Learning vs Experience

"If you want to know something, ask an experienced person, not a scholar." This nugget of Chinese wisdom is something I have learned down the years.

In the first half of my life, I was a great believer in learning from books. And it served me well, for quite a long time. I finished school, got my degree in Librarianship, got married and settled down to live the rest of my life.

As time passed, I began to realise that there are so many things that you simply cannot learn from books, from staying in your head. So many things that can only be learned, or dealt with, overcome,  by hard-won experience, by living from a place of love and risk. Love. Vulnerability. Death. Generosity. None of these can be taught. They have to be experienced.

Book-learning is good, in that it gives you a theoretical grounding in whatever it is you are trying to learn, but it is not until you try to put that theory into practice that the learning "goes in". It is no accident that William Blake put Innocence and Experience at opposite poles. Until we have experienced something, all the book learning in the world will not help us. We will remain in a state of innocence (by which I mean unknowing) until our self-confident edges have been knocked off by some life experience.

Take counselling as an example. As part of my ministerial studies, I did a certificate in counselling skills. I read the recommended texts and thought I knew how to do it. But it was not until I and my fellow students started practising on each other, working in triads (one "counsellor", one "client", one observer) that I began to understand how the theory I had read about really worked. And the same thing happened in the three years of my spiritual direction training. The wise tutors at the London Centre for Spiritual Direction had it spot on - we spent the first half of each session on the topic of the week, and the second half on putting what we had learned into practice by "doing" spiritual direction on each other. Without all the practice I had undergone, I would not have had the confidence to hang out my spiritual director shingle.

And sometimes, I have read a book about a particular spiritual topic (Richard Rohr's Falling Upward comes to mind) and could not understand it at all, until I underwent life experiences which helped the meaning of the words fall into place in my heart.

Where the book learning can help, I think, is that the wisdom shared in books can support us through whatever experience we are having, so that we come out the other end wiser and stronger, kinder and more compassionate than we were before.