Whether the technique is narrative or not, the primary experience [what the senses, or the dreaming mind, actually perceive] has to be connected with and fitted into the rest of experience to be useful, probably even to be available, to the mind. This may hold even for mystical perception. All mystics say that what they have experienced in vision cannot be fitted into ordinary time and space, but they try – they have to try. The vision is ineffable, but the story begins, “In the middle of the road of our life . . .”

Dreams Must Explain Themselves: The Selected Non-Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin

This is a problem – if that is the right word for it – that I have run into myself. Direct contemplative experience is, by definition, an altered state of consciousness: it is not in itself accessible even to the rational mind. Andreas Müller explains:

All there is is oneness. The unknown. No-thing appearing as it appears. It is already whole. It is already complete. That which seems to be missing – wholeness – is not lost…

What remains is indescribable. It is indescribable simply because there is no one left who can describe it. There is no one left who experiences oneness (which, by the way, would then not be oneness anymore) and could possibly know how that is. Yes, there is no one left who knows how it is. That is freedom.

As Le Guin points out, if we want to talk about our experience, even to think about it, it must be recast into something approaching narrative. This has an odd effect; what happens is that something which occurred, subjectively speaking, outside time (i.e. without duration) has to be described – thought of, even – as though it had a beginning, a middle and an end. Even in poetry this is true, though that is perhaps rather less obvious!

There is no way around this, I think. Primary experience has to be experienced; it can’t be explained, or taught. What can be explained, and taught, is the practice that makes a place for the possible. Nothing we can do can cause these experiences; all we can do is try our best to remove obstacles to their occurring. (This, of course, is the great temptation of psychedelics: swallow 250 microgrammes of LSD, and something will happen, whether you like it or not. And God help you if you don’t.)

From a time-bound perspective, one may spend a long while in regular practice without any alteration in one’s state of consciousness, except perhaps a certain gradual progressive loss of identity and increasing confusion, which can be distressing and even scary. Illumination per se is something that occurs, if it occurs, outside the practitioner’s life-time (I use the hyphen advisedly) altogether. It has no narrative. Nothing can compel this occurrence, and in any case – and this is important – it is not something one can, or should, regard as a goal. The practice is the goal, in itself; nothing more nor less than that. It is the practice that reveals the open ground, the Tao – and this entirely without drama, without altered states of anything. But – practice, effective contemplative practice, is not a narrative process itself. Though you can set a timer for 20 minutes or half an hour, time is not something that applies to the practitioner’s subjective experience. Just sitting, the way we do, is outside of story, outside of “and then, and then…” There is no Jones; and anyway, along where? Just sit still.