The human ego hates a genuinely new experience. It hates to change and is preoccupied with control. We prefer ideas. We can do anything we want with a new idea, including agreeing with it too quickly. But a genuinely new experience does something with you! It leaves you out of control for a while and forces you to re-access your terrain, find new emotions, and realign your life coordinates. It is often a bit of a humiliation, because it upsets your old coordinates. We prefer to stay inside our small comfort zones and actually avoid any genuinely new experiences. The ego almost does not allow them to happen.
– Fr. Richard Rohr, from the introduction to How Big is Your God?
