May 2010
HOW TO LEARN FROM A NEW EXPERIENCE
A creative new experience is one I view for the first time because I briefly rise above my usual life of idealistic dreams.
The opportunity for learning from a new experience occurs each time I voluntarily or involuntarily run out of my habitual mental, emotional and physical occupations, for the gap between an old and a new experience is the new opportunity.
The first glimpse of a new experience causes a variety of agitations, such as rage, helplessness, accusation, sneering, panic, emptiness.
First, there is the pretense that I am right; then, there is the wilderness of the humiliating feeling that I am wrong; then, there is either a willingness to enter the new experience of remaining wrong in order to finally exit with rightness, or a nervous refusal to see the wilderness as a wilderness, which means I will remain painfully wrong.
A great aid to learning from a new experience is to want to learn more than I want to bluff at being right.
NEVER PUSH IT AWAY
Have you ever noticed that you can’t put enough strength and energy into pushing away your present conditions? Do you know why you do that? It’s because it takes energy, right attention to see what’s going on in your present day. Not wanting to put the energy into that, you put your energy into tomorrow — the great ideal of tomorrow in that you're going to study, and after awhile, you're going to be all right. The wise individual, the person who is really going to make it, is the one who never pushes any experience, any condition away, never rejects any idea or anything.
