Quakers talk about truth being experiential. What does that mean? To understand that you need to make a distinction between two kinds of experience. For example, if I take a trip to Paris, I might experience the Eiffel Tower, a walk along the Seine River, a visit to Notre Dame. That is one kind of experience – what you did and what you saw. The focus is external. The other kind of experience has to do with what is going on inside of me, how it felt and what it meant. What was my experience like? For example, “It felt like the world had somehow gotten larger with more possibilities and I could not move fast enough to enjoy them all.” Or “I have never felt so lonely in my life. I had no one to talk to and all of these French people hate Americans.” So the same outward experience can feel or be experienced differently or mean something different.
When Quakers talk about truth being experiential they are talking about the second kind of experience, what something means. And they can talk about truth because this meaning is not something we make up but has an independent facticity about it.
Generally people approach this second kind of experience in two different ways. They may “think” about it. This could be in a cause/effect problem-solving kind of way. For example, “I’ve never been good at meeting people. That’s why I’m so miserable. I should never have gone on this trip.” Or they break it down into parts. “The Eiffel Tower was good exercise. The Seine smelled bad. They wanted me to take off my hat at Notre Dame.” And the sum of that is the “meaning” of the trip.
But there is something else you could do, and this is the thing most people never think to do but is what Quakers do. You could get a sense of the whole. To do that you could feel all that went with the trip, as if it were one process, as if in a continuous flow. Separate events may pop up but the focus is on the flow and the feel of the whole. It’s like the foreground/background distinction in gestalt psychology. Our normal way of functioning is to foreground the parts, the list of events, the cause and effect. And background how all of that feels. And in this Quaker way of attending, we foreground the feeling and background the parts. Note though that this is primarily an interoceptive feeling as opposed to emotional feeling.
Why would we do that? Well, as we foreground the meaning part of our experience, often something pops up that helps us understand the sense of the whole. This could be an image; it could be a memory; it could be a song. It usually comes like an aha’, with a sense of surprise, of insight. A situation we were only in before, we now understand holistically in a new way.
And why is that important? To answer that let me start with an example. Suppose you feel led to speak in meeting for worship. You get up and the words flow. If you don’t get something right, something tells you that. And if you restate “what you wanted to say”, and you realize that now you have gotten it right, something tells you that also. But it’s not a script written down. It’s a sense, a sense of the whole of what you want to say.
Underlying Quaker worship and practice is the experience that our actions, emotions, and words flow out of a sense of the whole. If that sense changes, what we do, feel, and say will change also. But not in the way that we decide ahead of time how things should go. This sense of the whole, out of which things flow, has an independent facticity about it. We are “thrown” in history to borrow Heidegger’s language. It is discovered and articulated, not willed into being.
So why is it important to understand this sense of the whole? Because when we understand the sense of the whole, it changes. An understood sense of the whole is different than one that is motivating and moving us for reasons we are unaware of. When we understand the sense of the whole, we are then free to choose how we respond, and to respond in a way that acknowledges and is consistent with our authentic motivations.
So what does this have to do with Quakerism? Fresh understanding usually comes with a sense of surprise, and feels like a gift, as we didn’t do it, and we can’t make it happen in a way of our choosing. And that sense of being gifted gives us an experience of Grace and our Christian/Quaker faith is based on Grace. What’s different for Quakers is that it’s not just a concept; it’s an experience.
I want to include a process from a different context that is similar to this Quaker way of getting fresh experience. The process is twilight imaging and it comes from Ira Progoff’s At a Journal Workshop. It’s very similar to the process that Quaker Rex Ambler teaches and that he reconstructed from early Friends.
This particular example from Progoff focuses on the most recent period of a person’s life. For Progoff that most recent period is discovered in the same way that we get to fresh understanding. We feel the flow of our lives and ask when did this most recent period start? It could be when I came to this workshop, it could be since I had my accident, it could be since I got married. You could think of this as finding something to focus on, finding a meaningful whole. If you are in meeting for worship, you might think of it as a situation. By situation I mean how we usually chunk our experience. We are all involved in multiple situations. The ones we typically notice when we grow still are the ones that “itch,” that feel uncomfortable in some way, that need attention.
We begin by becoming quiet. Let us sit in silence for a moment and once again feel the movement of our lives. We are quietly bringing ourselves into harmony with the continuity of our life experiences.
We do not at this point “think” of our life, but we “feel” it. We feel its movement in a general and flexible way. We specifically do not think about it, for if we did, we would only have the same thoughts on the subject that we have always had. We know from our experience that the self-analytic, self-judgmental thinking process tends to move in circular grooves, turning in upon itself and repeating itself.
We wish instead to open the way for something new to enter our experience. We therefore do not do what we have been accustomed to doing. We do not think our lives, but we sit in silence and we feel the inner movement of our recent experiences without judgment. We do not direct our thinking, but we let awarenesses present themselves to us regarding this present period of our lives.
At first this may seem to be a vague and general procedure. And that is part of the reason for it, especially at this early point in our work. We hold ourselves in a condition of openness in which no particular thoughts are dominating our mind. We are silent. Thoughts may come, but they are not any particular thoughts. They are not directed thoughts. They are not thoughts that we consciously seek. They are thoughts that simply come to us. We let them come, and we let them go. They will soon return to us, but in the form of images.
We sit in stillness paying no attention to any special thoughts, not thinking, but feeling the movement of our life. We sit in this quietness for some moments. We find that there comes to us a generalized awareness of what this recent period in our lives has been. An inward sensing of the tone of our life in this recent period. Now we let the quality of our experiences during this time of our life express themselves to us. Perhaps they will take the form of an image, a metaphor, a simile, or some spontaneous adjective that describes it in a word. If so, we will take notice of this inward awareness in whatever form it appears to us.
We are in silence, our eyes closed, feeling this recent period in the movement of our lives. While our eyes are closed, as we sit with no thoughts, in the quietness, images may take shape in our minds. We see them inwardly, and they carry a feeling of the movement of our lives. They reflect the quality of this recent period in our experiences.
Sitting this way, many different images and feelings can come to you, reflecting the quality of movement in your life. Whatever form it takes, let yourself perceive it. Do not reject or censor it. Neither should you affirm it; certainly you should not interpret it. Simply observe it and take note of the fact that this is what came to you when you closed your eyes and let yourself feel from within yourself the inner continuity and movement of your life.
. . .
In doing this, many different kinds of experiences can come to people, different kinds of perceptions and images reflecting the present situations in their lives.
One person sees an image of dark smoke stuck in a chimney. “It can’t get out,” she says.
Another person, a student, sees a seed under the ground. It is softening and breaking apart. It is beginning to grow.
Another person sees an airplane flying a bumpy course through heavy clouds. Presently it comes into clear skies where the sun is shining.
Still another person sees nothing, but hears strains of music. This is not a visual image, but an auditory image. The tone and tempo of the music expresses his feeling of the movement of his life.
Another person neither sees nor hears an image, but feels a movement of emotions within herself. She experiences a welling up of joy, a suffusion of love. This is a “feeling” image. One person experiences the love in relation to a particular individual in her life. Another experiences it as a promise of deeper connection to life, as a love of God.
Still another person feels the movement of the recent period of his life and perceives a visual image of darkness, followed by a feeling image of heavy sadness, followed still further by a body image that becomes a knot forming in the pit of the stomach. All are expressions of the present situation of his life.
Whatever comes to us in this way, we record in our Journals; and we make no judgment about it. We do not say, “Oh good, I have an optimistic or encouraging image of this time in my life.” And we do not reject the image because it was dark or doleful because it indicated that further difficulties may lie ahead.
We bear in mind, rather, that the significance of such images is that they express the quality of feeling that corresponds to this present moment in our life situation. Whatever it is at the moment, we accept as a fact that this is what it is, and that these are the images by which the inner situation of our lives is being reflected to us. We also know that whatever the images and our life situation are, they will inevitably change as they continue in their movement. If we perceive a plane flying in clouds, the cycle of the image will carry it through to clear light and sunshine. If it is an image of a seed in the ground, the organic movement of the image will carry it through to growth. If it is a flower blooming, it will wither; eventually it will become a seed again. Therefore we make no judgment in the midst of the movement of our imagery experience. We simply observe the movements of our images, write them down, and continue with our experiences.
As we are feeling into this recent period of our life, a simile or metaphor may come to us. “It has been like walking along a desert road and not seeing any trees.” “It has been like eating at a banquet where each dish is more surprising than the last.” This period in my life has been like a . . .
As we write down the comparison, some additional adjectives may come to us, describing this time in our life. Not words that we deliberately think about, just words that come spontaneously to us. When we allow words to come to us without thoughts in this way, they often say a great deal to us about our lives. And they say it in a very cogent form. They are verbal images.
Note that what pops up is creative, in the way that a metaphor or an image is in poetry. Also note that this process is not primarily cognitive, or at least not verbal. The words are unmoored without the sense of the whole that they refer to.
The word “intuition” has many meanings. But in its popular, as distinct from refined philosophic usage, it is closely connected with the single qualitativeness underlying all the details of explicit reasoning. It may be relatively dumb and inarticulate and yet penetrating; unexpressed in definite ideas which form reasons and justifications and yet profoundly right. To my mind, Bergson’s contention that intuition precedes conception and goes deeper is correct. Reflection and rational elaboration spring from and make explicit a prior intuition.
John Dewey, “Qualitative Thought”
If you want to know more about this experiential truth, you could check out Rex Ambler’s books, especially his short Light to live by. There are also “Experiment with Light” groups based on his work that meet in-person and online, primarily in North America and England.
You also find this experiential truth in the writings of Friends, especially early Friends and especially in the letters of Isaac Penington. Here is a link to a paper that discusses this experiential truth as it shows up in Quaker writings and compares it to the work of the philosopher Eugene Gendlin, especially in his book, Focusing.