How do you know what you think you know?
Published: Sat, 10/03/20
How is ignorance to be overcome? Okay, big subject, but lets start with a simple principle. I believe that there are three sources of knowledge: Experience, narratives, and intuition. That is: Our experience of the real world through our senses. Narratives are stories and information we receive second hand. Intuition is our inner guidance which we may call intuition, imagination, inspiration, and/or conscience. Two further points, learning from any one of these takes a lot of work and practice, and all three aspects need to work together for the principle of learning and overcoming ignorance to be successful.
So, the easiest aspect of learning is from direct experience? Not necessarily, actually learning to see clearly is hard work that takes a lot of sustained effort. The Norse mythology tells us that Odin exchanged one eye for a drink from Mimir’s well. As a result the Al Father lost half his natural vision but, he gained insight in the sense of wisdom and the ability to see all that happened from Hlidskialf, Odin’s high seat from which he could look out over the worlds of humans, Jotuns, Dwarves, Elves, and Asa. The problem is that our senses are massively overloaded with information and so our brains are highly selective which information is processed. There is part of the brain known as the Reticular Activating Cortex (RAC) which takes note of information of interest and filters out the rest. This is why you can be at a noisy gathering of people (remember those before Covid?) and you notice that someone in another conversation has
mentioned a film, book, or TV series you like and you want to join that conversation. Or, if you are on a journey with someone who is particularly interested in cars they keep pointing out interesting vehicles, to them anyway, even though to you they are just cars. Or, well just substitute the things you see that most other people do not notice. That is your RAC flagging up the things your subconscious mind thinks might be of interest to you. The RAC can be trained and indeed a great deal of education is simply activating the RAC in a particular direction. Teaching a child to read is largely a matter of training the RAC to respond to the letters of the alphabet at an unconscious level. How do you train your mind to see a particular thing which you are not currently aware of? You are told that it exists and you learn its name. Of course we are told the names of many things, why one thing in particular? One reason is that you
intuitively recognise the importance of knowing how to identify something so that you can build your knowledge of it. You gain a memory of what the thing looks, sounds, feels, smells or tastes like, and you are able to think about it because you can name it, even if you create the name yourself until you discover the accepted name. Or maybe your name becomes the accepted name. Again, like Odin, you are working with Hugin and Munin, the ravens of thought and memory. Odin is afraid of losing both these, but particularly Munin, memory because then he loses his ability to name and without naming it is not possible to really know what you are seeing.
So, seeing (and I am using the word to cover all identifying experiences involving the senses) is actually dependent upon us being able to name or narrate the experience and having a real sense of the intuitive value in seeing and acknowledging the experience. We have all had the experience of someone trying to get us interested in something that we really cannot bring ourselves to care about. However, once we have a desire to know something then we will ask for the name or even create our own name for the experience if we have to. Learning or giving a name is a well established magical principle because it activates our RAC and makes an experience real. Genesis 2 v 19 tells us that Adam was given dominion over all living creatures and he established that dominion by naming all animals.
So, does experience make for knowledge we can trust? Again, it isn’t quite that simple. My work is to sort out problems for people and sometimes I know exactly what is wrong and I can fix it straight away, but only sometimes. More often solving a problem is a matter of peeling away layers of uncertainty until the truth is revealed and then tested, sometimes many times. For example, there might be a great many reasons that a car will not start. If I am asked to get the vehicle going again then at first I have the actual problem, a car that won’t start, and a wide ranging narrative of reasons why other cars have not started at other times. The more reasons I know and understand the more possible solutions I have available to me, but I still have to determine why this particular car won’t start at this particular moment. The problem may even be something I have never seen or heard of before. The process of getting the car to start
is then one of matching my narrative of car problems to the actual situation and allowing my narrative to be both informative and informed by the experience.
One reason I do the work I do is that I either solve problems and build my knowledge and experience, or I fail and discover my limitations, either way I maintain and develop my relationship with reality, build up my knowledge, and strengthen my confidence in my intuition. There are no ideological answers to the questions I solve in my work, I either demonstrate success or accept that someone with a different skill set needs to do the job.
So, having faced our fears, how do we build genuine knowledge? By recognising that real learning is a process of working with experience, narrative, and intuition. You can only see that process through with a lot of patience and hard work, humility that recognises your own limitations, and a relentless commitment to discovering the truth.
Regards
Graham