In some spiritual circles, including in the Gurdjieff Work, one is advised to rely on one’s own experience.  This seems common sense and beyond refute, but is it actually self-evident? Perhaps there are aspects of this idea that are true, but others that can be misconstrued.

Gurdjieff, right away in the Tales, in Chapter 2, brings up a contradiction between Perception and Experience.  In one paragraph, we learn that Beelzebub has experiences and perceptions not proper to his nature in the solar system ors.  In the very next paragraph, we learn that there are conditions and circumstances improper to him.  The implied question is whether Beelzebub’s time in Ors is a reflection of an experience caused by his perceptions or is in fact a representation of objective events in his environment.  In fact, the whole of the Tales can be seen as a treatise on the relationship between Inner and Outer; a training ground for freeing oneself from one’s subjectivity and a rejoining with the objective world outside one’s ego-centricity.

The admonition to rely on experience rather than intellectual knowledge is, of course, true in a certain sense.  How often must we have an idolized view of someone outside of us, such as a guru, teacher, parent, mentor, or friend, only to discover they are quite flawed?  When we go to school and train for a particular career, brimming with enthusiastic idealism, we commonly to find ourselves hobbled and hemmed in by market forces when we finally get a job in the field.  An architect studies Write, Hadid, and Gaudi in school, only to find themselves copying and pasting standardized details time and again.  A counselor studies the dream psychology of Jung and the Self-Actualization of Maslow, ending up as a social worker desperately trying to manage their overloaded schedule.  A teacher spends 6 years in school, only to end up desperately shoving dozens of middle and high school students through regurgitated curriculums year after year. We require the hard knocks of experience to induce a realistic sense of other people and the large scale societies we participate in with all their inherent limitations.  Some of us go our whole lives, believing our priests, politicians, business executives, or others, actually have the entire truth, solely because their reputation precedes them.  Gurdjieff points out that all that is required is for “Smith” or “Brown” to speak of somebody or other in a certain way, and the hearer is already quite convinced that it is just so and could not be otherwise.  In this sense, it is important for experience to override our ideas about the world.

However, the idea that only experience is useful as a guide does not map onto all circumstances.  This also is common sense.  Do we expect the experience of a 20 year old to be as reliable as that of a 60 year old?  Should we tell a 20 year old, whose experience is that cars are fun, to drive at dangerous speeds? One might argue that this is a lack of experience, but in general we admonish young people to eschew their experience and instead rely on the knowledge of their elders to help guide their decisions.

Undermining the idea that experience is a reliable guide is also the fact of gender and racial differences.  Should a white person, voting on issues surrounding racial discrimination, vote based on their personal experience, or the knowledge that racism exists?  Perhaps they have no personal experience of racism, and if they were to vote based on their experience, perhaps the policies enacted by their “experience” would negatively effect others.  Can a men understand the experience of females, or females that of men?  In fact, when it comes to class divides, whether of sex, race, or socio-economic status, we rely entirely on the reported experience of others, which to us is purely information, and not experience.

Often, and for good reason, in order to step into the shoes of others, we rely on our experience.  However, what do we do when someone is going through an experience we have never had? After all, how can one experience the grief of a woman who has just miscarried?  One must resort to the most similar personal experience of grief.  Perhaps one’s own mother has miscarried, and, seeing one’s own mother grieving, one also felt sadness.  One could then project sadness at seeing one’s mother’s sorrow onto the sadness of the woman miscarrying.  This is the closest one can come to mirroring that grief.  But in the end, any method of projection in this way shows that one’s experience is inadequate for understanding the experience of another.  After all, to accurately understand another’s experience one must have experienced precisely the same circumstances.  Individual human’s are so unique that it is rare to find circumstances that mirror each other in so many respects that a precise accord can be found.

There is an additional problem laying in the fact that our remembering self and experiencing self are not the same.  Studies have shown that we tend to remember the most positive aspect of an experience.  Thus, if asked while in the middle of one’s vacation to Italy, a respondent will report one thing, and when asked later, another thing.  Therefore, even if we have had the experience another person is currently having, because that experience was in the past, there is no guarantee we will be able to call up the same feelings in the precisely the same way so as to be able to mirror the other person’s feelings.  This, of course, is not entirely bad.  After all, if one’s friend is coming apart at the seams due to a divorce, what they need at that moment is not for their supporter to start weeping uncontrollably from the same grief.  However, it does point to the fact that our “experience” is highly subject to the sensations and feelings in operation at that point in time.

Gurdjieff in his lectures called these “rolls”: accumulated experiences or associations which could be in operation in various combinations in a person at any time.  Any series of “rolls” in operation in a person’s centers edit the incoming reality from outside.  A similar concept in the Tales is “egoplastikoori”.

Yet another example of the instability of “experience”:  a person who begins running in order to get into shape, if they relied on their immediate experience, would quickly stop.  If one didn’t have the imagined context that one has just been running, the extremely fast heartbeat experienced could be extremely alarming!  Simply exchange the concept of heart attack i for the idea that one has been running, and one’s “experience” entirely changes.  One is not experiencing an elevated heart rate from exercise, but a fatal heart attack. However, a runner, with the knowledge that the first several weeks of training are the worst, will persist because of that knowledge, eventually gaining the experience to verify that knowledge.

Another downside to experience is that experience has a way of fusing associations in a disordered and harmful way.  It is a psychological truism that certain childhood experiences can attach negative feelings to what in reality are harmless sensations, such as the noise of cooking in the kitchen, the running water of a faucet, or the squeal of the front door opening.  Often the first step is to gain intellectual distance from the fact that the feeling attached to the particular innocuous sensation is not “real” and that it is okay to expose oneself to the off-putting “experience”.  This is called exposure therapy, and it is the most effective therapy for trauma.  IF one were to rely solely on experience, and eschew intellectual knowing, one would quickly find oneself adrift on a sea of irrational and random moods with no mooring.  This is, in fact, precisely the condition of most human beings.

The fact that direct experience is not reliable applies to almost every human endeavor we find meaningful.  As human beings, our individual reservoir of experience is simply too limited to be an accurate guide to understanding either the outer world in objective fact or the subjective experience of others around us.  The past several centuries of rapidly increasing global cultural interaction led to a gradual collective realization of cultural relativity and the fact that human experience is preceded by a dense network of conditioned psychological perceptions.

Gurdjieff, having travelled extensively in a time when travel was quite difficult, had a unique perspective for his day that gained him repute.  He understood moral and cultural relativity, and acted out his understanding in ways that shocked people around him.  Thus, when he arrive in 1920’s prohibition America to check in on Orage and his groups in New York and Chicago, and was chided by a pupil to hide the bottle of alcohol visibly hanging from his coat pocket, he waived them away, saying something to the effect of, “let them see.”

In conclusion, the relationship between knowledge and experience forms a dichotomy essential for our being. Humans must project goals to stay healthy and happy, and these goals are based from knowledge. We also want a culture in which the young take account of the wisdom of the old. At the same time, sinking into the present moment leads to a delicious simplicity of Being which is boundless and has a tendency to heal the mindless striving toward objective goals. It is the engaging with these two poles our existence that forms wisdom and a healthy ability to act in the world in a way that is truly harmonious and of benefit. Certainly, the dogmatic adherence to “experience” signals a lack of both experience and knowledge as well as the blending of their separate qualities.