Today, I am going to talk about what he calls experiential values, what we experience, what life gives to us and what we receive from it. This is the area of life where we receive things that we have not earned, where life gives us free gifts. Religious people call this grace, something that is freely given to us, that we have not earned, deserved, merited, worked for, achieved. There are many things of value that come to us in this way. Harry Emerson Fosdick has pointed out three examples of such things. First of all, natural beauty: Sunset and sunrise, mountains and the sea, flowers and trees, "all that we behold of this green earth," all these are bestowed on us freely without money and without price.

Then, there are the great spirits who have preceded us, and who have given enlightenment and inspiration to the human race - the great teachers and prophets like Buddha, Jesus, Socrates and Lao-tzu - the great painters in both East and West, - the great writers and poets and composers. They have given of themselves freely. We could not of ourselves have earned or achieved what they have to offer. Yet it is ours for the taking.

Thirdly, our most beautiful human relationships are a free gift. Fosdick points out that we did not pay in advance for the motherhood that bore us all or the love that nourished us. All this was poured out freely. Moreover, all fine friendships and true love are free bestowals.

In such experiences of beauty, truth, and love we can find meaning.

"The fullness of meaning which such values bring to human life must not be underestimated," Frankl declares. "The higher meaning of a given moment in human existence can be fulfilled by the mere intensity with which it is experienced and independent of any action. If anyone doubts this, let him consider the following situation. Imagine a music lover sitting in the concert hall where the most noble measures of his favourite symphony resound in his ears. He feels that shiver of emotion which we experience in the presence of the purest beauty. Suppose now that at such a moment we should ask this person whether his life has meaning. He would have to reply that it had been worthwhile living if only to experience this ecstatic moment. For though only a single moment is in question - the greatness of a life can be measured by the greatness of a moment: the height of a mountain range is not given by the height of some valley, but by that of the tallest peak. In life, too, the peaks decide the meaningfulness of the life, and a single moment can retroactively flood an entire life with meaning. Let us ask a mountain climber who has beheld the alpine sunset and is so moved by the splendour of nature that he feels cold shudders running down his spine - let us ask him whether after such an experience his life can ever again seem wholly meaningless."

Frankl himself recalls what it meant to him suddenly to see the sunset through the barbed wire in the concentration camp - just such an experience of beauty.

But, as Dr. Joseph Fabry, one of the leading exponents of logotherapy, (whose book "The Pursuit of Meaning" incidentally has been translated into Japanese) has pointed out, the greatest experience of all is that of mature love - to know one human being in his or her uniqueness, for as Frankl has said, to experience one human being as unique means to love him or, in the words of Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, "When we are with a friend or someone we love deeply, we no longer ask why we live or why we were born, we feel we were born for this."

We no longer ask why. That is because we know the value of what we are experiencing. We do not need to find reasons. It is not valuable for this, that, or the other reason. It is good in itself and we know it.

While it is true that such experiences come to us as free gifts and as I have said are ours for the taking, it depends on us as to whether we take them. All too often life offers as gifts and we do not take them, either through unawareness or insensitivity or being wrapped up in ourselves. We go through life blind and deaf nor aware of what is being offered to us and so we miss "the many splendoured thing."

Let me quote here some very wise words of advice taken from "The Betty Book" by Stewart Edward White.

"Most people proceed through life busy with their own thoughts. That is the way ninety-nine times out of a hundred you will find yourself if you go out for a walk. The teeming inner life of your mental activities holds you so that you are cramped within yourself and things outside are half-noticed or perhaps not noticed at all. Now stop short and let things about you into your consciousness, You will be surprised to find how many things actually have had no existence in you. Birds singing, for example. A moment ago you literally did not hear them. The lines of trees on the hill. You sensed vaguely that they were there because you were staring straight at them, but the cast of them against the pile of green away behind. The light on their leaves, the curious moton look of their foliage in mass, those things simply were not. You saw the fields, perhaps, but you did not sense them, The effect of the landscape whatever it might be, was shut out because you were occupied within the narrow confine of yourself. Until you voluntarily threw open yourself to wider influences than those of your self they could not claim you. By this shift of attention I do not mean a detached intellectual appraising of the surroundings, a cataloging, an enumeration of features and species and lines of composition …. I mean simply the expansion that is the result of the shift from a busy mental concentration within to a voluntary wide opening to influence from without."

Let thing about your entire consciousness shift your attention from preoccupation within to a voluntary wide opening to influence from without - This is the key to a widening and deepening of the area of experiential values in our life - a shift in attention.

Simone Weill says "absolute attention is prayer." May Sarton, the American poet, has some interesting comments to make on this statement. She says she has used the sentence often in talking about poetry to students, to suggest that if one looks long enough at almost anything, looks with absolute attention at a flower, a stone, the back of a tree, grass, snow, a cloud, something like revelation takes place. Something is given and perhaps that something is always a reality outside the self. We are aware of God only when we cease to be aware of ourselves, not in the negative sense of denying the self, but in the sense of losing self in admiration and joy.

Another write, D.H. Lawrence, has pointed out that in these matters so much depends on our attitude. We can cut ourselves off. One can shut many, many doors of receptivity in oneself or one can open many doors that are shut. It is up to us.