Direct Experience

What we know in life mostly comes from our own experience, what we call ‘direct experience’. We cannot really say, “I know” until we have experienced it. If we haven’t experience it, we cannot say that we know. There is a story which gives a good example of this. Here is the story:

Once upon a time, there lived a blind man who had never seen the sun before. He really did not know the sun. One day his close friend tried to explain what it was like to him. He told him that the sun’s shape was like a bowl. He touched a bowl and said, “I know now the sun is like a bowl”. Another day another friend visited him and by chance, he was given a bowl. He thanked his friend for buying him the sun. His friend said, “No that is not the sun! It is a bowl”. Then he explained to the blind friend that the sun shines like the light of a candle. He let his friend touch the candle and then he said, “Hmm..I know now the sun is like a candle”.

One day he himself went to the market and there he touched a flute. He asked a sales man, “Is this the sun?” He was told, “No friend, this is not the sun. This is a flute”. He was very confused and said to himself, “I will never know the sun if I never see it for myself”.

What the blind man thought is true. Although books may give us some knowledge about things when we read them, we will never have real knowledge until we ourselves experience what they describe, or see these things with our own eyes. Seeing is believing! This too can be called ‘Direct experience’. For instance, we would never know what heat is unless we had touched fire.

Believe it or not; the more we experience, the wiser we are.