Encounters vs experience

Society and faith

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This episode has focus on differenciating our experiences with the actual encounters we have in life. Our approach to thought is built on past encounters. The language and terms we use in our thinking is built from the culture and environment we grow up in (Mead, 1985) but the instrument we use is our own. I use the word encounters because our experiences are controlled by more than our encounters. By experiences we implement our thoughts, our emotions, our pasts, our wellbeing to the equation. An example would be if someone gave you some advice, and because of whatever state you were in, you could not receive or understand it. Perhaps later slowly the advice would come to you, or perhaps when someone else said the same words they just connected with you.

We live and act affected by our experiences, and our experiences become our truths. The reason for separating the two is our unavoidable inability to perfectly understand signals from the outside world. In a classroom the student may have understood the teacher a certain way, and that would be their experience. Though the teacher could have given the right lesson or answer, it may not have been received in the way the teacher intended. This noise or disturbance in life is therefore our cultures, past experiences, prejudice, and our worldviews. We encounter one thing, but we have the ability to experience something other. The reason we may do this and live like this is because of the cause and effect.

The cause must be held to an outer impact, and not with a melting with the inside. We must separate the encounter from the experience. If we live by our experience alone and do not weigh it with the meeting of transparent and outer truth, we may end up in fault. To jump to conclusions and build your life upon a perceived truth may end badly. An individual could then establish a complete worldview on information that has limited truth to it. Because encounters or truth, has been melted with individual meaning.

An individual’s experienced truth based on worldview cannot operate as objective truth. When we then come to the power of ideas that end up as ideologies, they can uphold truth claims, but cannot be objective. To live by other than objective truths would therefore be accepting a manipulation of objective truth, or at best being ignorant. In life we must accept being ignorant in areas, we cannot be experts in every field. We must choose what we allow to have in our lives, and we must endeavor to chase what holds an everlasting truth.

If truth of life and meaning is the main object, we must start with the building blocks for life, and see the cause and effect of life, and of meaning. With a worldview that is disconnected with outside truth, we at best do not know it yet. At worst we delude truth. If individual truth does not coincide with what we encounter in the human experience, it cannot maintain its objectivity. It cannot therefore obtain the quality of upholding a truth claim.
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Sources:

Ayer, A. J. (2001). Hume: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

Mead, G. H. (1985). Mind, Selff and Society. 60637, USA: The University of Chicago Press.

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