Fundamental Concepts and definations: KNOWLEDGE and EXPERIENCE

We often say that we ‘know’ a concept or that we have ‘experienced’ a particular phenomenon. But what is it that we actually do?  What is this knowing or experiencing? What is exactly happening here?  Let’s put an insight into these concepts.

Now, while living, from the moment we are just conceived, the concept of time is applied to us.  Time starts governing us and pushing us through a flow.  Imagine a movie playing, and the timeline is dragging the movie ahead.  Similarly, we are being dragged along by time, through the movie called life!  Now during this dragging process, we come across various patterns of colour and sound at first.  We come across various feelings and eventually across various emotions.  These patterns and sounds seem so random at first, but then, we learn that some patterns are repetitive and come again with time.  This process of recognizing patterns is firstly done via our DNA.  Some patterns seem good, while others seem bad.  (Concept of good and bad are defined after this one)  And then, after we are born, our parents teach us to recognize different patterns and connect to them in different ways.  These repetitive random patterns can be called as experience.  In life, we find more and more different random patterns which seem simple at first, but as we move on, the complexity of these patterns and the tools to analyse them also increase.  For example, at first it is just the 5 sense organs through which we ‘sense’ these patterns and then analyse them in our brain.  But as we evolve ahead in time, we start to discover the region beyond these five senses.  We start to discover that we are actually thinking or that we actually feel more than just physical pain or visual pleasure.  With time, we come to know that there is something much more in the music, than just words spoken in different pitches and sound created by battering round objects called drums or plucking some strings while manipulating their sizes.  This is what experience is all about.  Recognizing the patterns found all around us, first, via our DNA, then from our environmental factors.

Now, what happens ahead in life is that these experiences seem to be repetitive and happen in a specific way and can be predicted as well.  They are very precise and can be systematically labelled so that they can be referred to in future when required and are universal in nature.  These types of experiences can be referred to as knowledge.  Experience is very random in nature, while knowledge is very precise.

What happens when we grow through time is that the knowledge base creates an impact on our emotional realm.  We tend to find a particular area in which we feel secure or our ‘safe zone.’  Now, experience does increase the area of our safe zone but concepts like fear and ignorance keep us locked to it.  We will deal with these situations in further posts.