Turn Moments of Life into Experience

Turn Moments of Life into Experience

One of the key meanings of life is to learn. It’s almost impossible to live a meaningful life without learning something. What you learn can often determine your success or failure in life. And effortful learning combined with experience is a sure-shot formula for success. Your experiences help create the person that you are.

So it’s always a wiser decision to spend time and resources on ‘experiences’ rather than on materialistic desires. Materials are easily forgotten, but real-life experiences live on with you forever. Therefore, while learning anything, always think, am I acquiring knowledge from the depth and gaining any experience? Generally, we collect information from the outer world by observing whatever is happening there.  We have general information regarding weather, various objects and material, their shape, size, etc. We assimilate all such information just by observing.

Acquire Knowledge through Experience

We acquire some knowledge through experience. When you put your finger over a flame, you feel the burn and remove your finger immediately. This is experience, your own feeling.  So, in one way, someone tells you, do not touch the fire, you will get burned while in the other way, you felt the extreme heat of fire by touching it with your own finger. Now you have knowledge through your own experience that fire can burn you as you felt it yourself.

And when someone tells you that fire can cause burns, it is just a piece of information. The water in the sea is salty. If someone tells you this fact, but you never have tasted it yourself, you can store this piece of information within yourself, but it won’t become your experience and real knowledge.  However, when you dip your finger in the sea and taste it, then you can say, yes, the sea is salty indeed.

Likewise, if someone never had the taste of anything sweet, no matter how beautifully you describe sweetness and its feeling on the taste buds, that person will never understand it and won’t be able to describe the feeling of sweetness. Whatever experience we gain, that experience proves to be worthy for ourselves in the long run and we move forward in life with that experience.

Acquire Knowledge from Depth

The knowledge or information that we have gained from books or by reading scriptures, we carry such information with us and live with this misconception that it is our own knowledge. According to the Bhagavad Gita, the knowledge that you have memorized with practice, they are just pieces of information and not your own knowledge. Having knowledge from depth means, we have imbibed some knowledge thoroughly and experienced that.

For example if we are reading in The Bhagavad Gita, ‘equanimity is called Yog’, we must have the complete knowledge of this term ‘equanimity’. If we are talking about equanimity, we must experience it by staying balanced in happiness, distress, profit or loss.  We must follow evenness in all circumstances and maintain our internal balance. Now, have we experienced that internal balance that we want to achieve?

When we lose our internal balance, it creates disruption in our life through unwanted happenings. In such cases, we cannot live with stability. And when such imbalance reaches its extreme, various things start working against us.  Therefore, in life, only a balanced personality reaches great heights and attains success.

Real Knowledge Can Never Be Memorized

Understand that if we have bookish knowledge or information that we have heard from outer sources, that knowledge is not ours. Real knowledge can never be memorized. We have to experience it, we have to see it. If we have real knowledge, we know what action we have to take and when. Various moments of life become our real experience and experience enhances with age.

Irrespective of the number of university degrees man earns, or information gathered, one gains true knowledge only through experience. So, you do not need to memorize true knowledge. It is something you have experienced yourself in life. And it stays with you forever.

Dr Archika Didi

Youtub