While this seems to be true for most of us in that we learn by doing and do have to experience our own reality, my father also has a saying which goes like this:

“The stupid man doesn’t learn from his own experience.

The smart man learns from his experience. 

The geniuses learns from the experience of others.”

Yet what of the times when we see someone poor gasoline on themselves and set themselves on fire? 

Is the person who emulates this act of immolation a genius who has learned from another? 

Alternatively, those of us who avoid bathing in gasoline while playing with pyrotechnical devices,  are we geniuses simply because we have learned without experiencing directly?

And, what about when someone does something, and we see them get burned.  Or we do something and get burned.  And, we simply give up.  We do not try another way. 

Was Thomas Edison just stupid not to learn from his failures that it was impossible to make an electric light bulb?

Then again there is the body of research telling us that thinking is like doing.  That the mind cannot distinguish between having a thought about doing a thing and doing the thing itself.  Both are equally real.

Also, while book learning may or may not be as effective as doing, isn’t book learning worth something?  Book learning is merely mental exercise were we experience in our minds, things we learn from others who have written.  Even though we haven’t done it directly, it’s effective for something, isn’t it?

So, can we by thinking about a thing, experience the thing by proxy and thereby learn its lessons indirectly? 

Must we experience it directly?

Is Holt’s assertion a tautology?

Maybe all of these modalities are true, at least some of the time to some extent. 

I can and have sited several examples where each have been true and powerful. 

Maybe we need to take a broader view of what is the truth of how we learn through direct, mental and indirect experience.

Or, maybe one of these is more true than others?

What do you feel is true, truer, truest?

Something else perhaps?

Yours in truth,

Yucel