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I'll quote D.T. Suzuki in his book "An Introduction to Zen Buddhism":

"Personal experience, therefore, is everything in Zen. No ideas are intelligible to those who have no backing of experience. A baby has no ideas, for its mentality is not yet so developed as to experience anything in the way of ideas. If it has them at all, they must be something extremely obscure and blurred and not in correspondence with realties. To get the clearest and most efficient understanding of a thing, therefore, it must be experienced personally."

It continues on to describe the importance of personal experience in life (meanings) and so on...

I feel personally that experiencing things yourself is the most genuine way to learn and adapt to change and understand the world we live in. This is obviously from the context of a Zen frame of thought (or anti-thought if you will) although still very interesting in my opinion.