Experience is the best teacher. We learn a lot from our experiences. But, do we need to experience everything to learn? Can't we learn from the experiences of others? A very bad experience I had and I do not want others to experience is the pain when we break the bone.
How do we know what are the things worth the experience and what are best avoided? Do our upbringing and circumstances play a role in helping us decide what we should experience and what is best avoided?
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Experience
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2 comments:
There are a variety of experiences that human beings have, which I would loosely categorized into physical, emotional, psychological and meta-physical.
Experiences at an emotional and meta-physical level are nearly always not undertaken with the preconceived aim of learning a lesson or two. If someone indulges in eating/ praying/ partying because it brings them some contentment, the person is not learning from the experience. Humans tend to learn lessons only from experiences that give them either pain or pleasure in a measure that affects them.
One's upbringing does affect the choices one makes and if one is making an active choice to have a particular experience, then one's upbringing could be said to have played a part in such choice (but not always). One's experience also influences one to see whether or not there is the opportunity to learn a lesson after each experience.
From a rational perspective, someone who falls in love or loses a loved one cannot be said to have learnt a lesson, just had an experience that affects them deeply. This does, however, allow the person the opportunity to see how much s/he can give/ take... and not everyone sees or takes these opportunities.
Bottom-line: Experiences in themselves could be either (i) mere conditioning of one's mind, body and spirit to fall in line with the way 'society' thinks or (ii) a learning curve that creates an opportunity for one to explore the individual's potential within. Experience, as you said, is merely the best way to learn a lesson for most of us; one can also rely on books, religion or alien lifeforms to help learn a little more about themselves.
Stray, don't we use phrases like, "experience pain", "experience love", "experience the loss of a loved one", "experience god". So according to u these experiences most of the times do not teach us anything? Eventhough we undertake these experiences not with the intention of learning lessons, don't we end up learning lessons after these experiences?
There are activities like say taking drugs, we might undertake to have the experience to talk about it. But this might affect us in a negative way. If we are weak willed we might get addicted.
I agree with you that experiences most of the time creates an opportunity for one to explore one's potential. But I do not agree with the first point that experience conditions us to fall in line with the way society thinks. Mostly from our experience we condition ourselves only to learn the lessons that are accepted by our society. We do not probe or question more.
BTW Stray, Invite me so that I can view your blog. :)
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