What value to us is what we know? Knowing enables us to ‘repeat’ or ‘avoid’ an experience. Knowing about danger enables us to avoid it. What we each know establishes our personal paradigm. This paradigm is real to us. Our paradigm can only continue to exist by rejecting any conflicting beliefs others use to define the same reality. What we know is not truth. What we know is just our version of the truth. Competing versions of truth cannot be true. If the concept defined by the word ‘truth’ existed we could not have evolved our technologies.
Truth is what we believe not what is true. In a criminal case a person who is called to give evidence may be required to make an oath. So we promise to give the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But our testimony is not the absolute truth. Our testimony is our understanding. So, even if we do not lie, we have not spoken the truth we have conveyed what we understand about our experience. The truth is there is no truth. Experience is unlimited and cannot be incarcerated within knowledge. Knowledge is a set of beliefs that our mind gives its allegiance to.
Our observations are limited by how our vocabulary defines what we observe. Our definitions are limited by the words we use to define what we perceive to be reality. It is our knowledge of words that establishes the parameters upon our ability to define what we perceive to be reality. All words are false and limited witnesses. They are false because words are limitations. There are no limitations. Words are used to ensure uniformed agreement is established on what our minds collectively ‘see’ and ‘experience’. The mind perceives the ‘written’ and ‘spoken’ word as truth.
The universal medium for ensuring uniformed perception of reality is education. For many what we say we know is not what we know it is what we believe we know. Education replaces infinite possibilities within the mind with what we are educated to ‘believe’. Education sustains a systemic reality within uniformed perception. There is always a contextual limitation to any proposed truth that claims to define or describe reality. For example, in a quiz the following question may be asked. ‘In what year did the Battle of Hastings take place?’
To be judged correct you must answer to this question by stating that this battle took place in ‘AD 1066’. Nobody alive today can know this. We accept the proposed truth written in books to be our own truth. This is delusional on many levels. There is not a single person who lives today who can know about a battle which allegedly took place nearly a thousand years ago. So, in order to take the information in history books as our truth existing as personal knowledge, we must ‘believe’ that this text is ‘historical’ fact.
If I am asked if I know the answer to a question I either know or I do not. What we read in a book is not what we know. To read a history book does not mean we know, it means we believe we know. The words illustrated in books written by others including ‘these words’ are not your personal truth. You do not know if what I write about an experience is true unless you have the experience. If the delicious meal a food critic writes about does not taste good to me then my testimony will not match that of the food critic.
This does not make me ignorant of the proposed facts written by acclaimed food critics. How our food tastes to us is the truth of our experience. There is no substitute for the experience. My proposed truth based upon my experience is not true for others because it is not their personal experience. My testimony is prejudiced by my perception which makes it impossible to provide a truthful or factual account of my experiences. I may believe my perception of my experience is true. The beliefs an individual has will determine how their perception is distorted and prejudiced.
It is because we can believe anything that we can ‘limit’ and ‘contextualise’ truth. Most of what we say we ‘know’ is what we believe. When our fear of the known is not based upon personal experience but what we have read or been told then our mind is controlled by others. Our fear of the unknown exists because we have been taught to fear what we do not know. So when we fear the unknown we fear the adventure and the mystery of life. Until we have personal experiences for which we have no pre-existing thoughts or beliefs we have not had an experience.
How many times has the truth of us met the truth of our experiences? Not knowing is what makes life a mystery that unfolds through direct personal experience. Those who are first to do something are what some call adventurers and pioneers. Without this spirit of adventure we would not have achieved what is defined to be technological evolution. What we know or believe is what establishes the limits of the experiences we will voluntarily engage in. Our beliefs ensure that our experiences and our creative expression are limited.
If our existing knowledge is what determines the experiences we will voluntarily engage in or even contemplate we have created parameters which prevent us from experiencing our own creative expression. Our creative expression is limited only by our imagination which is ‘unlimited’. However, when we define ‘this’ to be this and not ‘that’, we create and enforce limitation and parameters for our imagination. It is these conceptual definitions which our mind worships as the commandment of its God. We the believers are the creators of our educated minds. Our beliefs are what we choose to worship as our truth.
The false Gods we have chosen to worship are our own beliefs. They are false Gods that define us, our experiences and what we perceive to be reality. Ideas come in response to thoughts and experience. Our minds are controlled by the limitation that is our knowledge. We are both enriched and constrained by our knowledge. Personal knowledge places limitations upon our individual creative expression. New ideas can only come into our conscious awareness if our mind is open to thinking or doing things in a different way. The mystery is the mystery. A mystery can only exist in what we do not know.
Fear based upon knowledge is what prevents us from thinking about or engaging in new or different experiences. We fear what may be waiting for us in the unknown. We know from experience what is waiting for us in the ‘known’. Most of mankind avoids the unknown and continues to exist generically repeating what is known and what is perceived to be safe. Repetitive behaviour can become addictive. Many become unconsciously conditioned to recreate feelings associated with a particular behaviour. So we can become addicted to drugs, romance, sex or alcohol.
In the case of those addicted to the attention and adoration of others they may be addicted to fame, pursued through sports, entertainment, politics or religion. When we judge what we have experienced we have replaced the truth of the experience with that judgement. The experience is the truth but our judgement of it holds the experience guilty of a crime it never committed. Many learned people have held their judgement to be fact. Once we have judged an experience to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ we create perception that programmes how we feel in similar qualifying experiences.
Our feelings respond to our judgement. If for example, I say that I find fishing boring my feelings will respond to that experience ensuring I feel bored. So when I am fishing my feelings will worship my own judgement. This is why it was said, ‘Judge that you be not judged’. There is no substitute for the experience and it if feels bad then it is bad for me but not necessarily for others. If I was kicked in what is commonly referred to as the shinbone (Tibia) just once in my life it is unlikely that I need to think hard in order to remember what that feels like.
When we feel pain, we know! Pain is a universal truth in experience. Once we have felt the truth of ‘our experience’ we know what it means to us but to put this into words as fact is to deceive others. The only experiences worth pursuing are those that are unique to us. Only our unique creative expression can express the unique miracle that we are. When we think in the context of ‘I wonder if’ or ‘what if’ we are asking our self a question. Those questions will be answered with thoughts and ideas from a source that is ‘unlimited’. We are unlimited.
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