Now I will introduce a concept, a word – give a name to this mystical property that has created everything we know. It's a magic formula, a sim sala bim, a fiat lux! (become light, from the beginning of the Bible).
You know what I'm referring to. I've already pulled it off several times.
As I've already explained, in Norwegian, we have this old Norse word «varhet», which means alert, vigilant, sensitive to the slightest changes. Alma again.
Varhet is active isness, a creative, experiencing state. There is no content. No subject. It's a state and an activity. Both.
You, are, in a way, pure varhet.
I am pure varhet, and I have discovered it.
It is what I am, beyond me, beyond the I. The essence.
Of everything.
You will not find that last explanation about varhet being «the essence of everything» in the dictionary.
In English, there are several possible synonyms: awareness, watchfulness, presence, mindfulness, wakefulness, alertness, attentiveness, vigilance.
None of these words captures the full depth.
- Varhet is a state of void
- Varhet is passive isness without conceptualisation
- Varhet is active vigilance, i.e. passive registration with successive interpretation
Somehow Alma conveyed it – with hisses and giggles, without words, without content.
YHWH is varhet.
But the word varhet in itself says nothing about what is.
Such a word is precisely what we are looking for because there is nothing to say about whatever is behind everything, as with YHWH.
Let me try to illustrate with a scene from the film history.
In Astrid Lindgren's film «Ronia, the Robber's Daughter» («Ronja Rövardotter»), we find the curious and constantly puzzled and questioning «rumpnissarna», i.e. small trolls in Swedish. They run around and continuously utter these words:
«Then why? Then why? Then why?»
(«Varför då då? Varför då då? Varför då då?»)1.
Such is varhet. It is a constant wonder, an eternal search for answers, a focal point. Every time something happens, the Experiencer – the Varhet – wonders what it could be, what it means. It never calms down but is permanently alert, on guard, vigilant.
That's the meaning of «the Experiencer», the isness that experiences the world.
This is not something we talk about or are aware of daily because that is what we are. It is our instrument that «measures» the world. It is the binoculars that capture all movements. It is the microphone that picks up all sounds. The observer.
It is the point inside you that experiences. Your focal point.
What do these devices know about themselves?
They know as little as you do about your own device, the Experiencer.
The word «Varhet» is more precise, but it is unfamiliar to most people, and it's not an English word.
Instead, I choose to stick with the term I have used many times so far:
- The Experiencer : the universal subject who experiences – the unspeakable isness,
- to experience: the activity, the verb, and
- experience: the observation, the result of experiencing, the noun, the object with associated qualities.
These words are familiar to most people.
You, too, experience.
You know this condition well.
To be able to experience, you must be an experiencer . And when you experience – practice the activity – you will experience «something», at the same time as you will have to try to create an understanding of the experience, understand what «something» is.
This «something» is the world.
Pause for a second.
Yes, it can be demanding to comprehend fully. You will get it presented several times and in different ways.
We are talking here about the mainstay on which everything rests, the foundation of the universe.
You may have thought it was an extreme explosion, something violent and powerful.
I say it was more like a vague breath or a solitary glimpse, the least imaginable. This glimpse was a coincidence or something deliberate in the Experiencer.
The Experiencer is not in itself conscious, for consciousness demands that there is something to be conscious of, a content. The Experiencer only has the ability to become aware of something.
The Experiencer has a desire, a need, a will.
The Experiencer wants to know itself! Or to again use the words from the Bible: «I will prove to be what I will prove to be.»
It's no different from what you experience as a human being. You will find this power in creativity, inventiveness, curiosity, desire, attraction, excitement, etc. And in boredom, doubt, wonder, fear, inner pain – which are the necessary opposites.
It's an ever-ongoing restlessness. There is never peace to be found!
We could call it life force, but that's a word with too many wrong associations.
Where were we?
We have said that the world is a mental notion. Nothing exists other than the subject that forms this notion of the world – «the Experiencer».
There is no other than this.
The Experiencer does not receive impulses from the outside because there is nothing out there.
What we experience is created by the Experiencer, are experiences in the Experiencer.
Thus we also have the answer to the «ability» of the Experiencer: to create ideas and conceptions, i.e. creativity.
This is not a play on words but a hard necessity. How could a universe exist without creativity and the ability to create?
The question must be asked whether one is an idealist or a materialist.
Did you think we finally got a grasp of it all?
We need to go deeper.
Creativity is not the primary, essential function of the Experiencer.
The Experiencer does only one thing; it registers changes – i.e. it experiences; what else?
The world is a long, long chain of experiences branching out, where one follows the other without any break.
How did it all start?
The Experiencer experienced a first impression and had to interpret – understand – this new and foreign. To interpret means to give something a label, a name, a term, an idea – a concept, which is the word I often use.
The Experiencer may get such first impressions, glimpses, in an endless stream, just as you can get ideas or experience impressions constantly. The only difference is that all your impressions can be traced back to one first impression, while the universal Experiencer must get such impressions without them being traceable to anything earlier, seen from our perspective.
It's inherently creative, but that first and only thing that needs to be created is the most minuscule thinkable; a single transition from void to existence. From isness – to isness with the tiniest possible content.
It's the tale of isness becoming conscious of something. This something is different from the Experiencer itself.
So, through this, two things arise: the something – the beginning of the world, but also the amness; the realisation that The Experiencer is something else, something in itself – a subject.
I am. That's The Experiencer's realisation. It's no longer «isness» without content but «beingness» with a realisation that it is something in itself.
All it takes is «a tiny mad idea», as A Course in Miracles puts it.
It sounds strange, but at the same time not, since we all possess an extreme ability to fantasise and also have this sense of being.
Each of The Experiencer's first impressions will have to result in a new, independent universe, and all of these are internally consistent and thus «livable», but with entirely different physical fundamentals than with us.
The basic laws are simple, as we shall see, and always the same in all possible universes, for they have the same origin; The Experiencer.
This constant, eternal ability to register change and at the same time interpret them, i.e. create vivid fantasies, is the inherent attribute of the Experiencer, the only one it has.
Whether this quality thus is the Experiencer or the Experiencer is a conscious creature behind who has this ability, we can not know from our point of view because we, ourselves, are within the Experiencer's experience.
We can, for the time being, say that The Experiencer has three closely interconnected functions:
- Experience change.
- Interpret, i.e. understand the changes as something, abstractions, concepts, ideas about what they are.
- Experience the interpreted, i.e. the ideas – as qualia, a quality that is «felt».
The third point is the same as the first, namely to experience. Thus, this is an eternal circle.
The third point is the same as the first, namely to experience. Thus, this is an eternal circle.
Since points 1 and 3 above became one, we can then say that the Experiencer does only two things:
- creates ideas through interpretation, i.e. abstracts, and
- experience what the ideas feel like, i.e. what quality – qualia – they have.
«Creating ideas through interpretation» is also an experience, but an experience of something abstract.
«Experiencing something abstract» is the same as thought, or if we reformulate it, «conscious interpretation of change».
A definition of thinking suddenly appeared. Not bad.
Thus, it has all boiled down to only one thing: the Experiencer experiences.
It sounds kind of obvious, doesn't it?
This experience is total, contains everything, for it manifests itself as the experience of abstract notions as thoughts and the experiencing of thoughts as perceptible qualia (materiality, light, sound, emotions, the feeling of being, etc.) – at the same time.
There is nothing else.
This permanent, continuous experiencing is what we call «life».
Here our story of the world begins.
