The Nature of Experience

All experience is mediated by the activity of the 100 billion (1 x 1014)

neurons which make up the human brain mechanism.

The average time for one neuronal cycle, i.e. the time it takes for a single
neuron to cycle from a state of rest through excitation to firing and return to
the resting state, is ~2.5 milli-seconds. In other words, a neuron
“modulates” at the rate of 400 cycles per second.

For any given second of time, there are 1.0 x 1014! (100 billion factorial) x
400 possibilities of neuronal firing patterns available. This is an enormous
number; infinite for all intents and purposes. Given an average lifespan of
72 years, one can say that a person is presented with a trillion discrete,
unique experiences, any of which are virtually unlimited in the potential of
their quality. Each “quantum” of experience is, in fact, unique and non-
repeatable.

When viewed this way, experience can be seen not only as fleeting, but
essentially non-definable. What one calls “eating an ice-cream cone” is, at
any given moment, an indefinable (due to the ungraspable complexity of the
experience itself), non-repeatable quantum of experience. To seek the
“pleasure” of eating an ice-cream cone doesn’t mean anything when one
realizes there is no way to exactly reproduce the recipe/algorithm that
constitutes its “pleasure,” and that even if one could exactly define that
recipe for pleasure, there is no way to actually constellate the exact, same
neuronal pattern associated with eating that ice-cream cone at 9:53 a.m. on
Wednesday, 07/01/2009 , with the pattern of another time, say 10:01 p.m. on
Thursday, 07/02/2009.

All human seeking or avoidance constitutes a misguided desire to replicate

that which can never be repeated. If one allows the implications of this to
sink in, the seeking/avoidance dyad, which is at the heart of self and, indeed,
all suffering (dukka), becomes disarmed.