Experience

Experience is knowledge a person gets by doing something or watching someone else do it. Experience is learning through actions.

Some religious groups and teaching methods value learning by experiencing. For example, if someone wants to learn about the game chess, they would play several games. By making mistakes and learning from them, they learn more rather than just reading about playing.

Types of experience

Experience is often divided into four types:

Type	Example
Body	A physical activity like riding a bicycle
Mind	A mental activity like playing chess
Heart	Learned from dealing with emotions like being in love
Soul	spiritual learning by prayer

Someone who experienced by watching or doing something himself is said to have first-hand experience.

When one person tells another person, the other person has second-hand experience.

When an experience is felt or enjoyed through imagined participation, the person has had a "vicarious experience".

A religious experience is a spiritual event seen by someone. Holy books like the Bible talk about visions or dreams where men like Moses, Daniel or Jesus met God. Mystics also describe these events, and offer advice. William James wrote a famous book about the kinds of religious experience.

Proverbs about Experience

• "Only the foolish learn from experience — the wise learn from the experience of others." Romanian proverb. (Fools go out, make their own mistakes and learn from them. Smart people learn from others' mistakes.)
• "Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other." Benjamin Franklin (Fools refuse to learn in school from textbooks or teachers. Fools choose to learn only from their own mistakes. They will not learn in a school classroom.) or (Experience is a great teacher and teaches many of life's most important lessons, but only fools will refuse to get new knowledge in other ways too. Examples of other ways to learn things are listening, reading, remembering, and reasoning.)

Related pages

• A priori and a posteriori
• Empiricism

Other websites

• http://www.primeguru.com (Site discontinued) Learn from other's experiences and let others learn from your experiences