The old saw “you can’t take it with you” could not be more wrong. It is quite true that you can't take it with you if you sit on it, but if you turn it into experience there is no place for it to go but with you.
Experience is the fact of our existence as sentient beings, and experience is the only thing that we truly possess. Some have said that experience is actually what we are, but it is obvious that if there were no timeless empty vessel, the shifting iridescent pool of time we know as experience could not exist. If there were no clay there could be no bowl.
All physical possessions, all emotional bonds, all pleasure and all pain, reduce in the soul of being to states of experience. Experience is the taste of being amidst the flux of the meaning-saturated gestalt. Some say the ultimate mechanics of experience are, and will remain, wholly mysterious; but since it is us, it is merely an exercise in self discovery. What could be simpler!
One of the great and beautiful mysteries of life is the gift that individual beings have to shape and to cultivate patterns of personal experience. For this reason a single event presents different a experience in different participants. We bring to experience the colors of our being and paint such meaning as we are able. Conversely experience shapes us in an endless feedback loop that in its best case spirals toward cosmic maturation.
We often meet, in the difficult times in which we find ourselves, a tragic misappropriation of experience: a misappropriation responsible for most of the appalling grief made inevitable by beings in whom the mind rules experience rather than experience existing as the articulator of the mind.
