Quotes about Experience

What happens depends on our way of observing it or on the fact that we observe it

Life is a process of self discovery, and no experience is ever wasted. It only brings us closer to our evolution.

Sometimes it is more important to discover what one cannot do, than what one can.

As I have often written, power is the fundamental ingredient of the human experience. Every action in life, every thought, every choice we make--even down to what we wear and whether we are seating in first class or coach--represents a negotiation of power somewhere on the scale of power that constitutes life.

In transmitting the dharma, there is neither explanation nor teaching; there is neighter hearing nor attainment. Since explanations never really explains, nor are they able to teach, why talk about it? Since listening isn't really hearing or attaining anything, then why listen? But say, since it cannot be explained or heard, how can you enter the Way?

But down the bagagge, take of the blinders, and see for yourself that this very place is the valley of the endless spring, this very body is the body of the universe. At such a time, who is it who can accompany this?

There is no estimating the wit and wisdom concealed and latent in our lower fellow mortals until made manifest by profound experiences; for it is through suffering that dogs as well as saints are developed and made perfect.

We have come into this exquisite world to experience ever and ever more deeply our divine courage, freedom and light!

We buy books, we go to gyms, we expend a lot of brain power on trying to hold back time, when we should be celebrating the miracle of being here in this world.

What does learning mean: accumulating knowledge or transforming your life?

Inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason - you and all other conscious beings as such - are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole.

Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon mother earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you.

The process of writing can be a powerful tool for self-discovery. Writing demands self-knowledge; it forces the writer to become a student of human nature, to pay attention to his experience, to understand the nature of experience itself. By delving into raw experience and distilling it into a work of art, the writer is engaging in the heart and soul of philosophy - making sense out of life.

The act of writing bears something in common with the act of love. The writer, at his most productive moments, just flows. He gives of that which is uniquely himself. He makes himself naked, recording his nakedness in the written word. Herein lies some of the terror which frequently freezes a writer, preventing him from producing. Herein, too, lies some of the courage that must be entailed in letting others learn how one has experienced or is experiencing the world.

There is a joy in the actual taste of vanilla ice cream that does not come from knowing the chemical formula of vanilla. There is a joy, an inherent aliveness in the body that you can experience if you pay attention to your body. But if you live up in your head, in your words all the time, you don’t notice it.

If you remember nothing else, always remember this one great secret of spiritual practice: we don't have to feel any particular way. We don't have to have special experiences, nor do we have to be any particular way. With whatever arises, whether it's pleasing or not, try to remember that all we can do is experience and work with whatever our life is right now. No matter what life is and no matter how we feel about it, all that matters in practice is whether we can honestly acknowledge what is going on, and then stay present with the physical experience of that moment.

Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientists do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way peace and security which he can not find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious - the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.

To describe the animate life of particular things is simply the most precise and parsimonious way to articulate the things as we spontaneously experience them, prior to all our conceptualizations and definitions.

Our most immediate experience of things is necessarily an experience of reciprocal encounter – of tension, communication, and commingling. From within the depths of this encounter, we know the thing or phenomenon only as our interlocutor – as a dynamic presence that that confronts us and draws us into relation. We conceptually immobilize or objectify the phenomenon only by mentally absenting ourselves from this relation, by forgetting or repressing our sensuous involvement. To define another being as an inert or passive object is to deny its ability to actively engage us and to provoke our senses; we thus block our perceptual reciprocity with that being. By linguistically defining the surrounding world as a determinate set of objects, we cut our conscious, speaking selves off from the spontaneous life of our sensing bodies.

If, on the other hand, we wish to describe a particular phenomenon without repressing our direct experience, then we cannot avoid speaking of the phenomenon as an active, animate entity with which we find ourselves engaged. To the sensing body, no thing presents itself as utterly passive or inert. Only by affirming the animateness of perceived things do we allow our words to emerge directly from the depths of our ongoing reciprocity with the world.

The animate earth – this moody terrain that we experience differently in anger and in joy, in grief and in love – is both the soil in which all our sciences are rooted and the rich humus into which their results ultimately return, whether as nutrients or as poisons. Our spontaneous experience of the world, charged with subjective, emotional, and intuitive content, remains the vital and dark ground of all our objectivity

All great experience has a guarded entrance and a windowless facade.

In a railroad car at nightfall, when the natural light outside has diminished until it is even with the artificial light inside, the passenger facing forward sees in his window two images at once: the dim landscape rushing toward him out of a pit of darkness, and the interior of the car, reflected with its more or less motionless occupants. At this hour most passengers unconsciously give allegiance to one of these two polarities of vision; and the individual momentarily aware of both may be struck by the profound, almost tragic duality between outer and inner worlds, between the rush of experience and the immobility of awareness.

The reason why the romantic love relationship is such an intense and universally sought-after experience is that it seems to offer liberation from a deep-seated state of fear, need, lack, and incompleteness that is part of the human condition in its unredeemed and unenlightened state.

Placing the blame or judgment on someone else leaves you powerless to change your experience. Taking responsibility for your beliefs and judgments gives you the power to change them.

True meditation is letting go of manipulating our experience.

In general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it - the present, that is to say, must have become the past - before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future. 

Remember that nothing has to change in the world for us to transform our own life experience.

The interpretation and experience of  spirituality and religion both depend on the person that is interacting with them. 

    What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour when your happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reason and your virtue.
    The hour when you say, 'What matters my happiness? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself.'
    The hour when you say, 'What matters my reason? Does it crave knowledge as the lion his food? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.'
    The hour when you say, 'What matters my virtue? As yet it has not made me rage. How weary I am of my good and my evil! All that is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.'

You used the word "civilization", which means a set of abstractions, symbols, conventions. Experience tends to be vicarious; emotions are predigested and electrical; ideas become more real than things.

Every experience in your life is an opportunity to love

Willing to experience aloneness,
I discover connection everywhere;
Turning to face my fear,
I meet the warrior who lives within;
Opening to my loss,
I am given unimaginable gifts;
Surrendering into emptiness,
I find fullness without end.

Each condition I flee from pursues me.
Each condition I welcome transforms me
And becomes itself transformed…