the timboucher experience

This passage from RD Laing about behavior and experience is really good:

I see you, and you see me. I experience you, and you experience me. I see your behavior. You see my behavior. But I do not and never have and never will see your experience of me… Experience is man’s invisibility to man. [At the same time] it is more evident than anything. Only experience is evident. Experience is the only evidence… Our behavior is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things… Natural science knows nothing of the relation between behavior and experience. The nature of this relation is mysterious.

I found this at the Metahistory site’s lexicon page, under “behavior.” She also goes into talking about how belief factors into the above description also. How people hold beliefs which influence their behavior. And how beliefs are only held when one does not actually have experience of something. She also drops this bombshell:

Considered in this light, beliefs in and about God (or anything else) may be derived from the incapacity to experience what God actually is. Someone who can experience God in a direct and evidential way no longer needs to hold beliefs in or about God.

This site is so good. I haven’t found something this good online in a long time. Wow, and then there’s this, which is just amazing:

Laing asserts, “My psyche is my experience, my experience is my psyche.” (p. 21) Behavior is the conditional form experience assumes when acted out and shared with others. It is what happens to the psyche, but not what the psyche experiences happening in itself. To live in behavior and identify oneself with behavior is to become alienated from one’s own experience, yet this emphasis on behavior (custom, habit, preprogrammed activity) is precisely the mark of belief-driven activity. People who hold the same beliefs will act in the same (predictable, customary) ways, and they will identify strongly with those ways. Their behavior will prevail because their capacity to experience has been severely compromised, if not destroyed.

God, I absolutely LOVE this website. Here’s two more awesome snippets from that same page, under the “belief-change” entry. GODDAMN!

Under to the spell of consensus reality, millions of people find their identities in what they believe — to such an extent that, lacking those beliefs, they would have no idea who they are.

… beliefs are not adopted because they are true, but come to be regarded as true because they have been adopted.

… Their value is not to carry truths that are acquired from the direct experience of the individual, but to insure the individual identity and participation in social terms.

Beliefs are tools for social conditioning, rather than expressions of inner realization or universal truth.

Ah, this sort of stuff makes me swoon. It’s so dreamy. Sigh…

• Faith vs. Belief
• Podcast 03: Beyond Belief, Pt. 1
• Delusional Beliefs
• Speculation vs. Experience
• Buddha Beyond Belief