What's lacking in our culture generally is allowing experience to be our teacher. Most of what happens in education or discussion is thinking in concepts, and not understanding the difference between the concept and the experience. Concepts are really useful in enabling us to think while the thing we are thinking about is absent. But for many there is a confusion or conflating of the concept with the 'reality' of something. Of course concepts are real too, as conceptual reality, but when we understand that experience only happens in the 'now', we establish a completely different experience with reality, an embodied experience.
It is that 'reality' which can reconnect us to ourselves, to each other, and to nature, in a much deeper way, and it is what is missing in our culture generally which is allowing us to march towards destruction of our species, and all other species.
Learning from experience is also linked to feelings. Since concepts are separated from experience, they don't have feelings attached. So we can think and talk dispassionately, which is highly regarded in intellectual circles. Feelings are generally seen to be a nuisance that get in the way of thinking objectively. Ideas are seen as existing separately from people. That is what makes them 'true'.
Learning from experience is also linked to feelings. Since concepts are separated from experience, they don't have feelings attached. So we can think and talk dispassionately, which is highly regarded in intellectual circles. Feelings are generally seen to be a nuisance that get in the way of thinking objectively. Ideas are seen as existing separately from people. That is what makes them 'true'.
The separation of ideas from people or feelings was what science was about, but that has all been thrown up in the air by quantum physics. So we are in the transition of allowing feelings to be listened to as valuable messages. What I have called the validity of subjective experience.
