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| What are you missing out on? |
Life is all about the experience. Most of us have a pretty vast intellectual knowledge of the world. Intellectually we know what’s available to us as human beings, and although most people haven’t got everything they want, they at least have an intellectual knowledge of it. They know what exists, and they know what is available. There is, however, a vast difference between academic knowledge and experiential knowledge.
We all long to experience the objects of our desire. We want to feel and share what we understand by engaging all our senses and nervous systems to comprehend what exists only as impulses in our minds entirely. Knowing isn’t enough. Until and unless you experience something, it will remain an idea and a concept that will always leave you wanting more. Experience is how you turn your intellectual knowledge into a physical experience. It becomes real when you experience it because you get to feel it in your nervous system. You involve your emotions, and, in the process, you get to feel the fullness of a concept turned real and made manifest in reality. You can know yourself to be kind, but the idea will remain intellectual and weak until and unless you do something kind. Only when you take the picture and act on it will you create the experience. Knowing kindness is what you want.
We create the experience by taking an idea and putting it to use through action. When you use your will to take action when you “see,” the invisible idea takes shape in physical form. Through physical experience, we all have a deep-seated need to experience that which we know intellectually and that we crave to share through our senses and our emotions. From this point of view, we are all constantly striving to experience through our physical bodies and the feelings that we hold as an idea in our intellect and minds.
The easiest way to turn your ideas into reality is through action. When you use your will, you can take any picture to experience your knowledge. The real purpose of learning is an action for what good is knowledge when you can’t use it? The challenge for most people is that they are held back by their own limiting beliefs and fears. Fears and limiting beliefs are imaginary, for the idea that taking action might lead to a specific “bad” outcome prevents you from taking action. It is the fear that doing “this” will mean “that” or will lead to “that” even though it has not occurred yet (and will most probably not).
The reality is that all experiences in life happen through contrast. We live in a relative world. Everything in life exists concerning something else, and everything in life has its reciprocal. A wise man once said that someone born blind would never know the meaning of darkness, for he’s never seen the light. Neale Donald Walsh explains it beautifully in Conversations with God when he said that in the absence of that which is not, that which is, is not. For us to experience anything, we must also share the opposite. Life can never be just a flat and one-dimensional experience. It simply does not exist.
The challenge is that most people live in the delusion that their lives are in shatters because there are some things they do not like. In reality, they are just experiencing the opposite of what they do want. Hot does not exist without cold. There can be no rainbow without the storm. In contrast, we get to live life through the experience of both truly. When you learn to see life experiences as different states of the same thing, you can start to really appreciate all of life and truly have the experience of living life. Appreciating and acknowledging that which is not the way you want will give you a different perspective on everything that you do not like in your life, both past and present. Whether you are feeling lonely, depressed, sad, or frustrated, you can start to appreciate these emotions for it’s because you can experience love, vitality, joy, and passion.
You have one incredible gift, and that is to take your inner desires and experience them. This gift is the gift of action which is your ability to take an impulse of thought and desire and put it to use. Regardless of whether you call something good or bad, the experience will fulfill you in life.
The word experience means to “test” or to “try.” When you relinquish your attachment to just experiencing pleasure, you will start to see the use, and even the meaning of pain for the one creates and defines the other. Experience has no and needs no attachment to specific outcomes. Although it does not guarantee you a particular product, it does guarantee you a prosperous life filled with many contrasting sensations. Every cell in your body has a “memory,” Through experience, you get to feel and “record” your intellectual knowledge by engaging all of you. This is the true meaning of “knowing,” for it comes with a deep sense of certainty that you feel in your whole body. This is when you “know it in your bones” it is a more profound understanding that can never come from intellectual knowledge alone. Your world cannot be grasped by contemplation and expertise alone, but only through action.
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