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The Purpose of Experience

we are all painters living in the gallery of the

paintings we have already done, but which

we have not yet set entirely aside, because we

have not yet “got them right”, and obtained the

internal satisfaction which comes from the feeling

of unfoldment or expansion of some part of our life.”

From Natural Theosophy By Ernest Egerton Wood

Posted 19/3/07

 

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In this extract from “Natural Theosophy” Ernest Egerton Wood likens our aspirations and ambitions in life to paintings with which an artist will never be satisfied until he reaches perfection.

 

“I remember to have heard an interesting story about a painter, which happens to illustrate the purpose of all experience. When he was still young he went one day to a woodland with his teacher, arid when asked what he would paint indicated a certain tree. “But”, said the elder, “you have painted that tree twenty times already; are you not tired of it?”. “No”, said the young man, “I have not got it right yet’.’ When he did “get it right” he would not want to paint it any more. What it could teach him he would have absorbed, and he would now become interested in something else, which would be interesting because it would awaken some part of his life which had not yet awakened. What a bore when a person persists in repeating to us the same joke or story or experience; however good it may have seemed when we first heard it!

 

Thus we are all painters living in the gallery of the paintings we have already done, but which we have not yet set entirely aside, because we have not yet “got them right”, and obtained the internal satisfaction which comes from the feeling of unfoldment or expansion of some part of our life.”

 

Natural Theosophy By Ernest Egerton Wood

 

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