The following is an article that I thought was very interesting. I did not write it, see the bottom link for the author.Â
Experience Versus Truth - Which Do We Choose?
 by: Rob Marshall
Something that we all come to recognize at some point is that experience is a very powerful teacher. The things that we have heard and seen may touch our lives, but our experiences, which combine hearing, seeing, and feeling, have a much deeper impact on us.
My wife is sometimes amazed, but usually confounded and even frustrated, that I have difficulty remembering things we've done together, but that I can remember lines from a movie I haven't seen in thirty years. I've even wondered myself why that is, and the best answer that I've come up with isn't because the movie has music playing in the background, although I think that really helps stimulate our emotions. Instead I believe that it's because I focused my attention on the movie, I wasn't distracted by other thoughts, and in many cases I had the opportunity to see it more than once.
Our experiences are often like movies in our lives. We can play them over and over again in our minds as we remember them, and many of them even get repeated throughout our lives. I don't mean that we experience the exact same thing, but we often have very similar experiences.
The things that happened to us growing up; what we observed in our parents, teachers, and others, are experiences that affect us for the rest of our lives. What those memories end up becoming are beliefs about the way things "are" or how life is supposed to work. A bad experience becomes a fear, the belief that something will hurt us, which we will then try to avoid at all costs. On the other hand, a good experience can become a conviction about what makes us happy and we may spend the rest of our lives trying to relive it.
The Reader's Digest did a survey some years ago about people's greatest fears. Oddly enough, the number one fear wasn't death. The greatest fear for most people is speaking in public.
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