Knowing without feeling is like a menu without a meal.

The role of past experience is of high importance, but what matters is what one has gained from experience — blind, understood connections, or insight into structural inner relatedness. What matters is how and what one recalls, hoVi he applies what is recalled, whether blindly, in a piece meal way, or in accordance with the situation.

We tend to place a lot of emphasis on our circumstances, assuming that what happens to us (or fails to happen) determines how we feel. From this perspective, the small-scale details of how you spend your day aren’t that important, because what matters are the large-scale outcomes, such as whether or not you get a promotion or move to that nicer apartment. According to Gallagher, decades of research contradict this understanding. Our brains instead construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to.

it is not half so important to know as to feel

Experience is not what happens to you;
it's what you do with what happens to you.

Structure is a primary element of experience and not something that is added by the mind. In this respect, it can be said that the techniques of understanding call for a drastic revision of the usual modes of thought that treat being and understanding as independent or at least as separable from one another.

Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.

It's not the experience that happens to you: it's what you do with the experience that happens to you.

This concept upends the way most people think about their subjective experience of life. We tend to place a lot of emphasis on our circumstances, assuming that what happens to us (or fails to happen) determines how we feel. From this perspective, the small-scale details of how you spend your day aren’t that important, because what matters are the large-scale outcomes, such as whether or not you get a promotion or move to that nicer apartment. According to Gallagher, decades of research contradict this understanding. Our brains instead construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to. If you focus on a cancer diagnosis, you and your life become unhappy and dark, but if you focus instead on an evening martini, you and your life become more pleasant — even though the circumstances in both scenarios are the same. As Gallagher summarizes: “Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love — is the sum of what you focus on.

It is not so much what happens to you as how you think about what happens.

It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.

Learning is experience. Everything else is just information.

It doesn't matter what has happened to you, it matters what you do with what has happened to you. Life is like a poker game. You don't get to choose the cards you are dealt, but it's entirely up to you how to play the hand.

What is important is not what happens to us, but how we respond to what happens to us.