To know that you do not know is the best.
To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease.-Lao-tzu,
Knowing is a word like others limited to the conditions of association. But when I say "knowing" I am not talking about the responsiveness of the mind based on compulsory education, I mean experience gained from choices made through awareness. We're all familiar to some extent with the sayings " It isn't what you know, but what you do with what you know" and "life is about this journey, not the destination."
But knowing something is not the same as living it. We accumulate so much information, most of which is never used that it overwhelms the senses. We can amass a vast storehouse of fact and theories and verifiable conclusions but underlying all that knowledge we remain children gazing into infinity.
But there is more to conscious experience than mimicking what we learn through filtered teachings. As the proverb goes "I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand" Doing leads to realization. To study the principles of mountain climbing is to gain conceptual knowledge; to climb a mountain is to experience direct realization. We can all agree we have heard " life is a dream" and "We don't actually know anything about anything" or " I know that already". We may shrug off such proverbs as cliches simply because we have heard similar phrases many times. But when such ideas truly penetrate our psyches, they change from mere bromides to universal truths- and we realize that everything is a dream or truly grasp that we really do not know anything.
And we can believe we know a number of things from gathered facts, data from books, newspapers, sources, online and more. But wisdom flows from life experience. Wisdom takes on the taste of sweat as we strive to overcome lower tendencies and live in accordance with universal laws. We like to believe we know what we think about everything but in reality we think more than we know. We live in the mind, most of the time feeding and inflating the existential, non tangible places within our thoughts. We can learn to think with our entire body and open perception to different ways of feeling, doing and living in the world- making decisions instantly, instinctively and intuitively rather than relying solely on the brain to weigh variables and figure things out.
With proper knowing, we can look into the engineered education systems and sources of information guided by profit and agendas. There is realization to be found when looking at the strengths and limitations represented by a college degree. Advanced degrees often require years of study; this means someone has passed through a cerebral gauntlet and undergone rigorous initiation into the world of the intellect. Such study is a real achievement, worthy of respect. But there is a difference between conceptual knowledge and practical wisdom. Practical wisdom can turn inward into body wisdom, knowing ourselves thoroughly inside and out, instead of knowing fictional characters, songs, and distracting mind traps more than we know ourselves. We can shed light on our mental and emotional addictions, reactions, lack of control or self accountability. We can stop craving attention and the desire to be seen or validated by others.
We all seek to gain, we all wish to achieve our goals. But we never throw into the equation the connection between what we think we know about what we want and how much we actually know about ourselves.
What is knowing today? True we have an unprecedented amount of information available on an unprecedented scale. But the resolutions to the true questions of life come not through mere communications, no matter how quick or how vast. They come from knowing itself. And knowing comes only when we have made the answers part of ourselves.
