Inner Experience Quotes

After I received my blue belt, I soon recognized that the belts were simply an external representation of an inner experience, and that they mattered little compared to the person I was becoming. ~ Chris Matakas

Poetry remakes and prolongs language; every poetic language begins by being a secret language, that is, the creation of a personal universe, of a completely closed world. The purest poetic act seems to re-create language from an inner experience that … reveals the essence of things. ~ Mircea Eliade

. . .many conservation biologists assert the importance of scientists being able to communicate the spontaneous inner experience and appreciation for the creatures they investigate, claiming that no one has more expertise, or right, to express a love for nature than those who have given their lives to its study. ~ Fred Van Dyke

Reminding me again and again and again that longing was not desperation and loneliness was not failure. And that, ironically, the less I tried to manipulate my inner experience, the more peaceful and content I felt.

If you feel sad sometimes, it's not because you're single--it's because you're alive. ~ Sara Eckel

A lot of people, after seeking a bit, have some experience, and sometimes will believe they're enlightened. One has to be careful about that. Especially Americans, who are very external stimulus oriented. When they have some type of deep inner experience, often they think that was the ultimate experience. ~ Robert Thurman

Hallucinations are an inner experience in which most of the time you forget you're there. ~ Gaspar Noe

Dancing is surely the most basic and relevant of all forms of expression. Nothing else can so effectively give outward form to an inner experience. Poetry and music exist in time. Painting and architecture are a part of space. But only the dance lives at once in both space and time. In it the creator and the thing created, the artist and the expression, are one. Each participates completely in the other. There could be no better metaphor for an understanding of the mechanics of the cosmos. ~ Lyall Watson

Replace fear of your own inner experience with a curious, gentle, welcoming attitude - free of judgment, self-blame, and aversion. ~ Melanie Greenberg

The inner experience of fallure is totally different than failure. Going to fallure means 100% commitment - you leave nothing in reserve, no mental or physical resource untapped, you never give yourself a psychological out. Failure means making a decision to let go, to be less than 100% committed, when confronted by fear, pain and uncertainty. ~ James C. Collins

The inner aim of thought is never fully realized until it ripens into vocal utterances through which others can have access- albeit indirect- to our personal experience. In fact,an inner experience only achieves true completeness when it has been spoken. No matter how profound an insight one may gain, as long as it stays inarticulately concealed within an introspective silence, it remains one-dimensional and incomplete. ~ Stephen Batchelor

People into hard sciences, neurophysiology, often ignore a core philosophical question: 'What is the relationship between our unique, inner experience of conscious awareness and material substance?' The answer is: We don't know, and some people are so terrified to say, 'I don't know.' ~ Raymond Moody

You may not seem able to change some outer circumstances but you can start by changing your inner experience of life and yourself. ~ Joy Page

Religion knew the truth of metaphor and symbol for almost all of history until the past few hundred years, and especially until the wrongly named Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries. Then we started confusing rational and provable with real. We actually regressed and went backward. In trying to defend its ground in the face of rationalism and scientism, religion tried to become "rational" itself and lost its alternative consciousness, which many of us call contemplation. It's as though we tried to deal with Mystery with the entirely wrong "software". We lost access to the higher levels of consciousness, the transrational, the transpersonal, the transcendent itself. Most tragic, we lost most inner experience of our own outer belief systems. That is the heart of religion's problem today, and it is indeed a deep and serious problem for upcoming generations. My generation took the symbols to literally, and now the following generation is just throwing them all out as useless. We are both losing. It might surprise you, but both religious fundamentalism and atheism are similar in that they are self-contained rational systems. Such a system works if you stay inside its chosen logic and territory. ~ Richard Rohr

Our inner experience is that which we think, feel, remember, perceive, sense, decide, plan and predict. These experiences are actually mental actions, or mental activity (Van der Hart et al., 2006). Mental activity, in which we engage all the time, may or may not be accompanied by behavioral actions. It is essential that you become aware of, learn to tolerate and regulate, and even change major mental actions that affect your current life, such as negative beliefs, and feelings or reactions to the past the interfere with the present. However, it is impossible to change inner experiences if you are avoiding them because you are afraid, ashamed or disgusted by them. Serious avoidance of you inner experiences is called experiential avoidance (Hayes, Wilson, Gifford, & Follettte, 1996), or the phobia of inner experience (Steele, Van der Hart, & Nijenhuis, 2005; Van der Hart et al., 2006). ~ Suzette Boon

By inner experience I understand that which one usually calls mystical experience: the states of ecstasy, of rapture, at least of meditated emotion. But I am thinking less of confessional experience, to which one has had to adhere up to now, that of an experience laid bare, free of ties, even of an origin, of any confession whatever. This is why I don't like the word mystical. ~ Georges Bataille

The inner experience of meditation can be had without any kind of forced discipline. The outer trappings - how one sits, breathes, dresses, and so forth - are irrelevant. ~ Deepak Chopra

The 'coming of the Self' is immanent; and the process of collective 'individuation' is living itself out in human history. One way or another, the world is going to be made a single whole entity. But it will be unified either in mutual mass destruction or by means of mutual human consciousness. If a sufficient number of individuals can have the experience of the coming of the Self as an individual, inner experience, we may just possibly be spared the worst features of its external manifestation. ~ Edward F Edinger

Remember: knowing originates on the inside, knowledge on the outside. Certain facts and concepts may change, come into being, disappear, or be replaced, but what it is to be a human being will never really be all that different. Every person to ever live, now and the whole of history, has had a rich and elaborate world of inner experience, but it has mainly been flesh upon the same skeleton. We are all
born, come to terms with the world, and then come to terms with coming to terms with the world, as we go through the stages of puberty, old age, death and
making sense of it all in between. We all live the same process in different ways. Some live it longer than others and some cover more ground. But that's it. ~ Oli Anderson

What does literature do better than anything else? It provides a detailed representation of the inner experience of being alive in a given time and place. ~ Elif Batuman

It is through an "intimate cessation of all intellectual operations" that the mind is laid bare. If nor, discourse maintains it in its little complacency ... The difference between inner experience and philosophy resides principally in this: that in experience, ... what counts is no longer the statement of wind, but the wind. ~ Georges Bataille

God's presence ... is an inner experience that never changes. It's a relationship that's there all the time, even when we're not paying attention to it. Perhaps the Infinite holds us to Itself in the same way the earth does. Like gravity, if it ever stopped we would know it instantly. But it never does. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen

The big thing (that really good fiction) can do is leaping over that wall of self and portraying inner experience and setting up a kind of intimate conversation between two consciousnesses ... the trick is going to be trying to find a way to do it
and for a generation
whose relation to the long sustained, linear verbal communication is fundamentally different. ~ David Foster Wallace

I think that frequently, many times in the beginning of our path as artists, we do have to deal with our upsets and our negativeness - in regard to, mostly, ourselves. We may be taking it out on our loved ones or people close to us, but really we're just mad at ourselves for not giving ourselves the time to devote to our inner development and doing the soul work through our art work. So there's a certain amount of working through that. You may have to cry, you may have to dance, you may have to get the energy moving in whatever way you can, and if you need to scream as you work that's as much of a prayer as the more refined kinds of artist's prayers. Sometimes it's a more direct kind of thing. You can scream in rage, you can scream your need for God, whatever's there for you. You've got to start where you're at. If you think that you can just start making spiritual art without addressing all the build-up of shadow material that you may be carrying around with you, and it's leaking out at the borders, then I don't think that's any good. You've got to be true. So wherever you're at, that's where you start.
And as far as the artist creating spiritual or visionary art, I think that it's obvious and important that the artist experience the transpersonal states prior to them trying to bring it out in their work, otherwise they're just doing imitative or derivative kind of work. It has to be from some authentic inner experience, and as long as you've had some experience of you ~ Alex Grey

My conduct with my friends is motivated: each being is, I believe, incapable on his own, of going to the end of being. If he tries, he is submerged within a "private being" which has meaning only for himself. Now there is no meaning for a lone individual: bing alone would of itself reject the "private being" if it saw it as such (if I wish my life to have meaning for me, it is necessary that it have meaning for others: no one would dare give to life a meaning which he alone would perceive, from which life in its entirety would escape, except within himself). At the extreme limit of the "possible", it is true, there is nonsense . . . but only of that which had a prior sense: this is fulguration, even "apotheosis" of nonsense. But I don't attain the extreme limit on my own and, in actual fact, I can't believe the extreme limit attained, for I never remain there. If I had to be the only one having attained it (assuming that I had . . .), it would be as thought it had not occurred. For if there subsisted a satisfaction, as small as I can imagine it to be, it would distance me as much from the extreme limit. I cannot for a moment cease to incite myself to attain the extreme limit, and cannot make a distinction between myself and those with whom I desire to communicate.
~George Bataille, "Inner Experience" pg. 42 ~ Georges Bataille

Whenever there is a reaching down into innermost experience, into the nucleus of personality, most people are overcome by fear and many run away ... The risk of inner experience, the adventure of the spirit, is in any case alien to most human beings. The possibility that such experience might have psychic reality is anathema to them. ~ Carl Jung

The contradiction so puzzling to the ordinary way of thinking comes from the fact that we have to use language to communicate our inner experience, which in its very nature transcends linguistics. ~ D.T. Suzuki

Yeah, there's stuff that really good fiction can do that other forms of art can't do as well. And the big thing, the big thing seems to be, sort of leapin' over that wall of self, and portraying inner experience. And setting up, I think, a kind of intimate conversation between two consciences. ~ David Lipsky

...they had succumbed to an impersonal and anonymous mode of consciousness which precluded personal feeling and which was devoid of a secure sense of self-identity. Everything tended to be seen in 'abstract' terms, as theoretical possibilities which could be contemplated and compared but to the concrete realization of which people were unwilling to commit themselves. If they attended to their own attitudes or emotions it was through a thick haze of pseudo-scientific expressions or cliche-ridden phrases which they had picked up from books or newspapers rather than in the direct light of their own inner experience. Living had become a matter of knowing rather than doing; accumulating information and learning things by rote as opposed to taking decisions that bore the stamp of individual passion or conviction. ~ Patrick L. Gardiner

As much as I can, I avoid using the word "spiritual" altogether. I find it neither useful nor necessary nor appropriate in my work at the hospital bringing mindfulness into the mainstream of medicine and healthcare, nor in other settings in which we work[.] [T]o my mind, the vocabulary of spirituality creates more practical problems than it solves. [...] The concept of spirituality can narrow our thinking rather extend it.
[...] Perhaps ultimately, spiritual means experiencing wholeness and interconnectedness directly, a seeing that individuality and the totality are interwoven, that nothing is separate or extraneous, If you see in this way, then everything becomes spiritual in its deepest sense. Doing science is spiritual. So is washing the dishes. It is the inner experience which counts. And you have to be there for it. ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experience that bears witness to the truth, what is one to make of the many people who do not have that experience? ~ Sigmund Freud

In the hearts of people today there is a deep longing for peace. When the true spirit of peace is thoroughly dominant, it becomes an inner experience with unlimited possibilities. Only when this really happens - when the spirit of peace awakens and takes possession of men's hearts, can humanity be saved from perishing. ~ Albert Schweitzer

Empathy involves the inner experience of sharing in and comprehending the momentary psychological state of another person. ~ Roy Schafer

The problem is that there may not be any way to really prove animal consciousness with data. Clever experiments can show that animals perform behaviorally in ways that people behave when they are in a particular state of phenomenal consciousness. But we can create robots that behave the way humans behave when we are having a phenomenal experience. Consciousness is, and probably always will be, an inner experience that is unobservable to anyone other than the experiencing organism. And in the absence of verbal report, there is little to measure. ~ Joseph E. Ledoux

Inner experience ... is not easily accessible and, viewed from the outside by intelligence, it would even be necessary to see in it a sum of distinct operations, some intellectual, others aesthetic, yet others moral ... It is only from within, lived to the point of terror, that it appears to unify that which discursive thought must separate. ~ Georges Bataille

Everything changes. That's the universal nature of outer reality and inner experience. Therefore, there's no end to disturbed equilibria as long as you live. ~ Rick Hanson

Flow is the process of achieving happiness through control over one's inner life. The optimal state of inner experience is order in consciousness. This happens when we focus our attention (psychic energy) on realistic goals and when our skills match the challenges we face. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Indeed, living a spiritual life requires a change of heart, a conversion. Such a conversion may be marked by a sudden inner change, or it can take place through a long, quiet process of transformation. But it always involves an inner experience of oneness. We realize that we are in the center, and that from there all that is and all that takes place can be seen and understood as part of the mystery of God's life with us. Our conflicts and pains, our tasks and promises, our families and friends, our activities and projects, our hopes and aspirations, no longer appear to us as a fatiguing variety of things which we can barely keep together, but rather as affirmations and revelations of the new life of the Spirit in us. "All these other things," which so occupied and preoccupied us, now come as gifts or challenges that strengthen and deepen the new life which we have discovered. This does not mean that the spiritual life makes things easier or takes our struggles and pains away. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

It is not art in the professionalized sense about which I care, but that which is created sacredly, as a result of a deep inner experience, with all of oneself, and that becomes 'art' in time. ~ Alfred Stieglitz

Is there any point in going across the world to eat something or buy something or watch people squatting among their ruins? Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with distance or the exotic. It is almost entirely an inner experience. ~ Paul Theroux

When I can stand in mystery (not knowing and not needing to know and being dazzled by such freedom), when I don't need to split, to hate, to dismiss, to compartmentalize what I cannot explain or understand, when I can radically accept that "I am what I am what I am," then I am beginning to stand in divine freedom (Galatians 5:1). We do not know how to stand there on our own. Someone Else needs to sustain us in such a deep and spacious place. This is what the saints mean by our emptiness, our poverty and our nothingness. They are not being negative or self-effacing, but just utterly honest about their inner experience. God alone can sustain me in knowing and accepting that I am not a saint, not at all perfect, not very loving at all - and in that very recognition I can fall into the perfect love of God. Remember Jesus' first beatitude: "How happy are the poor in spirit, theirs is the kingdom of God" (Matthew 5:3). How amazing is that? I think this might just be the description of salvation and perfect freedom. They are the same, you know. ~ Richard Rohr

Mystics throughout the world have spoken of the inner experience of unity with the Self, a reality defined in our language by the Sanskrit term yoga, meaning union, and the word "religion", which comes from the Latin religare, meaning to bind or link. ~ Gwenael Verez

The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy - or attention - is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

What would it be like if, right in the midst of this busyness, we were to consciously take our hands off the controls? What if we were to intentionally stop our mental computations and our rushing around and, for a minute or two, simply pause and notice our inner experience? ~ Tara Brach

So I see that Christianity in believing in a Creator pulls together more facts, data, inner experience and ability than any mechanistic view could hold for me. ~ Kenneth L. Pike

Belief is no adequate substitute for inner experience, and where this is absent even a strong faith which came miraculously as a gift of grace may depart equally miraculously. People ~ C. G. Jung

In philosophical anthropology, ... where the subject is man in his wholeness, the investigator cannot content himself, as in anthropology as an individual science, with considering man as another part of nature and with ignoring the fact that he, the investigator, is himself a man and experiences this humanity in his inner experience in a way that he simply cannot experience any part of nature. ~ Martin Buber

As I have told you before, in a manner of speaking you are given the gifts of gods. Your beliefs become reality. What you believe is, and becomes real in your experience. There is no area in your life to which this does not apply. ~ Seth

To spoil means to put no limit on caprice, to give one the impression that everything is permitted to him and that he has no obligations. The young child exposed to this regime has no experience of its own limits. By reason of the removal of all external restraint, all clashing with other things, he comes actually to believe that he is the only one that exists, and gets used to not considering others, especially not considering them as superior to himself. This feeling of another's superiority could only be instilled into him by someone who, being stronger than he is, should force him to give up some desire, to restrict himself, to restrain himself. He would then have learned this fundamental discipline: "Here I end and here begins another more powerful than I am. In the world, apparently, there are two people: I myself and another superior to me. ~ Ortega Y Gasset

If the mind is not ready to add new information to its network, then it is impossible to charge it with such information. Therefore, the learning process begins with the inner, not the outer world. In this context, the external world functions only as a complementary phenomenon. ~ Elmar Hussein

Becoming rich isn't as much about getting rich financially as about whom you become, in character and mind, to get rich. I want to share a secret with you that few people know: the fastest way to get rich and stay rich is to work on developing you! The idea is to grow yourself into a successful person. Again, your outer world is merely a reflection of your inner world. You are the root; your results are the fruits. ~ T. Harv Eker

What did I learn and internalize from the experience? That our challenge is to let go of our old stories that defined us and forgive others and ourselves. Dropping those stories will free us from the burdens and restrictions that have prevented us from writing new ones. The spirits - our loved ones on the other side, our angels or guides, Fred - want us to do that in order to heal the deep rift in the world, so our future includes an earth that is healed and whole and tended to by her inhabitants with respect. Their message is to love without conditions, to show compassion, to be as authentic as we are able, to strip away the lies we've told ourselves, and to remember who we really are and who we came here to be. We are spiritual beings constrained by our human experience, defined at this time in history by a distorted lens of perception and perspective, in a state of spiritual amnesia and asleep at the wheel of life. It's time to wake up. ~ Colette Baron Reid

Before there was a question, there was an answer. Before there was an answer, there was an experience. Before there was experience, there was God. ~ Jerrel C. Thomas

the Super Structure Principle may be stated as follows: The power of your story is directly proportional to the readers' experience of it, and the readers' experience is directly proportional to the soundness of the structure. ~ James Scott Bell

Making movies was a real weird kind of adult experience. In a way it was like MIT, in that it was a great education. The big lesson is, people are people. They're smart, funny, creative people, but they're people. ~ Charlie Korsmo

Forgiveness becomes central to Jesus' teaching, because to receive reality is always to "bear it," to bear with reality for not meeting all of our needs. To accept reality is to forgive reality for being what it is, almost day by day and sometimes even hour by hour. Such a practice creates patient and humble people.

Forgiveness reveals three goodnesses simultaneously. When we forgive, we choose the goodness of the other over their faults, we experience God's goodness flowing through ourselves, and we also experience our own capacity for goodness in a way that almost surprises us. We are finally in touch with a much Higher Power, and we slowly learn how to draw upon this Infinite Source. ~ Richard Rohr

In my experience, getting rich takes focus, courage, knowledge, expertise, 100 percent of your effort, a never-give-up attitude and of course a rich mind-set. ~ T. Harv Eker

All the translations of a poem in all possible languages may add nuance to nuance and, by a kind of mutual retouching, by correcting one another, may give an increasingly faithful picture of the poem they translate, yet they will never give the inner meaning of the original. ~ Henri Bergson

The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling. ~ Elliot W. Eisner

The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius. ~ E. M. Forster

Don't try to fit me in a box… My life is not one dimensional. I'm the summer breeze and the hurricane… I'm the serene lake and the raging ocean… I'm the gentle poet and the rough warrior… I can build and I can destroy... I can romance and I can ravage... I can be wise and I can be silly... I can and WILL be everything that the length, depth, and breadth of life will allow... KNOW THIS! Your labels don't limit me… they limit your experience of me. Don't confuse the two. ~ Steve Maraboli

There is pleasure and then there is pleasing. To experience the two and appreciate the difference is kindred.
To experience the two and never seek to learn the difference is...a shame ~ Mark Boyd

Be good. It'll be a new experience. ~ Susan Andersen

Art is by nature aristocratic, and naturally selective in its effect on the audience. For even in its 'collective' manifestations, like theatre or cinema, its effect is bound up with the intimate emotions of each person who comes into contact with a work. The more the individual is traumatised and gripped by these emotions, the more significant a place will the work have in his experience.
The aristocratic nature of art, however does not in any way absolve the artist of his responsibility to his public and even, if you like, more broadly, to people in general. On the contrary, because of his special awareness of his time and of the world in which he lives, the artist becomes the voice of those who cannot formulate or express their view of reality. In that sense the artist is indeed vox populi. That is why he is called to serve his own talent, which means serving his people. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

If you hope to be independent when there is money, you'll never reach it. On this world, humans can only safely have the knowledge, experience and ability ~ Henry Ford

There is a distinction I am beginning to make in my living between pain and suffering. Pain is an event, an experience that must be recognized, named and then used in some way in order for the experience to change, to be transformed into something else, strength or knowledge or action.

Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain. When I live through pain without recognizing it self-consciously, I rob myself of the power that can come from using that pain, the power to fuel some movement beyond it. I condemn myself to reliving that pain over and over and over whenever something close triggers it. And that is suffering, a seemingly inescapable cycle. ~ Audre Lorde

I am profoundly moved and persuaded by the near-death experience. ~ Huston Smith

The greatest religious problem today is how to be both a mystic and a militant; in other words how to combine the search for an expansion of inner awareness with effective social action, and how to feel one's true identity in both. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I do not get offended if you insult me, laugh at me or even make fun of me. I am offended when you do so to my dreams. ~ Sameh Elsayed

You'll go far. How do I know? Because life is goosing you so hard you'll never stop climbing. ~ Robertson Davies

self-stigma is not a person's fault; nor is it a part of the person's illness!
If the public did not hold negative and stigmatizing attitudes in the first place, these would never have become internalized, causing people the painful and disabling experience of self-stigma. ~ Patrick W. Corrigan

We simply can't trust God's power fully until we experience it in the midst of our crisis. ~ David Wilkerson

It's one of the great things about campaigns that experience trumps everything, ~ Gloria Steinem

Maybe it's time to set aside intellectualism and experience the wonders of things that can't be explained. ~ Jennifer Ott

What is needed today is a fundamental re-experience of the oneness of all living things, a comprehensive reality consciousness that ever more infrequently develops spontaneously, the more the primordial flora and fauna of our mother earth must yield to a dead technological environment. ~ Albert Hoffman

Sometimes you have to set aside the budget and do something absolutely extravagant, something your head tells you you can't afford and your heart tells you you can't do without. Mother said the ability to know when it was right to do such things was wisdom, and more than once she told us that the inner personal freedom to do something absolutely extravagant is the closest human beings ever come to understanding what God must feel when He is being gracious. This was especially so in the giving of gifts. ~ Jerry Camery-Hoggatt

Don't believe the negative criticisms.
You are capable beyond measure ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

When I turned toward the hurt in the silence, I entered a kind of tenderness that was not sore, not wounded, but rather powerfully present.I sat up straight. The silence had tilled hard ground into soft soil. I sunk deep into the soft ground, where the source of life was revealed--wordless, nameless, without form, completely indescribable. And then--I dare to say it--I was 'completely tender.' To ease below the surface of my embodiment--my face, my flesh, my skin, my name--I needed to first see it reflected back at me. I had to look at it long enough to see the soft patches, the openings, the soft, tender ground. Would I survive the namelessness--without my body, without my heart--while engaging the beautiful, floral exterior of my life? Fear and caution were attempting to shut down the experience of uncoupling my heart from mistreatment and discrimination--from the disregard, hurt, and separation that I experienced and accepted as my one-sided life. I was going back to the moment before I was born, when I was connected to something other than my parents or my people. ~ Zenju Earthlyn Manuel

I know from vast experience that fear talks a lot louder than courage. I need to listen to that other voice inside me, that faint one that's struggling to be heard. ~ Lesley Kagen

Words are effective not because of what they carry in them, but for their latent potential to unlock the accumulated experience of the reader. Words "contain" meanings, but, more important, words potentiate meaning... ~ Peter Mendelsund

I'm a very good friend of Stephen Crabb, I had great fun campaigning with Boris Johnson on the winning side, I have great experience working with Theresa May in government on national security. I respect all of them and I hope that's very much the tone. ~ Liam Fox

Meditation is the brain's way to exercise. ~ Abhijit Naskar

There probably is no more important quest in all science than the attempt to understand those very particular events in evolution by which brains worked out that special trick that has enabled them to add to the cosmic scheme of things: color, sound, pain, pleasure, and all the other facets of mental experience. ~ Roger Wolcott Sperry