Experience

Everyone needs experience to deal with the practicalities of life. Young children, for example, need the repetition of experience to handle a spoon before they can feed themselves. Experience is needed to deal with the everyday affairs of living in the world, such as being aware of possible dangers that mighty threaten the body. But this type of experience is not problematical, relative to the wellbeing of the man or woman. So it’s necessary to look deeper into the more abstract levels of our existence.

Each changing frame of existence is energetically stored within the psyche as memorable impressions of fluctuating feelings gathered in time. These emotions create a background vibration of tension and continually seek to re-experience the sensual excitation to keep alive the psychic body of pain. It’s the attachment to experience (primarily by thinking about the past) that keeps most people operating below their spiritual potential. When someone loves what they do, the experience is supported by virtue of the creative principle itself which renews life every moment. But what tends to happen is that, over time, the original inspiration is tarnished by the demands of the emotional self. This is often seen in ageing rock stars and celebrities who continue to perform, relying on past glories to bolster their diminishing light in the world.

Within each of us is a source of divine inspiration which when allowed to be creatively expressed fulfils the life as a timeless quality of being. This creative light is not reliant on experience and simply reveals itself as the spontaneous expression of an individual’s true character. But with the emphasis on an emotional way of life, people inevitably make their choices and decisions based on personal feelings. As a result, things rarely work out as planned; eventually all that remains are the consequences of past experience with the sense of something missing. No wonder life for many is such a struggle. When someone becomes attached to their experience, the effect is to exclude life as a whole.

The purpose of experience is to transcend any particular need to reaffirm the person’s identity in the world; this does much to depersonalise the concept of being a personal self. The overwhelming impulse behind all experience is for the ultimate pleasure of sexual union in the flesh. At a subconscious level, many teenagers advertise that they are looking for experience by trying to appear older than they really are. It’s this compulsive desire to experience the world (mostly before it’s time) that encourages youngsters to smoke, ingest alcohol or experiment with drugs, creating a pattern of behaviour that shapes and defines the person in later years. It’s only when someone has suffered enough from the effects of experience that they can begin to question the deeper purpose of life. This is the virtue of the ageing process, which was once the natural flowering of wisdom within the elders of the ancient tribes of the earth.

At some time during the spiritual process, a man or woman undergoes a period of aridity as an absence of experience. But this only lasts as long as is necessary to transform the emotional attachment to the world. More than anything, experience teaches us what is no longer needed and eliminates the unnecessary wastage of energy as the accumulation of ignorance in time. When lived as a conscious state of being, each phase of life is naturally eliminated as a precursor to the eventual demise of the physical form. Intrinsic to this state of being is the detachment from the fear of death, with the implicit knowledge of our immortal reality.