DIRECT EXPERIENCE: A SHORT STORY

What he remembered most about painting houses, as he did in his younger years, was that painting was a direct experience.  There was nothing philosophical about it; painting was not a theory.  It let him feel connected to the world in a way that strictly mental activity did not.

Alas, though, purely mental activity was what he wound up doing after college.  He spent all his time in his head, as a writer, to the extent that he no longer related to the outside world.  Reality for him was his inner world, not the world “out there.”

He came to see himself, in time, not as himself but as the idea of himself.  Anything other was not enough for him; the outside world was not enough.  What mattered was what the idea of himself created, which was poems, one-act plays, short stories, and novels, lots of poems, plays, stories, and novels. 
 
What he was blind to, what the invented self he had become refused to see, was that his thinking and writing was about the real world and not the real world itself.

It helped that his thoughts and words remained unpublished.  But then how could it be otherwise?  Publishers said that his work did not ring true, that it felt contrived, forced, just as he himself had become by then. 
 
Was there a solution?  He knew for his sanity he needed to get back to direct experience.  No, he did not take up house painting again.  Painting houses was a young man’s game, and he was not a young man anymore.

The answer for him was Zen.  Zen was not about thinking and words.  Zen was not about Zen even.  In Zen meditation, for instance, he was not to meditate on something but just meditate.  There was nothing he was to do or feel about Zen.   It was direct experience.

Operating on this level, however, on the intuitive level, he discovered that there was something else going on.  Somebody else was in the room with him, which, to his utter surprise, led to yet another direct experience called God.