Acharya Prashant explains that we not only give value to experience but also to learning, and because the valuer is the same, we place these two at the same level. We want to value everything, to attach some kind of quantifiable assessment to everything. This is because the mind is limited and seeks security in measurement; it wants to take the measure of everything it comes across. However, giving value to experience and learning are both false, but in very different ways. The value we give to experience is false because the value itself is provided by experience. The valuer himself is a product of experience. How did you learn to value anything? The valuer himself, without knowing or understanding, is just a coincidental aggregation of experiences. For example, if you are born into a violence-ridden family or a tribe that attaches great value to honor and bloodshed, that is what you, the valuer, are. Such a valuer has no independent yardstick to measure experience. Whatever you value will be according to your values, which have been given to you by your past experiences. Therefore, the statement that you are valuing a particular experience is nonsensical. Similarly, we want to value learning. But learning cannot be valued, for a different reason. Learning happens only when the one who is obsessed with valuing falls silent for a while. As long as you are valuing, assessing, and measuring, learning cannot happen. Learning is invaluable, whereas experience has zero value of its own. The process of valuation does not apply to experience because it has no independent value, and it does not apply to learning because learning is invaluable. Spirituality is about seeing the hollowness of experience, not about bringing Truth down to the level of experience. Do not turn Truth and God into newer experiences; instead, see the falseness of all that you are already experiencing.
