Experience is where it all starts

Today I read a letter from Marc Jones that was probably posted to the students of the Sabian Assemby some sixty-seventy years ago. This was entitled "Experience is its own existence". This got me thinking. How do I think about experience? And this took me down a long and winding trail to the 1960's when I was a young and aspiring supervisor with the great DuPont company.

God bless the corporate mentality that decided that we should be trained in subjects other than science and chemistry. So we were sent to courses, seminars, workshops and the like on subjects involving problem solving, decision making, and industrial psychology. And perhaps the best training session of all was the Dennis Whaitely program called "Goal Mind". It was when taking this program that I learned of the Reticular Activating System of the brain. Or RAS as Dennis referred to it. He described it as the receiver for all the sensory inputs from the environment which were then routed to the various parts of the brain for processing and storage as well as action if required. Like the good Gestalt mentality that I was given at birth I carried it around for all these years until all of a sudden the pattern took hold and I began to understand where all this was leading.

The objects of our time and space reality are taken in through the senses and processed by the RAS and sent to the proper place in the brain's cortex. Somewhere from here the signal is evaluated as to whether or not it is something to be embraced(pleasure) or avoided(pain) and this is the basis of experience. But, it does not stop just there. This is the animal level of being and we as humans have a capacity beyond that.

In humans there is a further processing of that stimulus that takes place in what we have described as mind, soul, spirit, psyche and the like. It is here where the experiences created by the stimulation of the sense organs are given meaning and value. Not all pleasure is favorable to the sustainment of the organism and can lead to its destruction as well in the case of some known addictions. Not all pain is a threat to the continuation of life as in the case of an operation to remove an encroaching cancer. So it is the mind, the psyche, that measures the trades-off that determine the continuation of existence. And this after all is Choice. And so it can be seen that even in that Garden so many millennia ago mankind was given a choice... the ease of life and pleasures of the Garden or to eat of the tree of Knowledge and go forth and multiply.

And you all know how we chose.