Direct Experience

Direct experience generally denotes experience gained through immediate sense perception. Many philosophical systems hold that knowledge or skills gained through direct experience cannot be fully put into words.

You cannot grasp it; Nor can you get rid of it. In not being able to get it, you get it. When you speak, it is silent; When you are silent, it speaks.

A good start are the audio books by Alan Watts

Note: Words only provide reference to experience. They are not the experience they refer to. The reference can be quite exciting though.


Famous quotes containing the words direct experience, direct and/or experience:

    Science is a system of statements based on direct experience, and controlled by experimental verification. Verification in science is not, however, of single statements but of the entire system or a sub-system of such statements.
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    I make this direct statement to the American people that there is far less chance of the United States getting into war, if we do all we can now to support the nations defending themselves against attack by the Axis than if we acquiesce in their defeat, submit tamely to an Axis victory, and wait our turn to be the object of attack in another war later on.
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    You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.
    Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)