Experience as a Synchronous Event

the puzzle of coinciding incidents

To move, to breathe, to fly, to float,

To gain all while you give,

To roam the roads of lands remote,

To travel is to live.

〰 Hans Christian Andersen 〰

photo © Richard Lee on Unsplash

On Learning from Experience

Experience is what largely makes up the content of life, if not life itself.

〰 Jean Gebser 〰

In 1958, the German-born cultural philosopher, poet, and linguist Jean Gebser gave a rare talk in which he shares scenes of his personal story of trauma and survival. He speaks about human experience through the lens of his unique worldview.

The talk On Human Experience ~ Über die Erfahrung ~ is available in German on youtube.

In his talk, Jean Gebser laments that humans don’t learn from their experience. What he is referring to is of course negative experience ~ the event of passing through scary and difficult stretches in the course of life.

His own explorations of risks, hazards, and life threatening ordeals have taught him that the experience of life always holds the potential of gaining self-knowledge. What the experiencer is going through is ultimately self-experience. Or in Gebser’s own words, “In any case, the experience of life can convey self-experience.”

Jean Gebser’s personal firsthand experience of the fragility of life begins in a wooden bathtub, the room sparsely lit by a petroleum lamp. Jean is three years old. His mother has to leave the room for a moment and gives him strict instructions to sit still. So he does. Or at least he tries.

But the warm bath and the dim light make him sleepy; he slides into a slumber and under water. Fortunately the nanny enters the bathroom just in time, finds the little boy submerged in the bathtub, pulls him out, and revives him.

A decade later, Jean, now an adolescent, has to take a compulsory swimming exam at school. He sees other students jump from a springboard into the river, disappear under water, and come up again.

The thought of taking such a leap fills him with paralysing dread. Convinced that he would drown. But he has no choice. He makes himself walk to the edge of the board. He jumps, plunges into the deep, sinks towards the river bed, and then, to his great surprise, the gurgling, swirling waters push him upwards.

Jean Gebser recalls walking home in a state of euphoria. When facing his old fear, he tapped into the frozen-by-trauma memory, pulled the ‘release trigger’ and was instantly connected with the pure source of life.

The experience of surviving the ordeal and being able to paddle back to the safety of the river bank allowed him to snap out of trauma-paralysis. Moreover, this moment of healing served him in several life threatening situations later in life.

photo © Jess Zoerb on Unsplash

Exploring while Passing Through

Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.

〰 Will Rogers 〰

Gebser defines experience as a drive through exploration. (Original German fahrend erkunden).

Interestingly, the German verb erfahren and its noun Erfahrung refer in their literal meaning to more or less the same range of definitions as the English experience, despite different etymological lineages.

Experience [from Latin experiri = to try, test › ex = out + per = through + ire = go] means literally to go through and out.

The English noun has been in use since late 14c., in “the sense of observation as the source of knowledge; actual observation; an event which has affected” the observer, witness or experiencer.

Contemporary meanings of experience (according to Merriam Webster’s online dictionary) include:::

› direct observation of or participation in events as a basis of knowledge

› Practical knowledge, skill, or practice derived from direct observation of or participation in events or in a particular activity

› something personally encountered, undergone, or lived through

› the conscious events that make up an individual life

› the events that make up the conscious past of a community or nation or humankind generally

› the act or process of directly perceiving events or reality

The original Latin experientia carried the definition of ‘trial, proof, experiment; knowledge gained by repeated trials.’ In other words, the Latin original was somewhat of a crossover between the contemporary English meaning of experience and experiment.

The English verb to experience is used in the sense of:::

› to go through

› to learn by experience

› to enjoy or suffer,

depending on the nature of the experienced event.

We can ‘have experiences’, such as an Aha-experience, life changing experience, or eye-opening experience, but we don’t make experiences, in the way we ‘make memories.’

This is surprising, since we may choose a holiday destination, a restaurant for a special celebration, a concert, theatre performance, or weekend visit to a beautiful place with the explicit intention to experience a memorable ‘time out’.

No matter how much we plan our experiences, however, there is no guarantee that the result will be good one. We get married with the sincere intention to make it a successful alliance, and may end up with the unsettling experience of a divorce.

You may go to visit a friend, colleague, or family member, excited to see them again, and before you know it you find yourself embroiled in an argument. You might go out for a ‘nice meal’ and come home with an upset stomach.

In other words, experiences don’t always go according to plan. Experiences can develop an Eigenleben ~ a life of their own ~ as if under the control of some other operating system, independent of personal intentions.

photo © Filip Mroz on Unsplash

The Perils of Experience

If you have the guts to keep making mistakes,

your wisdom and intelligence leap forward with huge momentum.

〰 Holly Near 〰

Experience is closely related to experiment and experimental, expert and expertise, and all their derivatives. These are the obvious ones.

Another group of related words are kins of empiric and empirical (1600) ~ borrowed from the Latin empiricus, which means literally a physician guided by experience.

Without the prefix we are left with the following words:::

Peril (1200) ~ danger, risk, hazard, jeopardy, exposure of person or property to injury, loss, or destruction

Perilous (1300) ~ hazardous, full of danger; risky; involving exposure to death, destruction or injury

Parlous (c. 14 c) ~ dangerous, alarming, a late Middle English variation of perilous

Perish (late 13 c) ~ to die, be killed, pass away; suffer spiritual death, be damned

Perishable (late 15 c) ~ subject to decay or destruction. Since 1895 used in relation to food

Slightly more distant relatives but clearly related are:::

Piracy (early 15 c.) ~ robbery upon the sea, the practice of robbing on the high seas presumably from the activity of exposing oneself and others to extreme risks and danger

Pirate (1300) ~ a sea-robber, sea-plunderer, one who without authority and by violence seizes or interferes with the ship or property of another on the sea; a person who exposes themselves and others to high risks and dangers

From 1701 onwards the word has been used for ‘robbers and plunderers’ who take someone else’s creative work without permission.

The use of the word in the sense of ‘unlicensed radio broadcaster’ transmitting content from a ship beyond territorial waters was introduced in 1913.

Etymologists have linked the English word fear and its relatives to the same root as peril. The linguistic lineage is clearly a different one ~ fear has descended from Old English fær (= calamity, sudden danger, peril, attack) related to Nordic far (= harm, distress) and Germanic Gefahr (= danger), rather than Latin.

However, there is a strong connection, when we take into account the German words for experience (Erfahrung) and danger (Gefahr). Both revolve around the word fahren (= drive, go, ride, run, travel)

The English word fear (before the 12th century) ~ now primarily used in the sense of a ’strong negative emotion’ in the sense of being alarmed ~ started its life in the English speaking world in the sense more or less synonymous with peril.

The meaning of being afraid developed relatively early, being already documented since late 12 c. From around 1400 it was used as feeling of dread and reverence for God.

The religions sense has grown by the late 19th century in the context of colonialisation, when the phrase to put the fear of God into the natives became popular.

“Thus then we seek to put 'the fear of God' into the natives at the point of the bayonet, and excuse ourselves for the bloody work on the plea of the benefits which we intend to confer afterwards.” Felix Adler wrote in his book The Religion of Duty, 1905.

The verb to fear was originally used in the transitive form i.e. to frighten someone, literally to drive ‘the fear of God’ into them. This has long since been squeezed out by the purely intransitive to be afraid, to be filled with fear.

This historical connection may explain the widespread reluctance ~ and often outright fear ~ of humans to face their own painful experiences.

photo © Denise Jans on Unsplash

Synchronous Experience

Failure is everywhere.

It’s just that most of the time we’d rather avoid confronting that fact.

〰 Oliver Burkeman 〰

Jean Gebser’s story shows that it is indeed possible to learn from negative experiences. In order to do so, we may need to go through uncomfortable events again, in a different context and time, with the ability to confront and handle them.

The late Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh confirmed Gebser’s experience when he said that “understanding can liberate you from every shackle of suffering.”

Gebser and Thich Nhat Hanh both focus on understanding as a solution, albeit with different approaches. This brings up the question, what is understanding?

Normally we interpret ‘understanding’ as a rational process. That’s how learning is being taught at school.

With negative experience this doesn’t work, for two reasons. Firstly, negative experience usually doesn’t make sense to the rational mind. Secondly, the negative experience itself is often so off-putting that we shy away from looking at it. We’d rather throw it in the trash and try again ~ at our own peril.

In his book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, British journalist and author Oliver Burkeman writes about his visit to the Museum of Failed Products in Michigan.

“Most surprising of all is the fact that many of the designers,… discover products that their own companies had created and then abandoned.” Burkeman explains. “These firms were apparently so averse to thinking about the unpleasant business failure that they had neglected even to keep samples of their own disasters.”

This aversion to look at our own failures leads to the weird situation that sometimes ~ as the Museum of Failed Products demonstrates ~ the same firm makes identical mistakes several times over.

From this we can conclude that being exclusively focused on success, while ‘eradicating the word failure from our vocabulary’ ~ as a business or life strategy ~ is doomed to fail.

When it comes to learning from experience, our exclusive rational-mind-academic-school-type learning is irrelevant. It mostly gets in the way. Learning from experience only works by taking the leap, diving in, and taking the perilous ride one more time.

Understanding reveals itself, either gradually or in a flash, when we recognise that experience is a multidimensional event, and are willing to dive in. Always. The incident we see and pick up in material reality, coincides with multiple events in the inner world, at other levels of reality.

Experience is as much an external as an internal event ~ always!

Once we are able to make the connection, negative experiences spontaneously transform into coherence. This is understanding.

Co-incidences ~ which we call experience ~ happen in synchrony [from Greek syn = together + khronos = time]. As long as we mis-take them for ‘accidental occurrences’, it is easy to dismiss them as mistakes.

If they are negative, we try to avoid them. In the case of positive coincidences, we call them ’synchronicity’ as if the suffix -ity adds a positive quality to this phenomenon, which English speakers used to call synchronism.

Synchronism has been used in the sense of “quality of recurring at the same successive instants of time” since 1854.

The original meaning of synchronism (from 1580s) was the “contemporary existence or occurrence, concurrence of two or more events in time.” (note the subtle differences in timing)

Here we use synchrony in the sense of simultaneous things happening in the same place at the same time. The statement 'experience is a synchronous event' means that many things occur simultaneously, both in the tangible outer reality and in our personal inner reality.

While ‘positive synchronicity’ is uplifting, pleasant, and encouraging, it’s the negative synchronous events from which we can learn the most, if we have the courage, willingness, and resources to travel through them.