The Prisoner of Knowledge

[Guest guest]

RELIANCE UPON BORROWED KNOWLEDGE is one of the fundamental

characteristics of our western culture. The handing down of a

collective heritage is the dynamic engine which has produced the

whole technological culture of our time. Science, for instance,

required many generations of innovators succeeding one another to

pass on discoveries which could be developed further. But this

passing on of shared and second-hand knowledge has an unhappy side

effect. Both teacher and scholar are liable to fall into the

persuasive trap of believing that knowledge is their direct,

firsthand experience. Ideas are expressed in words and symbols, and

these are necessarily static and unvarying.

The existential world of this moment is not like a static black and

white photograph, shot in one flat lifeless foreverness. Yet many

programs we pick up from a teacher inevitably are like that — a past

and fixed idea, time honored and verifiable.

Education is often built upon a uniform class system where each

unique individual is expected to learn exactly the same programs as

everybody else. Logic and linear thinking are favored as the best

basis for any examination, or test of abilities. The whole process

heavily favors the workings of the left-hand hemisphere of the brain,

so it is small wonder that we find this thinking mode so dominant in

our times. Such imbalance is compounded by the use of language

itself. The inherent mechanism of language is that of separation. A

child learns to use nouns to distinguish things and verbs to separate

actions, as if these ideas are real in themselves. The wondrous

kaleidoscopic flux of living has no such static divisions. The

grammar of language, those linear chains of ideas which we know as

reason, cannot express cyclic events, paradoxes and the total network

of holistic relations which are the rule of life rather than the

exception.

 

Unknown Man....Yatri

 

posted .......bob