Experience
Experience is a funny thing. It is totally subjective. Yet, to communicate I need to relay my experience to you. I say I feel pain in my shoulder, you know what I mean because you have felt pain before. Personal experience of your spiritual path is fundamental to Buddhism, but we get to think about it in a funny way.
In Buddhism, until we are completely immersed in the enlightened state, everything we experience is a label, a thought. Everything. The pain in my shoulder, a thought. My wife, a thought. A Bluejay, a thought. My financial situation, the actual amount of money in the bank, a thought. How I believe things will go in the future or have gone in the past, a thought.
Generally we believe, and act like, the world coincides with our thoughts. There seems to be a person that represents my wife. She seems to be real with feelings and clothes and work. But believe it or not, when I go about my day like this, believing this representation of my wife, I am not actually experiencing the world directly or correctly.
Impermanence
The entire 2500 years of Buddhist philosophy is summarized in one word, impermanence. Everything that is made up of parts is subject to change, in fact it is changing, it is impermanent. Tree, wife or bee. Impermanent. Joy, grief, and myself. Impermanent. Buddhism says that by using thoughts to label things with names and concepts we freeze them in our experience. We believe that they are singular, lasting and independent, we experience them as solid. We believe that world, the solid world, this is our pain. By thinking that impermanent things are not changing we suffer. Thats the whole of it.
Buddhism says that we can experience the impermanence of the world, moment by moment, we do not need to label or name, we do not need to create a thought to experience the world. That moment by moment going along, experiencing the lack of solidness, results in a great deal of comfort and precision, ultimately. We no longer control every moment, we get to breath. We participate in the world rather than direct it. And at some point, this apparent world begins to help us along. A famously enlightened Tibetan lama, https://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Dilgo_Khyentse_Rinpoche, once described this way of going about ones day, “All phenomena naturally appear in their uniquely correct modes and situations, forming ever-changing patterns full of meaning and significance, like participants in a great dance. Everything is a symbol..” It is possible to experience our world this way, that is the promise of Buddhism.