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Experience is good oftentimes, especially when it is occurs with sensitivity and learning.  However, too many fall into experiences, exclusively,  just like moths into the flame.  A mind that does not habitually, robotically blast into experience… goes beyond it at times.  It might seem odd or strange that one suggests that going beyond the realm of experience is beneficial and healthy… (but it is).  Many of us seek new and “more exciting” experiences.  In doing this, one thinks that one will achieve happiness.  However, once something is experienced,  its supposed “newness” tends to quickly evaporate and when we experience similar things, they tend to lose their quality of being beyond the same old patterns; so we seek new and different patterns, different experiences.  However, different patterns are still mere patterns.  A mind that clings to various series and strings of patterns (to be stimulated) becomes dependent upon such patterns.  A brain dependent upon mere patterns, for its happiness, is a mind that is not at all independent and free; it is enslaved with dependency upon the patterns (as so many people, unfortunately, are).  Then boredom, frustration, and depression often easily slip in; for a mind that is based merely upon patterns (an their recognition) easily gets fixated in robotic cause and effect reactions (based largely on what the patterns may or may not provide).  Inevitably, they never provide enough.  The experience and the experiencer are not two separate things.

A mind beyond mere experience — and there are few such minds — is really independent and free.  It goes beyond mere patterns and the recognizing of patterns.  It doesn’t do so out of volition and will; it just happens; intelligence is a factor.  When it happens, the mind is still (though highly active and aware); however, it is not merely absorbing or rearranging patterns.  Being beyond sequential reactions and patterns of recognition, it is an explosion of the new and immeasurable.  Joy and insight, beyond dependency upon experiences, exists then.

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Moth Head Study. Photo by Thomas Peace c. 2015