What Are You Really Missing Out On?
The Road To Happiness
Life is all about gaining experience. Most of us have a broad intellectual understanding of the world. Intellectually, we know what is available to us as humans and while most people do not have everything they desire, they do have an intellectual understanding of it.
They are aware of what exists and what is available. However, there is a significant difference between intellectual knowledge and experiential knowledge.
We all yearn to behold the objects of our desire. Simply knowing isn’t enough. We want to feel and experience what we know by engaging all of our senses and nervous system to fully comprehend what exists only as impulses in our minds. Unless and until you actually experience something, it will remain a concept and an idea that will always leave you wanting more.
Experience is the process of converting intellectual knowledge into physical experience, and when you experience it, it becomes real because you feel it in your nervous system. You involve your emotions and, as a result, you get to experience the fullness of a concept made real and manifest in reality.
You can know yourself to be kind, but unless and until you act on that knowledge, the concept will remain intellectual and weak. Only by acting on the idea will you be able to create the experience. What you really want is to have the experience of kindness.
Then, experience is something we create by taking an idea and putting it into action. It is only when you use your will to act that you will be able to “see” the invisible idea take physical form and experience physical sensations.
We all have a deep-seated desire to experience what we know intellectually and crave to experience through our senses and emotions. According to this viewpoint, we are all constantly striving to experience through our physical bodies and emotions what we hold as an idea in our intellect and minds.
The simplest way to make your ideas a reality is to take action. When you use your will, you can take any idea and just do it to gain knowledge experience. What good is knowledge if it cannot be applied? The difficulty for most people is that they are constrained by their own limiting beliefs and fears.
Fears and limiting beliefs are fictitious, because the belief that taking action will result in a specific “bad” outcome is what prevents you from taking action. It is the fear that doing “this” will result in “that,” even if it has not yet occurred (and will most probably not).
The truth is that all of life’s experiences occur as a result of contrast. We live in a world where everything is relative. Everything in life is related to something else, and everything in life has a reciprocal.
A wise man once said that a blind person will never understand the meaning of darkness because he has never seen the light. Neale In Conversations with God, Donald Walsh expresses it beautifully when he says that in the absence of that which is not, that which is is not.
To experience anything, we must also experience its polar opposite. Life can never be a one dimensional, flat experience. It just doesn’t exist.
The problem is that most people believe their lives are in shambles because they dislike certain aspects of their lives. In reality, they are experiencing the polar opposite of what they desire.
Without cold, there is no hot. There can be no rainbow if there is no storm. It is only through the experience of both that we can truly live life. When you learn to see life experiences as different states of the same thing, you can begin to truly appreciate all of life and truly live it.
Appreciating and acknowledging what isn’t going your way will give you a completely new perspective on everything you don’t like in your life, both past and present. Whether you are lonely, depressed, sad, or frustrated, you can begin to appreciate these emotions because it is through them that you can experience love, vitality, joy and passion.
Whether you call something good or bad, experience is what will bring you happiness in life. You have an incredible gift in that you can experience your inner desires. This gift is the gift of action, which is your ability to put a thought or desire into action.
The word “experience” literally means “to test” or “to try” in its original latin form. When you let go of your attachment to only experiencing pleasure, you will begin to see the value and even the meaning of pain, because the one creates and defines the other.
Experience is unattached to specific outcomes and does not require it. Although it does not guarantee a specific outcome, it does guarantee a rich life filled with a variety of opposing sensations. Every cell in your body has a “memory,” and by engaging all of you, you can feel and “record” your intellectual knowledge.
This is the true meaning of “knowing,” as it is accompanied by a deep sense of certainty that pervades your entire body. When you “know it in your bones,” you have a deeper understanding that can never be obtained through intellectual knowledge alone. Your world can only be grasped through action, not through contemplation and knowledge.
