A Radical Pragmatism: On Knowledge and Knowing

When I talk about knowledge, I am thinking about a very specific sort of knowledge. Not so much science, philosophy, sociology, etc. to me, these are information sets that frame, view, and understand the world and experience in various ways. While ways of knowing are diverse and interesting, I do not think that any of them in themselves help us to be better people and this betterment or refinement of ourselves, and the knowledge that will take us there, is what I am interested in. For example, one can be a brilliant scientist or a great sociologist, and be a real jerk at the same time. So, first and foremost, I am looking for a transformational type of knowledge. I will call this knowledge self-knowledge or introspection.

By introspection, I mean taking account of what we see in ourselves at any given moment, without any overlay of what we think we should be feeling or thinking. Just bare honesty of where we are at mentally and emotionally. Then, I think it is important to look for perspectives on why we act in the various, often habitual, ways that we act. At this stage, it is not enough, to me, to just analyze these things mentally because I think it is easy to over intellectualize (and again, one can be a psychologist, therapist, or psychiatrist and still be a nutter). Furthermore, it is important to me not to get caught in, trapped by, any particular school of thought. Along with the process of analyzing our thought patterns, I think it is also important to learn to experience our emotions deeply. We need to find the blockages in our ability to let certain emotions in and feel them, perhaps because of past experiences that caused us to call this or that emotion unacceptable.

Next, I think a practice like meditation is important because in meditation there is an opportunity to sit back and witness the flow of thoughts and emotions, not just being led away by them but rather seeing them arise and fall away thereby getting a sense of how we are usually attached and identified with our thoughts and emotions which can lead us into a lot of trouble (stubbornness, meanness, etc.) if we don't questions our mental and emotional tendencies. Furthermore, in my experience, during longer stints of meditation there is also the ability to have some non-normal experiences of consciousness which cue us into some of the deeper levels (levels not normally experienced, at least by me) of consciousness.

Next, there is the questions of ethics. How should I live my life? I think this is important because at some point I need to see if my actions in the world correspond to my insights and values, at the moment. Perhaps there is even a certain type of knowledge gained by doing (gardening, feeding the hungry, etc.)

So, in the end, as in the beginning, I am thinking of a knowledge that helps us to understand our thoughts, behaviors, and emotions better, that helps us live in more honest and kind ways. Two of the marks of this type of knowledge and knowing, to me, is that it is relative and impermanent. There are no final conclusions, just a process of continual self-exploration, always remembering that our ability to see ourselves is conditioned by the particular ways in which we think and feel (which are not objective/universal) and that that which we don't yet know about ourselves prevents us from seeing deeper within our relative framework, in that moment.

INTUITION

To me, intuition is something like a hunch. I know something but I don't know why I know it. For example, perhaps I have this strong feeling, or a dream, that someone I love has died and then I find out a short while later that they did die (perhaps right around the time I has the hunch/intuition). Or perhaps I just knew someone was going to call and they called.

I think that sometimes we can have a strong sense of something (an intuition) of what is going to happen because of familiarity with the type of situation. Perhaps we have seen someone we love do something over and over again and we then start to see signs that remind us of these previous experiences. Once these signs are noticed then we just somehow know that this person is doing 'such and such' again, even though no one told us and we haven't seen it ourselves yet.

Speaking more philosophically, there is a vast amount of information that we process at all times. We are only consciously aware of so much of this information at any given moment. Perhaps the reason for this is because it would be too overwhelming to be aware of all the information, and images, at once so our minds are aware of only that which is most necessary for our normal functioning. In addition, we also have our habitual thought and emotional patterns which likely cause us to notice some types of images and information much more readily than others.

So, perhaps intuition is the ability of our psyche to fill in those gaps (the often unrecognized images and information) that normally exist below conscious awareness. When we become more aware of the causes and conditions, information and images, that normally lie below the surface of our awareness we are able to intuit or guess that such a such a thing happened or is likely to happen. I don't think it is always necessary for us to know consciously that the mind has taken in more information than normal which has caused the intuition. I think it sometimes just happens and the proof, or the result, is this knowing beyond the known (the known being what we are normally, currently, consciously, and/or habitually aware of), which I am calling intuition.

I like that..."Intuition is knowing beyond the known."

Courage

What is courage? I believe that courage is the ability to look directly at whatever is arising in the present moment and respond without retreating into old fears or relying on conventional wisdom for a quick and easy answer. A situation that requires courage implies a challenge. We do not need courage for mundane tasks. Courage is reserved for those tasks which ask us to step outside of the known, our comfort zones, and engage with a situation that makes us uncomfortable. What is it about a given situation that makes us uncomfortable? When a situation asks us to do something that we do not know how to handle based on past experience/our conditioning we become uncomfortable, fearful, and filled with anxiety. Courage is that quality which allows us to feel these feelings of fear and despite these fears look deep into our heart-mind and discern what is the correct response and act, or not act, upon it.

It is easy to get caught in the fear and never act. We can perseverate on an issue, thinking it over and over without ever doing a thing other than thinking and worrying. In the beginning, I think courage is related to faith, and by faith I mean trust in the unknown. We have to be willing to step outside of our comfort zone and do that which we know must be done despite the thoughts and emotions that try to hold us back from action. In my experience, I have found that many of the fears I have are in fact not founded upon reality, i.e., they either don’t come true when I do the thing I was scared to do, or I find that by doing what my higher self urges me to do I can accept responsibility for whatever happens, hence not having my actions dictated by fear what of others will think or do in response to my actions.. In other words, in the beginning we have to have faith that acting in a way that is not dictated by our conditioning will produce favorable results. We may be frightened, but even if we don’t do exactly the right thing, or say the perfect words, the act of steeping outside of the known, outside of our fear, creates a new movement in our minds, a movement towards greater flexibility of mind, of greater wisdom and intelligence.

For a moment, we are in the present moment. We responded appropriately to the given situation with as much as our being as we can muster in that moment. Ideally, we would meet each moment will full awareness of our highest purpose but until we reach that stage of fearlessness, making small steps in that directly will greatly boost our confidence in our own ability to respond skillfully to a given situation. The more we act in this courageous manner the easier it becomes to act with courage. By stepping outside of the known and acting courageously we see that our fears are actually unfounded. These fears do little more than hinder us from expressing our self in a considerate and intelligent way.

We also gain a great freedom by acting courageously. We are imprisoned within ourselves, our fears and neuroses, when we are unable and/or unwilling to step outside our comfort zone, no matter how painful the comfort zones makes life for us. As we begin to act courageously in the face of our fears and doubts we liberate ourselves from the confines of our old fears and see each situation with new, with fresh, eyes.

FAITH AND BELIEF

Faith — I do not have faith in a god (God) or heaven, in the sense of these things being either “true” or “false.” All of these things/places may exist but I have no idea. Concerning religious doctrines, I don’t approach them on the level of thinking that they are either literally true or absolutely false. I see religious/spiritual stories and doctrines as existing more on the imaginative and psychic plane. These realities speak to the imaginative and creative principle that seems to be a part of my psychic make up.

I sometimes think about faith in the following way. Let us take the question “Do I have faith that the sun will rise?” I take it for granted. When I think about the phenomenon of the sun rising I realize that for a variety of reasons the sun could not rise over the earth (if a meteor obliterates the earth). I suppose my normally unquestioned belief, due to repeatedly experiencing the sun rising, that the sun will rise is a faith of sorts but this seems like a very shaky and impoverished way to define faith. This seems more like habituation and assumption and some would certainly argue that this is what faith in religious ideas/beliefs are, i.e., that people have faith in beliefs due to familial and cultural conditioning which have no evidence which can prove them true or false.

The best definition I have for faith is that when I move into an unknown and/or uncomfortable situation/mental-emotional state, that if I act from my heart/intuition things will work out despite my fears to the contrary. Faith is the impetus to move forward with something when it goes against what I know and am comfortable with. I can’t say that this faith leads me to believe that everything will take place the way I hope it will but that I will likely be okay when I act in a way that is counter intuitive to my conditioning. In this way, faith is related to courage for me. At a certain point when the particular unknown is no longer as scary and mysterious as it once was, I leave behind that particular need for faith and courage which I needed in a given situation, because now I am familiar with the situation and have inner resources that help me deal with that situation with more ease. Yet, there are always new situations which challenge what I am comfortable with and it is this “faith” and “courage” which again compel me to move into the unknown and uncomfortable.

Belief — Belief is another difficult topic. I have issues with the idea of concrete belief in a particular idea, doctrine, or person. My experience of life is that my mind is in constant flux. Ideas change from one moment to the next. To latch on to a particular concept or doctrine as unshakably true makes no sense to my experience of life. So, one way I would define belief is professing the truth of a particular mental-emotional idea/complex, or set of ideas, as literally and unshakably true. In this sense, once I start to use my powers of reasoning, I find that I am a skeptic.

Concerning a topic such as the belief in God (or angels or demons), I think of belief in black and white terms. Either it (God) is real, objectively true and correct or it is false. In that sense, belief is not very interesting to me when it comes to religious topics. I would say that the idea of God is a very powerful symbol with a long and interesting history. It means something, many things in fact, in different parts of the world. The idea of God is part of our culture and worldview, as it is part of my personal mental-emotional experience and history. The idea of God has a psychic importance.