The word experience shares the same root as the word experiment. This suggests that to experience something means that we are letting it affect us, but for that to happen we have to be present, on some level, so we can be aware that we are letting it affect us. What is important to grasp here is that each of us is more than just an "I" with a name attached. We are, each one of us, a unique entity that has agreed to experience itself as an I-dentity with a specific personality and a physical form.
There is an underlying experimental character to our experience of life as a specific person, which is more apparent at certain times than others. But we are far more than the person we call "myself". We are also this entity that is both "older" and more than our I-dentity. Many of us go through life without realizing this, but for some of us that is impossible; we have to account for experiences that have transcended or bypassed our I-dentity. For example, I know that I have experienced other realms or parallel realities without remembering having experienced them! That means that my ego or I-dentity was superfluous or secondary to an experience that this older part of me that I am calling my entity needed to witness or participate in.
Let me approach this another way: When I was working with ayahuasca, the ritual sessions would last roughly 4 or 5 hours whereas, what I, "Gary Lindorff", remember of the sessions could be covered by half a page of writing -- just the tip of the iceberg of what was experienced by me as entity.
Does being conscious of an experience mean that we have to remember what transpired? Absolutely not. Some part of me, a deeper part of me, knows (i.e. experienced) where I was during those sessions even if "I", my ego, identified as Gary Lindorff, remembered very little (or nothing at all), the point being that most of what happened was not directly relevant to my Gary Lindorff I- dentity. My ego merely registered it as a bracket of time. I am using the ayahuasca sessions to exaggerate what happens to us every day. When we wake up in the morning and don't remember what happened while we were asleep, or where we were in a dream, that is similar to my not recalling where I was during the major part of my ayahuasca sessions. Every night of our lives is comparable to a mini-ayahuasca session with the only difference being that in the ayahuasca sessions the ayahuasca is the guiding intelligence and in dreams it is the soul, or psychologically speaking, it is what Jung referred to as the Self (capital 'S') that is the guiding intelligence. (In the ayahuasca sessions the Self defers to the spirit of ayahuasca.)
We don't have to go to the rain forest to journey in a parallel universe. All we have to do is get better at being present when we experience something as conscious beings, and to recognize that there is ever more depth to any experience. The more present we are when we are conscious, the more we will remember and the more our I-dentity will relate to our entity.
Entity sounds impersonal compared to "I" or our name, but it is, in fact, much more descriptive of who we really are.
IV
What we remember of our lives is miniscule compared to what we experience from birth to death. Is it important to remember? Yes, but not for obvious reasons. It is important to remember the world and each other and it is important to be remembered. Remember means recalling to mind. The act or art of remembering is becoming more important when so much of the world is being cut off, dismembered, altered beyond recognition, eventually forgotten and ultimately lost forever.
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