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Experiential Learning Quotes

    “So it is that there is nothing to be taught, but yet there is something to be learned. There is something we may come to understand, but not if we demand that it be explained to us. There is something that may happen to us, but not if we await its coming from outside of ourselves.”

    Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 190)

      “The Zen master warns: ‘If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!’ This admonition points up that no meaning that comes from outside of ourselves is real. The Buddhahood of each of us has already been obtained. We need only recognize it. Philosophy, religion, patriotism, all are empty idols. The only meaning in our lives is what we each bring to them. Killing the Buddha on the road means destroying the hope that anything outside of ourselves can be our master. No one is any bigger than anyone else. There are no mothers or fathers for grown-ups, only sisters and brothers.”

      Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 188)

        “The most important things that each man must learn, no one else can teach him. Once he accepts this disappointment, he will be able to stop depending on the therapist, the guru who turns out to be just another struggling human being. Illusions die hard, and it is painful to yield to the insight that a grown-up can be no man’s disciple. This discovery does not mark the end of the search, but a new beginning.”

        Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 56)

          “As a therapist, I know that though the patient learns, I do not teach. Furthermore, what is to be learned is too elusively simple to be grasped without struggle, surrender, and experiencing of how it is.”

          Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 7)

            “Never believe anything unless you have experienced it. Never form any prejudice, even if the whole world is saying that something is so, unless you have encountered it yourself.”

            Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 131)

              “How many of us are good at spotting the feedback that’s saying, ‘Hey this is not working for you?’ How many of us make the same mistakes over and over, have been stuck in the same unproductive patterns for years, refusing to be taught by experience? How many of us are actively looking at models (as Seneca said, choosing ourselves a Cato) and being instructed by their example as we face new situations? How often are our beliefs changing, being updated to fit new information as it is provided by what we witness and undergo? Learning is so much more than what happens in books, so much than just facts and figures. It’s more than just what we seek out or want to hear. Life is a classroom. Experience is a teacher. Are we willing to be taught?”

              Ryan Holiday

                “Mature people are those who have watched and found for themselves what is right, what is wrong, what is good, what is bad. And by finding it for themselves, they have a tremendous authority. The whole world may say something else, and it makes no difference to them. They have their own experience to go by, and that is enough.”

                Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 24)

                  “This is perhaps the essence of the meaning of these visionary experiences, as it is really the heart of Active Imagination itself: It is a way of learning from your own experience those profound truths of life that can’t be transferred from one person to another with words but can only be genuinely known through one’s own connection to the collective unconscious. In this sense, we can only learn what we already know at the unconscious level.”

                  Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (Page 218)

                    “Two kinds of people are good at foreseeing danger: those who have learned at their own expense, and the clever people who learn a great deal at the expense of others.”

                    Baltasar Gracián, The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence

                      “The only time you’re going to really hold onto the past is when you haven’t fully learned from the past. When you have, you can apply those lessons to the present moment and create what you wanted to experience then.”

                      Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 226)

                        “To do your inner work means to evaluate why something triggered you, why something is upsetting you, what your life is trying to show you, and the ways you could grow from these experiences. Truly powerful people absorb what has happened to them and sort of metabolize it. They use it as an opportunity to learn, to develop themselves. This type of inner mental and emotional work is non-negotiable if you want to be truly powerful.”

                        Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 187)