Buddhists make a mistake when they posit that it is possible to have an experience without thinking. It is impossible to experience something without thought. The moment you experience something, you have also thought about it. You know that you experienced it because you were thinking when the experience happened. Otherwise, you won’t know that you experienced something.
Everything happens in the mind.
We learn from experience because of thought, and we are able to give meaning to experience because we are thinking while it was happening.
When we stop thinking, we don’t experience anything, we don’t learn anything.
Yes, there are some experiences we cannot communicate, but it doesn’t mean we cannot think about them. We cannot communicate everything we have thought about, but we have thought about everything we have communicated.
To do
- There are individual notes in this note. Flesh them out.
References
Noë, A. (1999). Thought and Experience on JSTOR. American Philosophical Quarterly, 36(3), 257–265.