In order to learn what happens when knowledge no longer plays any part in our relationship.
Intellectually we know a great big gob about life, the world, ourselves, reality. Experientially we also know a helluva lot: subjective experience, qualia. These are obviously two different types of knowing.
Or maybe you mean something different by âpractically, actually?â
Knowing what it means to be human is not knowledgeâŚitâs enlightenment.
Then enlightenment us. Because I have no idea what any of this means.
Putting aside your knowledge of technical matters, what do you know?
By âtechnical mattersâ I assume you mean: any and all fruit of thought. Yes?
Putting aside thought, I know my present subjective experience, the feel of qualia.
But that comes and goes; itâs not fixed.
But you know enough about love (which you say is a mystery) to ask whether we love one another.
I know as much about it as you or anyone else. There are no experts here. Thatâs why the question matters. It has no expert or professional answer. It is all about our amateur responses.
The division between the living and dying is not miles apart, it is together.
Kinfonet Quote of the Day
Nov 8, 2021
Can we substitute learning for living and humility for dying? May not be possible for us to do in practice, but we can surely appreciate how far off we are from being so at ease with the present.
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Yes, Iâm using âto knowâ in the sense of: âI know what Iâm feeling in this moment.â
Then you are not feeling it. You are naming it. You are removing yourself from the feeling. Thought is creating a distance away from the disturbance, labelling it according to its memory of previous experience and saying, âI know what this is.â The only fact is the disturbance, which is unknowable.
What does it mean to learn?
What we usually mean by learning is that the contents of our consciousness have evolved. ie. what we know has changed.
However the process of learning has not. How we learn remains the same.
Learning for humans is a cultural and psychological process of copying and integrating (or refusing and attacking if the âknowledgeâ is culturally or psychologically in conflict with my cultural/psychological identity - unless your survival depends on it : when in Rome or when starving in the tundra)
Human intelligence is about cultural identity. What we know is a translation of either our own knowledge, or a translation of the knowledge of our peers.
This is what sets us apart from our closest cousins (primates) - we are better at copying and believing what we are told (by those we trust or admire).
So our relationship is not one of learning something new, but one of comparison.
No naming.
Without the naming, are you feeling anything?
As long as we are learning about something that is totally separate from us - the mechanical workings of a car or a computer, for example - then comparison has a place. Otherwise, we would not survive for more than a day or two. But are we ever psychologically separated? If we are, then comparison is useful: one part of my mind is able to learn about what is happening in another part of my mind through comparison with what it already knows based on previous experiences. At least, this is generally how we act, how we approach our psychological problems, how we try to solve whatever we may feel is wrong with us. But actually are we separated, with the problem different from the observer of the problem?
I like to think of pride as a symptom of fear.
If living is considered as fear of dying - then they are not far apart.
If learning is part of identity - then we can be proud of our knowledge.
Are we psychologically separated from what we know? The answer has to be No - even when the knowledge is about things (like cars) that are separate from us.
However, the line here on Kinfonet seems to be that the problem comes from being emotionally invested ? Also there is the problem of judging our self - the self judging itself by its own criteria ?
Yes, but whose answer is it? Whether the answer is Yes or No, where does this answer come from? How do we learn about it?
We âlearnâ a language by memorizing what a word signifiesâŚK âlearningâ is not that at all. I understood it as a âmoving along withâ what is? In the sense that âlearningâ and âawarenessâ , âfreedomâ, etc, point to the same action of âmoving withâ: âthe flight of the eagle, leaving no traceâ?