Quotes About Experience

think of daily life as an ever-moving three-dimensional painting with you as the artist

You can learn more from watching the animals than you can from a guru or a minister — or from reading my book.

How many of you would want to limit your reality, your entire reality, to the experience you now know? You do this when you imagine that your present self is your entire personality, or insist that your identity be maintained unchanged through an endless eternity. (10:43.)

you were not born yesterday. Your soul was not born yesterday, in those terms, but before the annals of time as you think of time.

You are each born with the conscious knowledge of what has come before. Your brain is far from an empty slate, waiting for the first imprint of experience; it is already equipped with complete equations, telling you who you are and where you have come from. Nor do you wipe that slate clean, symbolically speaking, before you write your life upon it. Instead, you draw upon what has gone before: the experiences of your ancestors, back through time immemorial.

Man will not learn the basic nature of reality by studying the physical universe alone, nor will he learn it by studying the personality as it operates within the physical universe alone. The nature of reality can only be approached by an investigation of reality as it is directly experienced in all levels of awareness: reality as it appears under dream conditions, under other conditions of dissociation, and as it appears in the waking condition.

In the most cosmic and most minute ways, physical experience springs from inner reality. Events are initiated from within and then appear without.

Your idea of time is false. Time as you experience it is an illusion caused by your own physical senses. Your physical senses force you to perceive action in certain terms, but this is not the nature of action.

it is important that you understand the different ways of relating to reality, and how those ways create the experienced events. You

You do not understand this point clearly at all, but your social organizations, your governments — these are based upon imaginative principles. The basis of your most intimate experience, the framework behind all of your organized structures, rests upon a reality that is not considered valid by the very institutions that are formed through its auspices.

The main point I want to make in this chapter is that you are already familiar with all conditions you will meet after death, and you can become consciously aware of these to some extent.

Don't you want to know what happened?" Carol turned to look at her and put her hands on her hips. She said, "No, I don't, because I don't want you making a story out of it, because as soon as you make a story out of it, then it keeps happening every time you tell it, and if you make a good story out of it, then you're gonna want to tell it, so don't bother.

It didn't occur to us. We had swum in the ocean of religion all our lives and not gotten wet.

But she could only remember that it was good, not how it felt.

The novel is, above all, an intense experience of prolonged intimacy with another consciousness.

am thirty-five years old, and it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later.

the novel is, above all, an intense experience of prolonged intimacy with another consciousness. But

But he was sixty-two when I was, born, and the novelty of daughters had worn away long before.

experience, that was true of everyone, even Joey, who hardly ever tried to get away with anything, but had killed a bluebird with the slingshot Frank had given him and gotten away with it—Mama did not allow them to shoot at songbirds. Frank himself got away with so many things that he expected to do whatever he pleased, and he did.

Les he dado a mis hijos los dos regalos más crueles: la experiencia de una felicidad familiar perfecta y la absoluta certeza de que tarde o temprano se acaba.

She was almost sixty and she had not been to London, or Paris, or Rome, and there was no going there now. Yes, she was balanced, as she had gotten into the habit of congratulating herself for being. But, she saw, she was balanced on a very narrow perch.

See, the human mind is kind of like...a pinata. When it breaks open, there's a lot of surprises inside. Once you get the pinata perspective, you see that losing your mind can be a peak experience.

What makes a good book? Scholars and critics have been debating that question for decades. I like books that touch my head and my heart at the same time.

Fiction is like wrestling with angels-you do not expect to win, but you do expect to come away from the experience changed.