What is Experience?

We see, hear or in short Perceive. There is A stimulus. around us ,at any given point of time, there are N number of Stimulii.We respond to a particular Stimuli.Why we respond to a particular Stimuli is not what this article is About. That is a very complex issue,which I shall address later.Here let’s look at what Experience is.

Early this morning , I went through an article in the Guardian about Free Will and recent scientific view on it. I shall,though I have written in Free Will, be writing taking reference to the Guardian article.

I remembered that I had written an article on Experience earlier . I found the article I had written in 2014. I have provided excerpts from it here.

This post is not about what went on with us friends on this issue.

 

But what happens to us and our Life’s experiences over a period of time.

 

I remember some one to be pretty without recollecting her face( my friend gave her name).

 

Similarly I remember some of the most painful moments in my Life like my mother’s death, first wife’s death,death of my brother’s grand child in its mother’s hand, which I took away from her hands to prevent my brother’s daughter feeling sad about the fact the child had died in her hands;

 

I recall my most pleasant moments in my career but not the worst problems.

 

Even the pain I recall has dimmed but at times I am overtaken by it.

 

But one thing is clear.

 

My reaction to these issues, now, is not very passionate .

 

They pass through my mind’s eye as  fleeting images.

 

I am not affected by them.

 

What is an incident becomes an experience when we react.

 

We become passionate, disturbed,anxious and worry so much as if Life would end there.

 

It does not seem to be so.

 

What has been an experience becomes nothing more than a fading memory.

 

I do not get involved, though some of these incidents appeared ,at that time, to affect my life radically.

 

On hindsight it does not seem so mentally.

 

Another curious fact is that most insignificant things get recalled but not what I thought was very important.

 

Like a game played on the street in childhood, a meal with a stranger in a Train, the hotel where I stayed in a town…..

 

Is Life all but a series of fleeting impressions?

 

Seems so, to me.

https://ramanisblog.in/2014/09/28/incidents-experience-impressions-life/

To take this forward, Experience needs three factors.

In this sense, free will just seems to be a given.

But is it? When my mind is at its quietest – for example, drinking coffee early in the morning, before the four-year-old wakes up – things are liable to feel different. In such moments of relaxed concentration, it seems clear to me that my intentions and choices, like all my other thoughts and emotions, arise unbidden in my awareness. There’s no sense in which it feels like I’m their author. Why do I put down my coffee mug and head to the shower at the exact moment I do so? Because the intention to do so pops up, caused, no doubt, by all sorts of activity in my brain – but activity that lies outside my understanding, let alone my command. And it’s exactly the same when it comes to those weightier decisions that seem to express something profound about the kind of person I am: whether to attend the funeral of a certain relative, say, or which of two incompatible career opportunities to pursue. I can spend hours or even days engaged in what I tell myself is “reaching a decision” about those, when what I’m really doing, if I’m honest, is just vacillating between options – until at some unpredictable moment, or when an external deadline forces the issue, the decision to commit to one path or another simply arises.

This is what Harris means when he declares that, on close inspection, it’s not merely that free will is an illusion, but that the illusion of free will is itself an illusion: watch yourself closely, and you don’t even seem to be free. “If one pays sufficient attention,” he told me by email, “one can notice that there’s no subject in the middle of experience – there is only experience. And everything we experience simply arises on its own.”

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/27/the-clockwork-universe-is-free-will-an-illusion?ref=refind

So, Experiencer, called Subject in Philosophy needs things to Experience ,to know, what is to be Experienced .The Flip side is That which is to be experienced is needed to prove the Subject or The Experiencer! It is not enough if we have the Subject, the Experiencer and thing to by Experienced, called Object.We need both to be connected.That is, it is not enough to Experience if we have the Subject ( Experiencer) and the thing to be Experienced ( Object). If we have ,say a Pen in the adjacent room which we can not see ,of which we have not been informed earlier, then despite one( Subject) and the Pen(Object) being present, we can not Perceive the Pen.The subject and object are to be connected , relate to each other.

When we perceive, initially, we have three things present, which we can be sure of. That is , Subject , Object and the Connection.Once you get connected to the Object,you Experience the Object.That is you are no longer aware of the object on the sense that you don’t look for it and you have immersed in it by way of experiencing it whether pleasant or unpleasant.Only when you come out of the state of Experiencing , you are aware of yourself, what you have experienced.At the point of Experience itself,Nothing Remains but Experience.

This is the Goal, Purpose of Yoga.

This Experience at the Macro , Universal Cognition, is Realisation.

How Individual Experience becomes Universal Cognition?

Article to follow.

Featured image of Cognition is from researchgate