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New Day Herald

Your Experience is the Teacher

This article by John-Roger was first published in The Movement Newspaper in June 1977.

There can be a danger in reading a lot of books by a lot of authors, which is that you may start making the experiences of the author your own experiences. You start dubbing them in as your own life experiences, and before you know it, you’re in trouble with your own beingness because you are attributing to yourself experiences that someone wrote down in a book. Their experiences are not yours. They’re a facsimile for you, not the real thing. When you read a lot of material by people who profess to be on a spiritual path, you may take the experience they have written about and find some place in you where you may sort of fit with their experience; then you use their experience to amplify your own. And the experiences may not be the same at all.

You’re dealing with a facsimile; and that facsimile will get you in trouble because, before long, you won’t know what is the spiritual energy flow that you’re working with and what is the make-believe, the duplicate, the facsimile. That confusion makes it extremely hard for people to progress on their own path in their own timing. It will block them from soul transcendence because they’re too involved in the mental machinations of the written word. They just can’t get beyond the block of that. They will become blocked by thinking, “This book is written so clearly and I love the words so much; they were put together so well, and it is all so beautiful. Their experience is so magnificent; mine can’t compare.” And already they’re lost. That author may not have even had the experience of which he writes. It may be an amalgamation from different sources. The author may have put it together as a facsimile, produced it as reality, and passed it off as his own experience. And those sources from which the author got his information may also have been a facsimile. So you don’t know how far back that process might go. But the result is that you’re living a facsimile instead of living your real experience. You may say, “But some place inside of me, I feel that’s so true and so right.” So? The criteria of spiritual evaluation is not a feeling! It’s a realization! The realization produces change through the process of incitement. I could use the word “excitement,” but that would indicate an outward process. Incitement is inward. It changes the molecules and cells.

If the particular material you have read brings about realization, and that realization produces a change inside of you so that you never go back to the original position you were experiencing before you read the material, then that material has been an experience for you and is valid. But if you find yourself back in the process of seeking and searching, the same as you were before you read the material, then you have only played a game and you have not enhanced your experience.

The idea of not reading strikes indirectly against the very nature of our society and our educational system which says, “Get a good book and read.” You read a book to get excitement, but it may not produce realization. It certainly does produce a form of education, of knowledgeable repeatability– “I read Alice in Wonderland and the Mad Hatter said, `I’m late. I’m late…’” and you are recognized as educated. Being able to repeat things out of a book is not education. True education is realization.

The ability to repeat what you have read is memory. It’s just a mechanical ability. You repeat it enough and you’ll get really good at it. It’ll amaze everyone how “smart” you are. It may be smart. It may be rote ability. It’s not realization.

This process of creating a facsimile does not apply to reading for information, like reading the newspaper or technical material. But if you are reading “true confessions” magazines all the time or love stories, or if you’re getting lost in the last novel you read, that is the facsimile. If you’ve over-identified with Gandalf or Bilbo Baggins in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, you’re lost. Pretty soon, everywhere you go, you see it as the mountains of Mirkwood–and you get lost in comparisons and analogies. That’s a facsimile. You say, “Well, didn’t it really exist some time, some place?” Watch out. You’re going to try to mock up a facsimile of a facsimile of a facsimile of a facsimile, and call it reality. It will not produce the realization that will produce the incitement that will produce the change. It won’t do that. So don’t look for it to do that.

This same process can happen with movies, and it happens particularly with television. With situation comedies and with soap operas and with some of the dramatic series, where you follow one character or one series of characters for months, through various episodes of their lives, there is the danger of identifying so heavily with one or more of the characters that you begin to look for similarities in your life. Perhaps “Leslie’s” husband on the series starts staying out late, giving his wife the excuse that he’s working late at the office, but he’s really got a relationship happening with another woman. Your husband calls one night to say he has to work late at the office. You immediately move into the facsimile, you move into the “similarity,” you move into the illusion. All of a sudden you are rushing into the fears and the doubts and the worries about what your husband is doing, because you think he’s out with some other woman.

The experience of that soap opera or movie is not the experience of your life. The situation of that play is not the reality of your husband’s expression. There may be a similarity. But if you have gotten caught up in that situation comedy or that soap opera, you may begin to look for those things you think “fit” with your life. You’re losing.

Be realistic in your approach to reading, to films, to television, etc. Realize that it is only entertainment, that it is only diversion, that it is not your experience. There is nothing wrong with these entertainment mediums if you keep them in the proper perspective, but if you begin to use them as substitutes for your experience, you are in trouble, and you may block your growth.

There is always both a positive and negative process with any action. In entertainment, the negative aspect would be getting caught up in the facsimile. But all these entertainment mediums-books, plays, television, film, etc. can be used for your upliftment and for your progression, if your approach to them is correct and if your attitude towards them is correct. If used properly, entertainment can even be a way to release and clear karmic situations in which you are or have been involved. For example, a film such as The Diary of Anne Frank might have tremendous significance for many people. If you identify with Anne, for instance, and use the experience portrayed in the film as your own experience-for that time-it is possible to clear karma which might have been related to that time and place in history. But you let the experience go when you leave the theater. Perhaps the film gave you a greater sense of humanity, perhaps it gave you a greater sense of the oneness of all human experience, perhaps it gave you an empathy and a compassion for the Jewish people that you never had before. From that experience, realization can result; incitement can result that will bring change. The experience of the film, then, enhances your own experience and your sense of your Self. And the result is positive.

But do not go out, then, and look for signs that you are being persecuted; do not go out and look for signs of violence and hatred in your fellow men. If you do that, you have used the film as a negative experience that has caught you up in its illusion.

Often, at a very early age, you may find someone that you look up to for some reason. It may be that they’re macho, and you find that attractive. Or maybe they’re very feminine, and you find that attractive. Maybe they cook well, maybe they drive well, maybe- they’re handsome or pretty. But for some reason, you like their expression and start emulating factors of their personality. Maybe their laugh is unique–“hu, hu, hu, heh!” So pretty soon, you’re laughing, “hu, hu, hu, heh!” You start dropping out your expression and start picking up theirs. Maybe you like someone else’s walk so you copy that. And you like the way someone else dresses, so you buy clothes that look that way. And later on somebody says, “Who are you?” And you say, “My God, I don’t know. I guess I’m a little bit of George, a little bit of John, a little bit of Susy. I sure wish I knew who I was. I wish I knew who was behind all these images.” Your expression has become a facsimile; there’s nobody home.

You have to be careful, too, when you start into the inner expression of meditation, contemplation, or spiritual exercises. (I’m using all those words here to mean the same thing.) You think, “I’d like to meditate, but I just don’t feel it’s right for me.” You’re lost! You think, “If I just had more time…” You’re lost again. You think, “If I had a quiet place where I could…” Lost again. The mind postures. It accepts a set of criteria not its own. It accepts a facsimile and then attempts to maintain it, hoping that eventually it will produce something good. It won’t. That abstract concept that you idealize is going to be your confusion and your turmoil and your despair until you can let it go and return again to your experience as your only valid reference point.

Can you endure past the facsimiles of your mind? If you see a light and you wonder if that’s the light your Indian guru wrote about in his book, care you let that comparison go, realizing that your experience is uniquely yours and cannot be “fit in” with another’s? Can you realize that your experience is just as worthy as another’s? If you can, you are changing within yourself, and that’s positive growth.

The Soul attempts to gain experience any way it can. It will attempt to use every medium to observe, to identify, to experience. But it may get lost in that experiencing. If you have been caught up in the facsimile, through reading, through film, through “hero worship,” or whatever, it may take some time for you to step free of those patterns and feel the freedom of your Self coming forward. Hang in there with it. Let the mind energy just disperse. Don’t reinforce it. Don’t look for your inner experience to fit the way you read it in a book. If an author, is truthful, he’ll tell you his words are inadequate to describe his experience. And yet you will take his words as being the ultimate and want to limit your experience to the level of his words. That’s very restrictive. Your experience will be so much greater than anything you can read in a book. Just because it’s written down, you don’t have to think it’s particularly special for you. Certainly it was special to the author. But only your experience will be special to you. And ultimately it is only your experience that will be your teacher.

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