Actuality
The self-verifying actuality already present before it is defined: endlessly specific, dynamic, inconceivable and unresolvable.
The orientation
Peter Brown
An introduction to Peter Brown’s yoga and its direct investigation of what this actually is.
The starting point
Begin with what is actually here
Peter Brown’s work begins with one unavoidable fact: experience is present.
Everything ever known, felt, seen, remembered or imagined appears as experience. No world outside experience is ever encountered. No separate reality behind it is ever found.
Peter does not ask us to accept this as a philosophy. He asks us to examine the actuality that is already here and let it show what it is.
The starting point is not an explanation such as awareness, consciousness, self, world, mind or matter. The starting point is this present actuality before those explanations are taken to be the fact.
Yoga means investigating what this is.
The meaning of yoga
Investigation for the discovery of truth
Peter uses yoga in its older sense: investigation for the discovery of the actual nature of reality.
The method is normal experience itself. Nothing has to be suppressed, purified or arranged first. Seeing, hearing, sensation, thought, emotion, confusion and distraction are all available for investigation exactly as they appear.
The practice is to engage present experience intimately, sensitively and intelligently, and to discover its inherent properties directly.
The yogi does not travel towards a distant condition. The absolute condition is already present as the explicit actuality of experience, although it is ordinarily misidentified.
Radiant presence
What is here turns out to be radiant presence
Radiant presence is Peter’s name for the actuality of your being, your experience and your reality, all at once.
It is not something behind appearances and not a special awareness hidden inside the person. It is this entire present actuality and everything appearing as it.
The presence is the fact that experience is. The radiance is its ceaseless appearing as light, sound, sensation, thought, mood, energy and all the countless qualities for which we may not even have names.
These qualities arise spontaneously and effortlessly. They do not come from somewhere else, and they never depart from the actuality in which they appear.
This that is here is radiant presence.
A central distinction
Experience and the world made from it
Interpretation
The spontaneous defining of experiential qualities as body, world, person, object, distance, history, cause, meaning and situation.
Not two worlds
Interpretation is itself another appearance. The difficulty begins when its simplified definitions are taken to be the reality they claim to describe.
Direct checking
This can be checked anywhere: in a sound, an object, a memory, a sensation, a problem or the sense of being a separate person.
What seems settled does not remain settled when examined.
Unresolvability
Nothing finally becomes the thing it seems to be
Experience appears with absolute clarity, yet nothing within it can be resolved precisely and completely.
Look closely at anything and more detail appears. Colours shift. Sounds change. Sensations move. Thought will not hold still. Every apparent configuration is already becoming something else.
Definition works by simplifying this infinite specificity into stable things. The thing feels obvious, but the actuality never resolves as the definition claims.
This is not a defect in experience. Its fluidity, dynamism and unresolvability are properties of what reality actually is.
How the yoga is done
Relax, release and open
Experiential
The authority is your own experience. Every statement must be checked there rather than merely believed.
No final definition
No definition is final. The yoga does not replace one interpretation with a more spiritual interpretation.
Normal experience
Normal experience is the method. No special posture, silence, purity or state is required.
Find out for yourself
Peter repeatedly insists that you must find out for yourself what the words refer to in your own experience.
This Radiant Space
Working with Peter’s orientation
This Radiant Space works directly with Peter Brown’s yoga of radiant presence.
The workshops give practical form to the investigation: feeling what is here, examining how experience is being defined, and seeing whether body, world, time, self and situation are actually found in the way they seem to be.
This Radiant Space is an independent project. It is not affiliated with Peter Brown and does not represent him or his work officially.
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Live inquiry
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Investigate actuality, interpretation, body, world, time and the apparent self in a small live group.
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Read and listen
Read and listen to material arising from the same investigation of experience.
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