Nature is always free

“We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms.”
— Alan Watts

Whatever idea you have about something is just that—an idea. A reflection, never the thing itself.

Try to capture the taste of a strawberry in words. All you’ll end up with is a tasteless, colorless, textureless mental image—nothing like the vivid explosion of flavor on your tongue.

When thought remains in its proper role—as a creative tool—its power is extraordinary. But when it escapes that role, claiming all the attention and hijacking all the resources, it behaves like a parasite—creating more problems and solving none.

For us humans, the search for meaning has long been at the center of our existence. Over time, language and other forms of conceptual representation have crystallized into a kind of parallel reality—one in which our survival now  entirely depends on interpretive mechanisms and belief systems.

As a consequence, we’ve gradually drifted away from the intelligence of the senses, moving deeper into the abstractions of the mind, losing touch with the possibility of experiencing reality with renewed freshness, independently of any interpretive framework.

At this stage of evolution, we are so deeply lost in the labyrinth of our conceptual patterns—trapped in layer upon layer of belief structures—that we’ve become experts at overlooking even the most obvious fact:

Beneath all those generated projections and interpretations exists a whole universe no one truly knows anything about. And we are not simply observing it from a distance—we are it. That miracle isn’t hidden away. It’s here, there—everywhere you look.

To be clear, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with conceptual thinking. As mentioned earlier, it is the most creative of our faculties, part of the toolbox life uses to experience itself.

Problems only arise when thought becomes so absorbed in its own projections that it mistakes them for reality—hijacking attention until nothing seems to exist beyond that limited framework.

That phenomenon is what we call identification with thinking. However, there is no actual “someone” identifying with thought; the identification happens within thought itself. Interestingly, even the question of whether identification occurs or not concerns thought alone.

If you simply return to your senses right now, you’ll see that—naturally—a very different kind of perception comes into focus. Here and now, Existence needs no description to be what it is. It simply is.

No meaning is required. No sense of good or evil. No “shoulds” or “shouldn’ts.” Existence at its rawest has no urge to know itself through any frame of reference. Only thought does.

For thousands of years, thought has searched for answers to questions it alone created—fantasizing that these answers would bring about order and peace within its own mechanisms.

Needless to say, the whole quest was, and always will be, futile. Thought cannot know harmony any more than it can know truth or reality. Thought is pure abstraction. Thought is image. And an image cannot know or feel anything.

That other way of perceiving—let’s call it nonconceptual awareness—is essentially pure perception, an intelligence of its own. It is intuitive, direct, constant, unconditional.

That intelligence needs no awakening—it is already awake and available at all times. All that really matters is recognizing it for what it truly is: the freedom we’ve always sought externally, intimately present here, within us, all along.

Underneath the projections created by thought—all the belief structures, every assumption turned into certainty—Existence has flowed naturally the whole time: free, silent, undisturbed.

It is one continuous, unperturbed flow that always takes perfect care of itself. Within it, there is no conflict whatsoever. Everything springs from the same Source, and returns to it.

IMF, Siem Reap - Cambodia, 21 March 2025