Of late there has been lot of debates about lack of
understanding and more knowledge in the social media.
It is good and incidentally several years back Aldous Huxley
wrote a wonderful but long essay on this topic ‘Knowledge and Understanding’
and surprisingly one may find a pdf of half the essay in Sri Ramankrishna
Mission site.
Coming back to the subject.
It has become normal to confuse information for knowledge;
Knowledge for experience and thought;
Ideas formulated based on these for wisdom;
The problem is as these may inadvertently lead to an
arrogance which may create unassailable prejudice, petrified presumption and
start projecting what we know or think we know or presume as some great piece
of tool to decipher the puzzle of life as panacea.
The most important facts of humility are that our perception
or understanding based on whatever may be the source of knowledge is
defective or at least not totally prefect and therefore there is nothing that
can be construed as a panacea in this world.
Education is the enlightened awareness and acceptance of facts of
inevitable evolution of everything and experiencing life as a flow of all or
some them as they emerge through the churning process of life where they
express the multiple dimensions of everything and the various dynamics of each
dimension emanating from inherent attributes as well as a reaction to external
impacts.
Life is
an unmapped atlas where we are not even sure whether all pieces of the jigsaw
puzzles are there to create a shape.
Lot
depends on proceeding on unbiased observations beyond or besides or if
necessary even without existing loads of knowledge because the existing bunch
of knowledge could also act as a conditioning factor if we are not alert and
totally divert our understanding of anyone or anything.
Besides
all these there are also factors like our attitudes towards multiple
interpretations, ideological identity based inhibitions to accept certain
things, attitudes and overall perspective towards what we encounter etc.
That is
why it becomes a necessity to not to take on extreme positions in anything and
instead maintain a balanced view.
Extreme
positions can blur the view from seeing the multiple possibilities that may
exist everywhere.
Phenella writes in “The Unwritten Comedy”.
“To be ignorant of many things is expected
To know you are ignorant of many things is the
beginning of wisdom.
To know a category of things of which you are
ignorant is the beginning of learning.
To know the details of that category of things
of which you are ignorant is to no longer be ignorant.”
“Everything changes as
you move through three stages of awareness:
first, that beliefs are the result of conditions;
second, that beliefs are the cause of conditions;
and third, that beliefs are themselves conditions.”
― Eric Micha'el Leventhal
“All of us have our
own inner fears, beliefs, opinions. These inner assumptions rule and govern our
lives. A suggestion has no power in and of itself. Its power arises from the
fact that you accept it mentally.”
― Joseph Murphy, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind
We,
most of us, swing as a pendulum between excuses and justifications with a
keenness to convince others and end up coming with answers like these: - A tourist guide who, when once, a lady asked him
“How a row of fine rock formation were piled up”, said “they have been piled up
here by the glaciers”. When she anxiously asked him “Where are the glaciers?”
he replied “Madam, they have gone back to get some more rocks”. Such replies
are often the result of ignorance, half-knowledge or impatience or all of
these.
The
problem with human beings unlike other species is that we are consciously aware
and we can also collect, store and retrieve data and reuse them. This faculty
along with our intellectual thinking and reasoning powers hamper us from having
humility to accept the mere fact that there are many unknown as well as
unknowable elements to life as a whole and even in our individual lives.
We
either act or react according to what we want, what we can and what we are
destined to. At different times either one of these three predominates i.e.
what we want, we can we are destined to do.
Knowledge, Information, Thoughts, Ideas and Teachings
are ingredients,
Understanding is making them into a tasty cooked food,
Grasping and Interpretations are the utensils used for cooking,
Learning is the process of cooking a tasty, easily digestible, nutritious
food.
