Tom's Nature-up-close Photography and Mindfulness Blog

Experience… what is it, and why do we exclusively depend upon it?  A lot of people say, “I’ve learned from experience”; or they say, “I will learn from my experiences.”  Many people go on expensive and lengthy vacations to far distant places to get “exotic experiences.”

Experiencing has its place.  However, it is very limited.  Many crave “new” experiences… but are such experiences — all based on patterns of recognition — really all that “new”?  I am suggesting that fundamentally, intrinsically, they are all very much the same and are not really so “new”; they all depend on — and add to — patterns within the field of the mundane known.  (That is why many of us retain a deep, inherent sadness, even though we travel to places that should seem new and exciting.  Merely existing as a brain that is based primarily on patterns and the recognition of patterns… is sorrow.  But that is what most of us were trained to exist as.)  Most of us were brainwashed to crave various “wonderful” experiences (i.e., more and more experiences)… through commercials, magazines, examples in books, and by what friends and relatives say and do.  (Experiences are never enough, though, because they are essentially limited.  But nobody tells you that.)

Evading experience (on the other hand) can be a very childish thing, wherein one endlessly sits cross-legged, for example, thinking that one is accomplishing something special.  (You know… all that phony so-called meditation stuff, which is really a glorified form of self-hypnosis.)

Is the experiencer all so separate from what the experience is?  If one examines intelligently, the answer is rather obvious: “No.”  We look with (and “as”) accumulated patterns and labels at things, pigeonhole them in the rather musty memory bank system and call the experience “new.”  To really see something new, perception itself must be dynamically new, fundamentally different, and not based on old, stale systems (and patterns) of observation.  Most people are incapable of that, and you don’t get it by sitting in a corner with your legs crossed.  Additionally, you don’t get it by reading traditional so-called “religious” books that have been severely distorted over time.  

There is a deep, orderly intelligence that is a true spiritual blossoming that is beyond the thoughts and fabrications of man… beyond all of the rituals, stone temples, and concocted patterns.  (Those fabrications are all old, and the timeless, miraculous new does not dwell as them.)  Deep intelligence is a dynamic harmony, a deep order that effortlessly flows between experiencing and going beyond experiencing.  (Constant experiencing and “accumulating” only builds up the illusion of the self.)  The “going beyond experiencing” factor (or dimension) is never planned or mentally arranged for.  Deep, spontaneous newness and dynamic creativity are never part of a plan or contrived methodology.

Wildflower Pods … Photo by Thomas Peace c. 2019