King Solomon was said to have been the wisest man that ever lived.  In the book of 2nd Chronicles in the Bible, it tells that Solomon asked God for wisdom and knowledge, and God allegedly granted that request.  But in the book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon tells about exactly how that wisdom was bestowed upon him.  He says that he denied himself no experience, and that through experiencing everything his heart desired, he ultimately found wisdom.  He didn't go read books or consult other people, he went out and experienced the world, and drew conclusions about right and wrong from his experiences.

I remember reading about a particular teaching of the Buddha that reflected this same idea.  "The Buddha repeatedly emphasized the impossibility of ever arriving at Truth by giving up your own authority and following the light of others.  Such a path will lead only to an opinion, whether your own or someone else's.  The Buddha encouraged people to 'know for yourselves that certain things are unwholesome and wrong.  And when you do, then give them up.  And when you know for yourselves that certain things are wholesome and good, then accept them and follow them'.  The message is always to examine and see for yourself.  When you see for yourself what is true - and that's really the only way that you can genuinely know anything - then embrace it.  Until then, just suspend judgment and criticism" (1).

How many people do you know that spend a lot of time talking about things they've never experienced?  Almost everyone I know feels it necessary to express an opinion or value judgment about just about everything.  And what are these opinions based upon?  Upon what they believe, not upon what they have experienced.   Take for example eating meat. Suppose you tell me you are a vegetarian, that you do not believe in eating meat.  I ask you why, and what is your response?  Perhaps you give me some Biblical verse which you say justifies not eating meat, or you cite some medical study that says meat is bad for you.  Perhaps your medical doctor has told you that eating red meat is bad for your heart.  So you are going to believe all these other sources, but what is your experience with eating meat?  Does it make you feel bad physically when you eat it?  Has God come down and spoken to you individually and told you personally not to eat it?  By looking at the animal kingdom as an empirical example, I see that some animals are carnivores, some animals are herbivores, and some animals to be omnivores.  It seems every creature was not intended to live by the same dietary rules.  I believe the animals' dietary choices are based upon their genetic predispositions, their living conditions down through millions of centuries, and many times, simply upon what was available.  The chimpanzee cannot look at the lion and say, "It's wrong for you to be a meat eater."  The chimpanzee and the lion have different body chemistry and different needs.  Each and every person does as well.   We cannot make one rule for everyone.  We must each base our own food choices upon our own experience.  Please make THAT your standard of authority and not some arbitrary rule.  At least, that's how I see it.   You are free to come to a different conclusion if you can find something in your own experience or an example in nature that would contradict what I have said.  I am not making my conclusion binding upon you.  It's simply what I have observed.  I have simply observed that I feel better and my body functions more normally if I do eat meat on occasion.  If the idea of eating meat on a particular occasion is not appealing, I take that as an indication that my body does not need that particular food at that particular time, and I try to pay attention to the kinds of foods that do sound appealing because that is how my body communicates to me what my nutritional needs are.

Do you have an experience that contradicts what I have said?  I mean a real experience, not some logical argument you've worked out in your mind supported by some religious or health authority?  If you don't have any personal experience in this area, perhaps its time you did a little empirical research.  Starting eating meat, and observe what happens to your body.  In fact, start observing how EVERYTHING effects your body.  You will come to some startling conclusions which defy everything the medical authorities tell us is true.

Your first challenge is to start gathering empirical evidence upon which to base your conclusions.  But your second challenge is even harder: to refrain from making judgments about things you have no experience about.  Can you do it?  When you are going down the road and another driver pulls out in front of you, can you refrain from judging his actions?  "That crazy driver, he had no right to pull out in front of me like that, what did he think he was doing?"  If only you could have known that he had just received news that his wife and child had been in an accident and he was rushing to get to the hospital before they died, perhaps you would have a little more compassion.  Have you ever exceeded the speed limit and darted in and out of traffic in an emergency?  If you have had the experience of losing a loved one or trying to get to the hospital fast, then perhaps you have an experience upon which to draw.   The trouble is, even when we have had an experience on which to draw, we often ignore the experience as a basis for making a decision about our own beliefs and behavior.  Even if you know that accidents happen, people die, and driving crazily isn't always because of irresponsible behavior, do you apply what you know to your current situation?  Or do you apply some arbitrary standard that is impossible to live by?  Do you say "All drivers should always drive responsibly."  Well, that's a nice little rule to live by, but it's not reality.  Things happen which sometimes make that impossible, so why not refrain from judging the actions of others since you don't know their motives or situation?

I hope that in every situation you encounter, you will start to restrain yourself from making value judgments about people's behavior.  Look to your experience as a guide. Suspend your self-righteousness and start doing some empirical research of your own.  Dare to start thinking about your life in a different way, and stop evaluating the lives and behavior of others.  You are not qualified to judge anybody besides yourself.  And you must get it through your head that nobody is required to live their life the same way as you.  Your way is only A way, it is not THE way.  Despite what you may have been taught, you are NOT your brother's keeper.  There is no religious authority who has been given the right to decide what is right for everyone.  And just because somebody has done something that has inconvenienced you or offended your sensibilities doesn't mean they are wrong either.

When you are offended by something, this is a sure sign that you have made a value judgment about someone else's behavior.  If you hadn't decided that what they did was wrong, then why would you be offended?  You don't have the right to make that judgment.  So you don't have the right to be offended.  Get it?  If you are suspending judgment until you have direct experience about the area in question, then most of the time you aren't going to have any grounds to judge someone else.  And even if you do have experience in a particular area, whatever you learn was meant to help you alter your own life, not somebody else's.  The lessons of life that God has made plain to us through nature and our own experience were put there so we could learn what we are supposed to do about ourselves.  We can't apply those lessons to the lives of others.

From now on, when you feel offended, upset or out of sorts about the behavior of someone else, STOP!  Simply change your attitude right then.  Don't allow yourself to go on with that kind of destructive and divisive thinking.

Someone recently asked me this question, "Is it necessary to experience everything to know if it is good or bad for us?  Take smoking, it's very well known that it's bad for us.  Should I start smoking to experience it's bad effects?  Should I keep smoking for years to know that it will cause lung cancer?  So can't we learn from others' experiences too?"  My response was, there are people who have been smoking all their lives and never get cancer.  I'm not encouraging anyone to smoke, but everyone's experience is not the same.  Perhaps part of your experience is seeing what other people go through who have had cancer.  Based on your experience of watching them suffer, perhaps you decide you don't want to do it.  You are still relying on your experience in that circumstance.  The distinction I am trying to make is, don't believe things others tell you just based on taking their word for it.  But if you have seen for yourself that it is destructive, that is also experience.

Almost everyone has known someone who died of cancer.  My mother died of cancer.  She took lots of chemotherapy and based upon the suffering the chemo caused her, I have made the decision that if I ever get cancer, I will under no circumstances take chemotherapy.  That is based upon my experience of her suffering.

I had been diagnosed with diabetes.  They say it is affecting my vision.  I went to a doctor who wanted me to take laser treatments on my eyes.  I would only allow him to work on one eye because, if something went wrong, then I would have no vision.  He told me that was an "extraordinarily foolish decision."  He gave me two laser treatments on one eye, and immediately my vision clouded up and I had no usable vision in that eye.  I would not take any further treatments.  He told me, without these treatments, you will have no vision in six months to a year.  Guess what?  I can still see, and it's been over a year.  My experience was that these treatments were not good fo rme.  I'm not telling anyone else not to take them if they want to, but my experience was, they were painful and destructive to the vision I still had.  And, my experience with doctors has always been, that every time I get involved with them, I always regret it.  So my decision now is, to listen to my intuition at all costs and avoid them when it doesn't seem right to me. 

So, that's how experience works.  If I had gone with the prevailing wisdom, which is that without the treatments I would go blind, it would have been disasterous.  I may at some point have no choice but to take them, but for now, I am happy with my decision.

Trust yourself.  Do what you feel is right, and don't let anyone talk you out of it.  On the other hand, when I say "trust yourself" I mean for you NOT to rely on the programming you've received from others, that's within you.  You're not trusting yourself if you are basing your decisions on anything except your own empirical experience.  Often our experience contradicts what we have been taught, but we are afraid, for one reason or another, to trust ourselves to be right, and we erroneously trust in others' teachings and or opinions. 

I am not an authority on anything except my own experience, and neither are you.  And neither are those people who are trying to get you to believe their way.  No supposed authority figure should be trusted to make decisions for you.  There was once a book written called "Emotions, Can You Trust Them?"  The premise of the book is that you cannot.  This is totally false.  Your emotional guidance system is how you tell if something is right for you or not.  If you are thinking about something, and you have negative emotions toward it, then that is a way you should not go.  Your guidance system exists for a reason.  Don't ignore it.

References:

1.  Hagen, Steve.  Buddhism Plain & Simple.  1997.  New York: Broadway Books, p. 9.