Experience may "prove" something to the experiencer but that doesn't prove it to anyone else. That's why we invented scientific method.
But scientific method, mon ami, only proves it to a greater number of people (who are willing to accept the validity of the hypothesis and the subsequent proof :-) Put another way, I could show a tribe of rain forest dwellers, who had seen neither beer nor a glass bottle before, a pint of Old Rumble and claim, This is the shape of Old Rumble! and they would go ooh... And then I’d take them to an Old Rumble bottling plant (if they still exist) and show them thousands of bottles of the stuff streaming off the conveyor and they would say ooh again and know for sure that a pint of Old Rumble in a glass bottle was indeed the shape of the stuff. They’d believe me, and a great edifice of belief would be built around the Shape of Old Rumble. Then one day I’d pour the stuff out into a glass and say, Ha - got-ya!
It happens all the time, its called shifting the goalposts. Reality is only real within the parameters we wrap around it, and they’re always changing. It’s all in the mind, the stuff of conjurors - scientific, religious or otherwise. You cant even trust quarks any more - they’re one thing one moment and something different the next ;- ) Like the time-travelling Hindu whose young disciple once asked, “Is it true, master, that you can travel anywhere, in space or time, and back again in the blink of an eye.” The maser replied, “Yes”. So the disciple asked again, “Master, can you show me?” The master replied, “I just did.” :-)
In his book The One World of Lao Tzu and Modern Physics A Dialogue with a Zen Abbot, Akira Hasegawa writes, “Once I took Professor Lichtenberg who studies and teaches physics at the the University of California [to meet Abbot Kobori of Daitoku-ji temple in Kyoto]. As soon as we were invited in and sat down, the professor challenged the Abbot: “In Zen Buddhism, mind exists before matter Do you agree?” When the Abbot replied “yes”, the professor continued: “Then I have a question. If all human beings disappeared and consequently all mind disappeared, I still believe under those circumstances that the Earth would rotate around the sun according to Newton’s law of gravity. Consequently, I believe matter exists before mind. What would you say to this?” The Abbot responded immediately: “It is your mind that askes such a question!”” :-)
