How can we tell the difference between ourselves and our experiences? If a dog bites you, and you really hate the experience, are you a dog hater?

Are we not a sum of our experiences? I offer that we are not the sum of our experiences. We are much greater than that. You will naturally hate an experience of pain. It is undesirable most of the time, but does this display your identity?

Well yes, but without experiences we have nothing to base ourselves on, nothing to build on or learn from. We do indeed have something to base ourselves on without experience. The behaviours of our body and brain require no experience in order to occur, and they mirror in every way those activities that are thought to be more voluntary.

Like a person learns to draw a tree, he becomes an artist. He is not a tree artist. That was just one lesson. One can discover within themselves a deep and abiding drive to draw trees though, though it is more likely their range of drawings will be wider than that.

We somehow have to look over a larger context then our experiences? How we perceive an experience can be completely different one day to the next, and since I don’t consider ‘me’ to change that much, there is something more. In a sense, our focus has to be much smaller, more implicate. What elements do each and every one of our experiences have in common?

I need to know what you mean by experience. If we have no experiences, we must be in a closed box. We have experiences. We are not our experiences. We have thoughts, and those thoughts mirror both our experiences and our sense of self in the process of having that experience.

What do we base those thoughts on? How did we learn to think? We had to experience language. We do not learn to think so much as we learn new ways of thinking, and much research is now supporting the notion that elements of language are present even before we learn words to go with them. Concepts of self and other. Concepts of right and wrong, pain and peace.

But we are much higher beings than concepts. We are indeed higher beings than these things. This is what I seek to explore today. We can lose language, lose elements of our experience, and not lose our sense of self. Helen Keller was one example. Her communications could really only occur in gestures, as she could neither hear nor see anything that we typically used to form language, and yet her sense of self was as fully developed as ours, in no way compromised for having such a sparse range of experience.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~