Knowledge isn’t real. I am summarizing some ideas from books by Don Miguel Ruiz and Eckhart Tolle mixed with some of my own ideas. Actually, knowledge can be real but sometimes it isn’t the truth.
We know that you are supposed to stop at a red light, but that doesn’t mean someone won’t run it and cause an accident at any given time. So it is not truthful to say everyone stops at a red light, yet it is common knowledge.
What we know is like a half truth. It is an experience of reality mixed with our interpretation of what happened.
Adam and Eve got kicked out of Eden because they ate from the Tree of Knowledge instead of the Tree of Life. Don Miguel explains this is because knowledge is our interpretation of the truth which is a distortion, while life itself is the truth.
I have read in other books the Tree of Knowledge actually referenced as the Tree of Illusion.
Both authors describe this split with words like conscious and unconscious, reality and illusion, the living and the undead, truth and half truth, etc.
Eckhart Tolle says we are naturally in a state like a cork floating on the surface of water. We are often pulled under into the unconscious by our thoughts, beliefs, and “knowledge”. We just have to let go of what we know and float back up to consciousness.
This is interesting to me because self-awareness is interesting to me. Finding out what holds us down is interesting to me.
If we are energy, then we are vibrating at a certain frequency. I like to think that frequency is how frequently we are aligned with the truth. Sometimes we are at a high vibration, that is being highly aligned with our truth. And sometimes not, which means are spending too much time in the land of illusion.
What we do know is that we don’t really know anything. Which brings us back to the main point, that life isn’t a puzzle to be solved. Life is to be lived. Let’s go live and try to live a little better than we did yesterday.
2 responses to “Knowledge”
Perhaps the single most important statement to come out of the current administration (from my point of view) is from Kellyanne Conway: “Facts don’t matter, what people believe matters.”
I couple this with the idea that a very large part of what we think we know is secondhand knowledge, someone else’s direct experience related to us in a way that we accept it as truth, fact, whatever. In fact, it is often third, fourth and fifth hand knowledge.
And finally, I think most of what we do is primally driven, instinctual, and that instinct is hugely powerful. I believe our capacity to reason and communicate is really a set of tools whereby instinct achieves it’s intent and then explains itself as best it can, which often isn’t very well.
I like your musings, very much up my alley, keep them up!
Thanks Michael! Glad you like!
Great points you made. I been thinking a lot about how instincts fully take over at times and it is awesome you brought it up! And you are so right about how when it does take action, explanation comes after the fact.
I was thinking about instinct vs. intuition. They obviously work together sometimes, and other times so obviously not.
I was thinking about man’s primary directive of survival and how in today’s world that means “money”, yet getting a random job (for me anyways) doesn’t feel instinctual at all. At least that’s what my intuition is telling me.
So, to take it further, I feel (my intuition) that survival instincts over time expanded to include our entire species. Meaning instead of fighting for just ourselves, we are fighting for all humans. Thus all the arts and sciences and studies and music and individual voices become most important. So it becomes instinctual for me to stay creative regardless if I am not making that much money, yet it is my intuition that it will pay off sooner or later somehow or some way.
But then it comes full circle, because if this is the case then all jobs are important if they are helping people survive. Rambling now. But thanks for you input!