Descriptions of knowledge, level 1Limitations [are] usually placed upon our `knowingness'--the most restricting of such limitations being our insistence on indexing knowingness into a tiny `knowing self' or `mind', and our preoccupation with being `aware of' finite and terminating `objects of knowledge'. (p. xvi, TSK)
The unknowing mind perpetuates a sense of separation between 'our private world' and the 'world of others'. (p. xxxv, TSK) If we consider lower space as a chamber, then meanings might be thought of as echoes which sound out its walls. But in fact the echoes not only sound out, but actually define these walls. The chamber is itself a meaning, or more precisely, is given with all other things by time as a series of meanings. (pp. 102-3, TSK) The play's script dictates that the self views itself as a host. It has a world order as its house, and entertains guests (its objects). It indulges in mental dialogues about itself, its world, and its guests. The dialogues 'mean things' within the world order, and that order is somehow more basic than the particular instances of 'meaning'. (p. 170, TSK) From our conventional perspective, the events and facts which we know--the tremendous weight of our past and of our cultural conditioning--have seemed to establish a vastly complex world within which our present positions gain their meaning. (p. 212, TSK) We feel cut off from `the world', the object of knowledge. We try to look, to know, but in doing so we throw up a screen in front of our eyes. We relate to knowledge as though it were little drops of water, falling from different places, that we must chase after and collect in a bucket. And we try to escape in experiences that seem special in some way--pleasurable, informative, liberating, meditative, or `peak' experiences. (p. 213, TSK) Even though 'knowingness' is always available to us, we ordinarily try to achieve knowledge in what we see as basically an insentient world. This has the effect of freezing knowingness into a world of knowable or known but unknowing things. (p. 220, TSK) There is very little depth or sensitivity to `lower knowledge', and little fluidity as well. Everything is forced into conformity with a certain implicit logic of how knowing occurs and of how the known world is structured. `Lower knowledge' acts like a kind of magnet, attracting experiences and presuppositions that obscure understanding of the nature of appearance. (p. 237, TSK) The themes of the self-oriented trend take over: a subtle grasping and consolidating, a resultant stance taken up `outside' experience, labelling and trying to `get' the content of experience, and an emphasis on the acts `of knowing' and `being happy'. Labelling, and the preoccupation with `content', obscure the fulfillment available for a `knowing' which remains `in' experience from the beginning and which is not a separate act or event. (p. 266, TSK) Conventionally understood, knowledge takes form by moving through the stages of observation, experience, interpretation, understanding, and actualization. This step by step process widens the separation between knower and known, and easily turns knowledge in the direction of an intellectual process far removed from direct experience. . . . The linear link between subject and object confines knowledge to a two-dimensional plane, leaving the depths of knowing unexplored. (p. xli, LOK) A pattern of want and need, punctuated by episodes of fulfillment, establishes the fundamental order within which knowledge can arise. Only a few alternatives for knowledge seem allowable: Knowledge that allows the self to identify and distinguish what is desired from what is not; knowledge of technological knowledge; and knowledge as a possible object of desire. (p. 36, LOK) For human being which establishes itself as real through occupying space and taking up time, knowledge is based on the senses. It arises as the sensory faculties make contact with the things that appear in space and the events that occur in time. The resulting sensory data provide the basis upon which interpretation and other forms of knowing can then be constructed. (p. 100, LOK) |
 The implicit model we have for how knowledge arises thus proves rather complex. To summarize, it appears that the direct content of experience is given through a polar knowledge confined to a particular location in time and space. The polarities of 'perceiver/perceived', 'here/there', and 'now/then' mark the various aspects of this 'micro-level' knowing, which seems to have special reference to the sensory realm.
In themselves, however, these polarities are inadequate to account for conventional 'objective' reality. This 'reality' forms the basis of descriptive temporal knowledge, which is referred to a 'self existing over time', whose 'nature' is unclear. But descriptive knowledge directs the self away from what it seeks to know. It assures that the unknown will remain unknown even while it is being defined, classified, and positioned. (p. 106, LOK) Ordinary knowledge could be described as knowledge built up through `models': explanations or descriptions of how things work within a specified domain. These models provide the mental constructs that claim to represent with some accuracy the `objective' reality that appears in conventional space and time. (p. 129, LOK) Consciousness is insensitive and yields only indirect, clumsy contact, because it and linear time are viscous, dense, impure. That is, they are not totally frictionless and translucent, and hence are not capable of responsiveness free from distortion and resistance. So no effective contact is available, and the overall course of life does not permit much real achievement, penetration of obstacles, or fulfillment. (p. 48, DOT I) In ordinary knowing, the active play of the Body of Knowledge recedes into invisibility. The structures that consciousness imposes solicit our participation in a conspiracy directed at authenticating appearance's claims to substance. We join in willingly, agreeing to look past the embarrassing indeterminacy of the established. The ongoing availability of knowledge is reduced to the potential for obtaining accurate information about what is already known to exist. (p. 68, VOK) Knowledge is what we obtain from books or store in databases; it has to do with instruction manuals or tests we took in school. What is more, to know calls for effort. If we want to increase our understanding, we have to become students, and this means starting with the awkward admission that we lack the knowledge we require. (p. 75, VOK) . . . our usual understanding of time and space gives rise to a form of knowledge that can only understand experience as something subjective. (p. 89, VOK) If we lose sight of . . . knowledgeability, it is because we have committed ourselves to a form of knowing that stays on the surface, holding fast to the distinctions that knowledge unfolds in the play of its becoming. We include and exclude; establish logic and characterize its operation; set the definitions of good and bad; determine the proper usages and appropriate categories. (p. 91, VOK) In gathering and assembling knowledge, we understand ourselves to be the subject who knows: the owner and potential author of knowledge, its originator as well as its consumer. (p. 93, VOK) Unfortunately, we have been trained to see knowledge as something dull and routine, something to possess and make use of like a sophisticated tool. We apply knowledge to our situation as we might try to fix a machine by following an instruction manual. But this way of knowing puts us at a distance from what we are trying to know. There is the thing and there is our knowledge of it, and the two are separate. (p. 167, VOK) Each time we take a position, we once more position knowledge as a possession, affirming an unbridgeable distance between knower and known that brings not-knowing to the fore. Though we can establish countless structures based on the interaction of positions and the exchange of predetermined messages, we are simply working out the implications of this not-knowing. (p. 269, KTS) |
