Life Experiences and the Thinking Mind

Your experiences in life are the byproducts of what happens to you throughout your life journey, which is determined by two pivotal players: circumstances and choices.

·       Circumstances are events that happen to you and around you, and they fall under two categories: self-inflicting internal circumstances, such as your procrastination affecting the subsequent turns of events in your life; uncontrollable external circumstances, such as accidents due to no fault of your own.

·       Choices result in actions or inactions, which often bring about consequences as well as circumstances that may affect your life in general and in specific. Choices may also create self-inflicting internal circumstances that ultimately affect the other choices subsequently made.

For example, you had to complete a project and submit a report on that. You had sufficient time to do what you were supposed to do, but you chose to procrastinate until the last minute. An unforeseeable event happened and made it impossible for you to finish your work on time, thus creating a self-inflicting circumstance of frustration and undue stress that might affect other choices you subsequently made.

Personal choices may not be able to alter uncontrollable external circumstances, but they may still play a primary role in one’s reactions and adaptations to those external circumstances that are beyond one’s control.

To illustrate, in the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in 2011, the Japanese people demonstrated their remarkable resilience in their reactions and adaptations to the uncontrollable external circumstances inflicted on them by nature.

Remember, life is about choices and consequences, and living has much to do with causes and results—they become the components of life experiences.

Experiences and the Five Senses

The five senses form the basics of human sensations: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. These five senses can best be epitomized in sex (the “s” stands for “senses” and the “ex” for “experiences”)—all the five sensual pleasures experienced in the very act of sex.

Questions for Reflection

·       Are your sensual pleasures synonymous with your happiness in life?

·       Does your happiness come solely from your sensual pleasures?

But our five senses do not tell us everything; as a matter of fact, they often give us only the half-truths.

The person who uses only the vision of his or her eyes is conditioned by what he or she sees. It is the intuition of the spirit that really perceives the reality. The wise have known for a long time that what we know through our eyes is not the same as the intuition of our spirit. If that is the case, sadly, most people rely on what they see, thinking that “seeing is believing” and thus lose themselves in the realities of external things.

A Case in Point

              

In 1997, Richard Alexander from Indiana was convicted as a serial rapist because one of the victims and her fiancé insisted that he was the perpetrator based on what the victim and her fiancé claimed that “they saw with their own eyes.”

But the convicted man was later exonerated and subsequently released in 2001, based on new DNA science and other forensic evidence. Experts explained that a traumatic emotional experience, such as a rape, could “distort” the perception of an individual. That explains why the woman and her fiancé “swore” that Richard Alexander was the rapist, but evidently he was not.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau