Thursday, May 30, 2024

What Do We Mean by “Experience”?

By Steve Beckow

Posted on May 30, 2024

Ideas

Experience

To say “to experience,” as I’m intending the word, does not (necessarily) mean “getting out in nature” or “eating new foods.”

It can. But by the same token, we can be out in nature “experiencing” and still be relating to the world from the intellectual level only.

I’m referring to there being three levels to our knowledge of Reality: the intellectual, the experiential, and the realizational. When I use the word “experience,” I’m referring to live lived from the experiential level.

For us, in the growth movement, playing the awareness game meant always being aware of how we were feeling, in addition to what we were thinking, seeing, touching, etc. The emphasis was on feeling.

Many sages could be found who advise us to feel our way to God. Sri Ramakrishna suggested bhakti or love/devotion as the best path to God in the Kali Yuga or Dark Age, as it was (1) Bhakti is a strong path in Hinduism. Love attracts us to the Truth, which we then realize.

The mind, on the one hand, can lie and deceive in the service of the ego-self. Sociologists and philosophers call it “the self-serving bias.”

Feelings, on the other hand, don’t speak in words; they don’t lie. A feeling is a feeling. It has no text attached to it. It is what it is.

In my opinion, it’s how we interpret our feelings and what we do with them that gets us into trouble. If, as Jesus advised, we simply observe and experience them through to coimpletion,in my experience, no trouble results at all. (2)

***

Mind you, having said that, feelings are not the biggest prize – far from it. Just to illustrate the difference in impact, you’re lying on the beach and a child runs by with a bucket of water, splashing you a bit. You’re annoyed.

A half hour later, people are shouting that a big wave is coming in and everyone better run for safety. You gather your belongings and head for higher ground.

Let the splash of water be a feeling of love. It’s localized and of minor inconvenience. Let the tsunami of love when the heart opens be like the approaching wall of water in the face of which everyone is affected and runs for cover.

The feeling, as good as it was, was contained within you. But you’ll find yourself immersed in the higher-dimensional consciousness state, the tsunami of love, and, later, the Ocean of Love.

They’ll have different impacts. The feeling of love warms our heart, so to speak. But the tsunami of love sweeps all our cares and concerns away. We’ll feel more alive than we ever have before. A blessing of incomprehensible proportions will have hit us. We never knew this existed!

***

We think of realizations as being momentary. A flash in the dark. A sudden seeing of that which was missed and would never have been seen without the elevating influence of bliss.

But what if the realized state endures. No, doesn’t stay permanently; that would be Ascension. But stays for perhaps eight hours and then leaves to come back another day?

That was my lot through most of 2015 after March 13, before love gave way to bliss on Sept. 28.

We don’t have a word for a prolonged state of realization which then disappears. We don’t have distinctions or a language or even a name for a lot of what we’re doing, seeing, and realizing.

Our knowledge of who we are is in its collective infancy. Many of us haven’t gotten around to acknowledging that we’re a spirit having a human experience as well as a human having a spiritual experience. We’re both.

So when I use the word “experience,” I’m not talking of licking an ice-cream cone or running a mountain trail. I’m talking of us being aware of and using all our senses plus the creative imagination to derive information holistically about us and our environment – to fulfil the purpose of life. (3)

Doing this has more impact on our learning than simply talking about something and trading ideas. I’ve compared the merely intellectual to eating dry oatmeal; the experiential, to warm porridge with milk, blueberries, cashews, and maple syrup.

And realization is even better.

Footnotes

(1) “The path of knowledge is very difficult. One cannot obtain Knowledge unless one gets rid of the feeling that one is the body. In the Kaliyuga the life of man is centred on food. He cannot get rid of the feeling that he is the body and the ego. Therefore the path of devotion is prescribed for this cycle. ” (Paramahansa Ramakrishna in Swami Nikhilananda, trans., The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1978; c194, 170.)

(2) “Jeshua via Pamela Kribbe: The Third Way,” at http://goldenageofgaia.com/2014/01/jeshua-the-third-way/.

(3) Which is to know who we truly are, because, when one of us realizes our true identity, God meets God. And it was for that meeting that all of us were created. The Divine Mother confirms it:

Steve: The One wants to know itself. Is that correct?… And it can’t because it’s everything. So it’s taken the aspect of Yourself and designed a universe in order for us to learn our true identities. The moment of Enlightenment is when God meets God. Is that correct?

Divine Mother: That is correct. (“Divine Mother: Know God but Through Joy,” November 4, 2018, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2018/11/04/divine-mother-know-god-but-through-joy/.)

Steve Beckow