Read time 4 minutes. Authentic Experience is a stand alone article in our series regarding Acceptance
Today we return to the theme of radical acceptance. In doing so, several related ideas emerge: experience, purpose, freedom, and identity. A Zen mindset frames these differently than we are used to. Instead of “personal experience,” Zen speaks of authentic experience. Instead of “freedom,” Zen speaks of absolute freedom. And instead of mere “acceptance,” Zen insists on radical acceptance.
Accepting nonacceptance
In Nonacceptance, I suggested that the path begins not with universal acceptance, but with something more realistic: accepting our nonacceptance. The task is not to force ourselves into a posture of acceptance, but to be willing to experience resistance as it is.
Charlotte Joko Beck clarifies:
“When you are truly experiencing, you are not feeding the suffering or the anger; you are it. And I say, ‘Be what you are.’ The word experiencing confuses people. Experiencing doesn’t mean something fancy. It doesn’t mean anything more than, for just a second, being without the thought.”
Even for a fleeting moment, when we allow nonacceptance without thought, the false identity of ego falls away. What remains is a glimpse of our true nature. Radical acceptance, authentic experience, and absolute freedom are not three separate goals. They arrive together, revealed in the same moment of presence.
Experiencing the unfamiliar
Beck presses further:
“What does it feel like to be freer of the need to control? What is our experience when it is not motivated by fear, anger and guilt? It’s terrifying because we have given up all illusion of control. And it’s glorious and wonderful to feel the freedom of a truly experienced human life.”
Here the themes converge again: the radical acceptance of allowing, the pure experience of presence, and the freedom of letting illusions fall away. What Beck calls “terrifying” is simply the loss of false control. What she calls “glorious” is the freedom that follows.
In this freedom, the endless search for external meaning collapses. In our last lesson I mentioned that the purpose of life may be for consciousness to become aware of itself. Seen this way, our tangled problems dissolve into one: forgetting our true nature. And the solution is the same: remembering.
Authentic experience as purpose
The egoic self makes a grave mistake: it imagines the universe was created for us—whether for humanity as a whole or for us as individuals. From there, we expect events to favor us, to go “our way.” But what if life does not bend to that narrative at all?
What if experience itself is the purpose?
Think of a peak moment in your life where you felt fully alive. That clarity was not manufactured by thought—it was a pure, thought-free experience. Nothing could be more meaningful. In authentic experience, there is no need for the universe to smile upon us, because we are the universe. We are Tao expressed. Life does not require a meaning statement. Life is.
Authentic experience happens
When we take up the Zen mindset, experience itself becomes the ground. Thinking may gain knowledge, but authentic knowledge is lived, not thought. Thinking may construct acceptance, but radical acceptance is experienced. While thinking may frame freedom, absolute freedom is experienced.
Zen reminds us: all things are equal in Tao. The value of what we experience lies less in its content than in the authenticity of presence. Tao created everything to be experienced as it is. When we allow authentic experience, we emulate Tao. We become the emotion, the experience, the flow itself. More accurately, we remember what we always have been.
The paradox of effort
A truly experienced life is instinctive. Yet thinking about it becomes the surest way to block it. Trying to rid ourselves of thought through more thought is a dead end. This is why Zen offers practices that sometimes seem baffling. They are not about despising thought, but about refusing to let thought dominate.
As Thomas Hoover notes in The Zen Experience, Zen addresses the tension between rational and intuitive modes of mind. The practices are not designed to destroy thought, but to awaken what lies beyond it. In that awakening, we discover untapped potential.
And with it—radical acceptance, authentic experience, and absolute freedom.
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