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Experience is a term not easily defined, as Gadamer suggests: “however paradoxical it may seem, the concept of experience seems to be one of the most obscure we have” (1975, p. 310). What do we mean when we talk about experience? What is an

categorically define what experience is, rather, it seeks to outline some of the key attributes of experience within which the concept is situated.

The concept of ‘experience’ lies within a paradox which calls into question the validity of one’s self-sufficient and privately knowable world. Experience has, at times, been defined as personal, subjective and ineffable:

The word experience has often been used to gesture toward precisely that which exceeds concepts and even language itself. It is frequently employed as a marker for what is so ineffable and individual (or specific to a particular group) that it cannot be rendered in conventionally communicative terms to those who lack it (Jay, 2005, p. 5).

And yet, alternatively, experience can also be viewed as being primarily constructed by social contexts and language itself; as sitting within language. This view of

constructed and commodified experience, prominent in the latter part of the twentieth century, can be a challenge to personal, lived experience, regarding it “as a simplistic ground of immediacy that fails to register the always already mediated nature of cultural relations and the instability of the subject who is supposedly the bearer of experience” (Jay, 2005. p. 3). However, as Jay goes on to suggest, a concept of experience which sits between these alternatives is perhaps more appropriate: “‘experience,’ we might say, is at the nodal point of the intersection between public language and private subjectivity, between expressible commonalities and the ineffability of the individual interior” (2005, pp. 6-7).

While there is a variety of possible definitions of experience, in the context of this research an ‘experience’ is broadly taken to involve a personal encounter or event that is lived through; which involves the perception of something through the senses or the mind. A view of experience that is personal, mediated, lived through, and is deemed meaningful and qualitatively significant, is presented below.

2.3.1 Experience as Personal

Experience is personal. Two people can experience the same event very differently. We can watch a movie with a friend and have alternative experiences of the same film. Even an event that is described by two different people in a similar manner cannot be objectively knowable as the same. We simply cannot see into another person’s mind. There is an element of experience that is subjective, personal and that, almost by definition, remains knowable only to oneself. The language of description, then, cannot convey an experience fully to another because language is not experience.

While it is not possible to objectively validate two experiences as exactly the same, those experiences are very real for the experiencers themselves. Through experiences we come to know the world. Experiences bring meaning to our world and they influence the way we will experience the world in the future (Dewey, 1938b, p. 25). Experiences are real for us and are personal not only in the sense that another person cannot fully know them, but also in the sense that they may reveal much about the way we personally view the world.

2.3.2 Experience as Mediated

Though apparently antithetical, views of experience as ‘personal’ or ‘mediated’ need not be diametrically opposed; indeed, the discourse between the two provides

insight: “we need to be aware of the ways in which ‘experience’ is both a collective linguistic concept, a signifier that yokes together a class of heterogeneous signifieds located in a diacritical force field, and a reminder that such concepts always leave a remainder that escapes their homogenizing grasp” (Jay, 2005, p. 6).

Our experiences are influenced and mediated by social and cultural norms. We are part of society and as such we carry with us, whether we are aware of it or not, cultural baggage that operates as a filter for our direct experience. As Stewart suggests, “how we interpret our experiences is a function of how we have learned to see the world around us. Our ‘way of seeing’ our world is shaped by our culture” (2003, p. 313). To be a middle or upper class Australian today brings with it an

understanding of nature and the wilderness that will inevitably mediate experiences of an outdoor journey. Linguistically, too, experience is mediated (Martin, 2005). While experience is not language per se, the two are inextricably linked. Not only do we use language to describe our experiences, language also, in part, shapes our personal conception of experiences. Thus, experience might be viewed, to some degree, as occurring within a linguistic or semantic context.

While experience may be viewed as mediated by the cultural and linguistics norms of a particular social grouping or sub-group, equally, experiences themselves might group together to define a social grouping. In other words, a set of shared or common experiences may link together a group or class of people. Within experiences there are commonalities which can be expressed and provide meaning for both individuals and groups of people.

2.3.3 Experience as Interactive

When we have an experience we are interacting with the world; we are experiencing ‘something’, an object that can be physical or an abstraction held in the mind. The term ‘experience’ in the context of this research, though, does not infer an experience of something in the unidirectional sense that it is purely us having the experience separately from an object in the world. Rather, the experience is the interaction between oneself and the object of our attention. By saying we are experiencing ‘something’ we are directing our attention towards the ‘something’ and our

interaction with it.

The continuous and fluid nature of the process of living and interacting with the world through our senses largely explains why ‘experience’ is so elusive. We constantly process multiple sensory inputs, but for one reason or another we select what to direct our attention towards and, therefore, experience. As William James suggests: “my experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind – without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos” (1901, p. 402). Our experience of something is not necessarily physical. It could be an event, thought or emotion – but our attention is directed toward something, and in

directing our attention towards something we are making a choice to interact with the object of our attention.

As I direct my attention towards something I perceive it. To have an experience, then, is to direct one’s attention towards something and interact with it; it is to

perceive the world:

I cannot say truthfully that my perception of a particular wildflower, with its color and its fragrance, is determined or ‘caused’ entirely by the flower – since other persons may experience a somewhat different fragrance, as even I, in a different moment or mood, may see the color differently, and indeed since any bumblebee that alights on that blossom will surely have a very different perception of it than I do. But neither can I say truthfully that my perception is ‘caused’ solely by myself – by my physiological or neural organisation – or that it exists entirely ‘in my head’. For without the actual existence of this other entity, of this flower rooted not in my brain but in the soil of the earth, there would be no fragrant and colorful perception at all, neither for myself nor for any others, whether human or insect (Abram, 1996, p. 53).

2.3.4 Experiences as Lived Through

If our experiences are moment-to-moment interactions of directed attention then we should have a continual stream of momentary experiences throughout our day and, indeed, our lifetime. But experiences do not appear to us as a continual series of uniform events. Instead, we group moments together to form ‘an experience’, some of which appear more important or meaningful to us than others: “the stream of our lived experience... is not really a ‘buzzing blooming confusion.’ It presents itself as a meaningfully ordered context” (Kohak, 1992, p. 174). What does it mean to have an experience? What is it that allows us to differentiate one experience from another?

Things can be experienced, but not always in a way that results in an experience. Dewey suggests that we can have anexperience “when the material experienced runs

its course to fulfilment… Such an experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and self sufficiency. It is an experience” (1934, p. 151). The experience is allowed to run its course without distraction, and is unified by a common quality. Thus, life is not a continual flow of random interactions with the world. We are able to look back and pick out specific experiences in our lives: “if something is called or considered an experience its meaning rounds it into the unity of a significant whole… An experience is no longer something that just flows past quickly in the stream of the life of the consciousness – it is meant as a unity and thus attains a new mode of being one” (Gadamer, 1975, p. 60)

2.3.5 Experience as Qualitative

An experience has a quality that defines it, that holds the parts together. When we look back on experiences we have had in our lives, they are not only fully lived through but contain qualities that bind the moment-to-moment interactions together to make up the experience. There are qualities of an experience without which it ceases to be that which it is. These qualities are not always easily described. For example, when we view a piece of artwork or read a poem, we often perceive it as more than just the objectively known brush strokes and colours on the canvas, or the words on the paper. It is possible for these objects to invoke a quality that is more than the parts:

A painting is said to have a quality, or a particular painting to have a Titian or Rembrandt quality. The word thus used most certainly does not refer to any particular line, color or part of the painting. It modifies all the constituents of the picture and all of their relations. It is not anything that can be expressed in words for it is something that must be had. Discourse may, however, point out the qualities, lines and relations by means of which pervasive and unifying quality is achieved (Dewey, 1938a, p.70).

It is necessary to have some knowledge of paintings to have the experience of a certain quality, such as that given in the example above. These qualities, then, are not fully in the object attended to or the experiencer themselves; they are an interaction between the two.

2.3.6 Experience as Meaningful

Meaningful experiences in the context of this research are taken to mean the

experiences individuals deem to be particularly moving, important, affective and/or difficult to describe. The definition has been left deliberately open and broad so as not to presuppose what individuals may find meaningful.

However, it is necessary to consider where we need to look for this ‘meaning making’. As Baumeister and Vohs suggest, “the empirical knowledge about the process of making meaning is still in a very early state of development” (2002, p. 616). What are the essential structures that create the meaning of an experience; how do we have ‘that experience?’ In a neurological sense we have been able to pinpoint where certain types of mechanistic reactions, such as pain, vision and memory recall, occur. However the same cannot be said for ‘meaning making’. There appears to be no central processing unit that ascribes meaning to our world. Much of this is often ascribed to our consciousness, where consciousness is taken to mean being aware of the external world or the “having of perceptions, thoughts and feelings; awareness” (Sutherland, in Chalmers, 1996, p. 3). In other words, to be conscious of the world is to experience the world, to pay attention to the world, and to endow it with meaning.

We make meaning from our experiences; we come to know the world and interact with our world through experiences. To have an experience is to present something to the conscious mind, to pay attention to it. While each of us has firsthand

knowledge of what it is to be conscious, consciousness itself is little understood. Chalmers (1996) suggests two overall categories of consciousness, one being the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, while the other is the ‘easy problem’. The easy problem of consciousness includes our ability to verbally report on occurrences, to make decisions about actions and reflect on experiences. While understanding how these aspects of consciousness work is anything but easy, they are related to

neurological cause-and-effect processing within the brain, and can theoretically be unravelled to some degree. On the other hand, there are aspects of our consciousness that appear more difficult to track down, such as why we have subjective experiences that make us feel a particular way. The problem with this form of conscious

experience as we have it; we cannot know or express the qualities (or ‘qualia’) of the experience as we are experiencing it. This is the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness – ‘hard’ in that it asks questions to which we cannot fully know the answers:

When someone strikes middle C on the piano, a complex chain of events is set into place. Sound vibrates in the air and a wave travels to my ear. The wave is processed and analysed into frequencies inside the ear, and a signal is sent to the auditory cortex. Further processing takes place here: isolation of certain aspects of the signal, categorization, and ultimately reaction. All this is not so hard to understand in principle. But why should this be accompanied by an experience? And why, in particular, should it be accompanied by that

experience, with its rich tone and timbre? (Chalmers, 1996, p.5).

The intuition of the quality of an experience may in fact run deeper than our

reflection on it. Experience may have a pre-reflective component that occurs before we categorize or conceptualize it, and that profoundly influences us. While this element of experience must, by definition, remain in one sense a mystery to us, the search for those qualities remains worthwhile because they are so significant in bringing meaning to our world. Are we able to describe these pre-reflective building blocks of meaningful experience in a way that will enable us to better understand and facilitate worthwhile experiences? This research attempts to identify and describe the commonalities within meaningful experiences.

2.4 Understanding Potentially Meaningful