The Unchanging Ground Beneath Your Changing Life

On Experience and Being

Kyra and her friends, Devon, 24th May 2026 - Photo: Rupert Spira

Your life has two dimensions, experience, which evolves along a horizontal line of time, and being, which does not partake of time at all. In this brief essay, I explore the relationship between these two dimensions and the natural peace that is revealed when being is allowed to emerge from the background.

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There are two aspects to your life. There is experience, that is, thoughts, images, feelings, memories, sensations of the body, perceptions of the world, activities and relationships. All of these evolve. They take place on a horizontal line of time, moving and shifting from one moment to the next.

And then there is the vertical dimension of being. Being does not take place in time; it does not evolve, move or change.

Everything in your experience evolves. Your body grows and changes, your relationships shift, your thoughts arise and pass. But your being is always the same.

The Sameness of Being

Your current experience of being – the ordinary, intimate, familiar experience of just being – is exactly the same as the experience of being you had two minutes ago, two days ago, two years ago and as a two-year-old infant. It is exactly the same experience of being you will have on your deathbed. The experience of being is always the same. It does not evolve, age or tarnish.

Experience always changes; being itself is always the same.

The experience of simply being has none of the colours, qualities or flavours of experience. It is independent of the content of your experience. It is colourless, transparent, silent, still.

For this reason, you tend to overlook it in favour of the more colourful, demanding, intense content of experience. Your being recedes into the background, obscured by the content of experience.

Meditation or prayer is the reversal of this process. In everyday life, experience obscures being; in meditation or prayer, being outshines experience.

Your Being Is Always at Peace

The content of your experience is never still. Your thoughts, feelings, activities and relationships are always moving and changing. The drama in a film is always moving and changing, yet the screen on which it appears never moves or changes. It is the same with your life. The drama of experience is always moving and changing, yet your being is always at peace.

Normally you privilege experience over being. In meditation or prayer, you emphasise being over experience. To begin with it is necessary to spend time emphasising being to counteract your tendency to lose yourself in experience.

In time, the conflict between these two aspects of your life diminishes. You no longer lose yourself in experience at the expense of being. You remain in touch with being, you remain as being, both in formal times of meditation or prayer, and during your normal everyday life. You feel the golden thread of being running unbroken throughout your life.

At this point you no longer need to turn away from experience to access the peace that is the nature of being. You may do so from time to time, in formal times of meditation or prayer, but even when you are fully engaged in experience, you remain in touch with the peace of being. Experience loses its capacity to take you away from your being. Being is no longer something you visit between other experiences. It is your home. It is where you live. It is who you are.

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