Quotes About Experience

Being a mother is a lot like growing up. When, or how, did you become an adult? What was the precise moment you lost your childhood? No one can say. It's all so permeable.

Sometimes we must all fall out of a tree.

Old books exert a strange fascination for me -- their smell, their feel, their history; wondering who might have owned them, how they lived, what they felt.

When you think about it, everything has been said before, in one way or another. It's only our experience of it that makes it new.

LIPID (Last Idiot Person I Dated) syndrome: a largely undiagnosed but pervasive disease that afflicts single women.

was to keep a record of the voyage, not the dry, factual pilot's log, but a more personal, anecdotal

and free-flowing account in the tradition of other popular travel works of the day;

beg you to join me here, that you may sample for yourself the delights that surround me.

Stripped of his command, and having learned nothing from the experience of his failed mutiny, Cartagena grew intensely resentful of his inexperienced replacement. From that moment, he burned with desire for revenge against Magellan, no matter what the cost to the expedition, and as Fonseca's son, Cartagena had power to make great trouble. Of all the perils that Magellan faced on the journey's first leg, the greatest was Cartagena's treachery.

experienced local pilots, familiar with the seas and tides, were valuable to a visitor like Drake.

he would present phenomena as he observed them with his own eyes.

Religion is an inherited form. Sufism on the other hand existed before religion. Do not make a religion out of your experience. Rather, focus on what gave birth to religion, and the rest will flow naturally.

To think about our bodies as horses to be ridden or even temples to be occupied, is to create a duality between our thinking and our body. It is like a tourist who arrives in a wild forest in his or her Recreation Vehicle. We have all see those campers with their televisions, and so on. Are they experiencing the nature around them? They have an insular experience, that is, camping without getting their hands dirty.

The wisdom of the Gnostics is called Gnosis. Gnosis cannot be understood through doctrine or dogma. The Gnostics believe that you can have a direct experience with the Infinite Spirit.

What makes dreams so fascinating to this discussion is that when a person is dreaming, he or she believes that the dream is real.

None of the various Gnostic groups that existed approximately during the first and second century of the Common Era (anno Domini or AD), which scholars today term Gnostic groups, called themselves by that name. Gnosticism is a seventeenth-century term that scholars invented to define those groups that sought truth and direct experience with the Divine, and who existed approximately during the first two hundred years after the Christos walked the Earth in a physical body.

It is essential to realize that while religion may provide a comforting and enjoyable weekly experience, as you attend church every Sunday with your family, religion is no substitute for immediate consciousness of the ultimate reality.

Journey to the Heart of Beauty; do not be obsessed with mental and egoic ideas of form and perfection. Get your hands and feet dirty, dance in the rain, and rejoice in the Life that is Living Itself through the Uniqueness of You!

Prose is subject to the polemic. The academicians can endlessly debate, defend, advance and argue over little facts. However, a tale is not so subject to debate. A story simply is. It conveys experience.

An image resists explanation. You relate to it or you do not. You cannot disagree with an image. Through identification with an image you comprehend a totality, rather than learn particular facts.

A cadaver does not yield the secret to the human experience.

One of the best means by which change occurs is through repeating an act or experiencing a spiritual feeling: for example, repeating certain religious prayers, creeds, or rituals.

Strong emotions may be experienced just prior to illumination; terror most readily comes to mind. In addition, amazement may be experienced.

As we know, bears hibernate in caves. They appear almost lifeless. This is an analog to the practices of ancient shamans, and to Sufis who practice the forty-day halvet (retreat), in which the Shaman would enter a cave, have an experience of dying, explore the spiritual realms, and then is reborn as the Initiate or Master (just as the bear is reborn each spring as it "wakes up" and leaves its cave).