Let us explore the concept of an experience.This can best be done through examples. Whatever I can conceive in my mind and think about there usually springs forth 3 possibilities. One is the idea of the ability to see it into reality. The second is the ability to comprehend at the intellectual level and the third is the experience itself. So for example, you go to a restaurant and you sit at your table, and the waiter gives you a menu. You examine the menu, you make your choice and await your meal. You can at that point see the food or beverage item on the menu you have  chosen and be satiated with it. Second possibility, is that you look  around the room and see other people eating the same meal and you note the joy on their faces as they consume their meal, and accept that as what you are going to eat and be satisfied. So intellectually you have understood the food.  The third is the meal that you get and you taste it for yourself. It is not until you eat this meal that you can say you have experienced it fully.

Another example is that of when a doctor gives you a prescription for a medication for an illness. Firstly you can see the paper that has scribble on it intended for a cure. You can feel that you are being cured by the very nature of a paper being given to you. Secondly you can pray that you are being cured as you have the cure in your hand, you can see it after all, and then you have faith in this prescription and the doctor and so on a devotional level you feel the healing.But not until you actually fill the prescription and you consume the medication that illness is eradicated, and therefore you have experienced the cure.

Similarly while growing up you are taught as a child  through religious studies and parents about religious principles, and the various cultures tell you what you should and should not do. You have faith and so at the devotional level you follow blindly. Now you grow up and perhaps you read the religious scriptures for yourself and then again at the intellectual level you understand and acknowledge about life and death and the ideas that you are not this body, but a soul. Until you finally reach the experiential level through meditation and slowing down and feeling each moment passing, that you truly experience the impermanence and grasp the concept of change. Everything has to be experienced, and it is not sufficient to simply understand through reading or seeing at the intellectual or devotional levels. Faith is very much a corner stone in getting you to this level as the other levels are easy enough to reach, but this requires discipline, and dedication.

Awareness and enlightenment is a state of being. It can be achieved through meditation, and  being awake in each moment. Listening to yourself is the first part of self  healing as is following your heart. Your mind, spirit and consciousness all experiencing your life, creating your realities, your future, your dreams.

Are you simply living or living simply through your experiences?