Information enters the senses, goes into the mind and reaches the subject, becoming experience. Let s do a simple experiment. You observe for a few moments a plant in your room or outside the window and then close your eyes. Inside you see many different thoughts like how big is the plant, what colour it is and so on. You experience the plant through many thoughts.
Mind creates distortion between perception and experience.
Direct experience requires that while experiencing the plant, your mind is quiet. Not even a single thought should arise. The first step towards direct experience is to understand that we have the capacity to watch activities of the mind. Watching means that we observe our mental structures like thoughts, emotions, scientific theories, cultural, social and religious prejudices, opinions and so on as clearly as we can observe our body. By constantly watching the mind we start taking a distance from it, we don t identify with it anymore.