Information, Knowledge and Wisdom

04.06.2020

Information, Knowledge and Wisdom

As I currently see it, each of us lives within a particular bubble of information/knowledge. To the extent our individual i/k bubbles overlap, the other person feels like our kind of people. Our i/k bubbles form through learned sub-cultural patterns of identification such as family ties, cultural context, community affiliation, nationality, etc., and they are developed through the particular fields of information/knowledge we find engaging. If another’s field of information/knowledge bears little resemblance to ours, their ways of being themselves in this world appear different, strange and even incomprehensible from the point of view we have within our unique bubble of information/knowledge. From within the mind/world of our familiar representation of reality, those folks don’t fit very well. We feel alarmed and threatened.

And yet, they are here, along with the rest of us. At some point, we’ve recognized that any description or narrative like the one we’ve got running in our head pretty much all day every day, is always limited and fragmentary; it can only live within our personal information/knowledge bubble. Our bubble is always a very small sub-set/sub-process of the totality of our shared, human information/knowledge field. Obviously, everyone else’s information/knowledge bubble is likewise limited.

None of us has the whole picture unless our view is free of all points of view.

We each live within our own mind-made representation of reality and we have believed that that is the way Life is. A bit of reflection reveals to us that our personal bubble of information/knowledge overlaps to some degree with the i/k bubbles of some people much less than they do with others among us. None of us have the whole field within our personal consciousness.

But it is possible to embrace the whole field of our human species of consciousness through the skillful methods of realization and wisdom that have passed through innumerable generations of the practice lineages are being shared among those of us who have some interest in these streams of information/knowledge. Simultaneously, seemingly new practice paths have been emerging among us which are also helping us to recognize and to awaken our conscious awareness. This is the underlying opportunity within the dynamic energies of the very messy structural dissipations our human species of consciousness is navigating at this time.

I believe, like it or not, we’ve all been sucked into a transformative vortex from which there is no escape. This isn’t Kansas, anymore. The tower of babble we’ve been living within has been created by our own minds on a mistaken foundation of separation and reification and its inevitable consequence is evident in all the polarization, superficial labeling and divisiveness destroying civility and preventing any real discourse. As a result nearly everyone is identified with the sound bites of a particular media-made world-view and at the throats of others who happen to be immersed in a different stream of identity and perspective with in this distorted sea of reified dualities.

The field of representation which constructs our sense of identity and its co-arising perception of context is breaking down as the light/energy/information/knowledge of the One that is All-That-Is has been emerging within our shared consciousness. As our world is changing, who we’ve taken ourselves to be becomes less and less tenable. If we haven’t yet begun noticing the peaceful expanse that is emerging beneath and behind our habitual mind-world/dream-body, losing our identity(ies) and their co-arising, apparent world we have been living, can be terrifying because these ideas and the attendant feelings are what we have come to believe we are.

Many if not most of us who’ve glimpsed, recognized and begun to stably live as this emerging state of conscious presence - our natural state - at least for moments, find our organisms responding with fear and aversion to surrendering our imaginary control of our lives to this silent presence that is revealed when we stop thinking for a moment to attentively notice what’s always here; whether we’ve ever noticed it, or not. And yet, the recognition of our shared oneness has gradually been becoming inescapable.

As an example, consider our current global pandemic - this is a planet-wide event in which virtually everyone on the planet is involved. To me it seems pretty obvious that we are all in this together and, virtually, no one among us is immune; in this sense for once, we are all equals.

In my perception, we are in the process of exchanging our brain’s old operating system which has been running the current, mistaken mind-world/dream-body of separation, reification and lack. The new operating system that is being revealed among us is resonant with a more wide-open, shared m-w/d-b of oneness; the experience is one of clarity, openness and the wisdom of innocence in the face of the apparent insanity of our world.

So far, I am sure you’ll agree, it has been a pretty bumpy ride. There is some integration of oneness emerging; it is revealing Itself within our consciousness as the recognitions that, if we are to live here, we are inseparable from the dynamic flows of this ecosystem, that the nourishing aspects of what we put into our minds and bodies impacts how well our minds and bodies can function, that the multi-generational transmission of misunderstandings and trauma impairs our cultures’ capacities to embrace and integrate with what is emerging for us all. As the revelation of our fundamental, shared oneness break through the surface, into our conscious awareness, the old structures which have contained and sustained our day-to-day consciousness have begun breaking down and dissipating.

As species of consciousness on this planet we seem to be arriving at a fundamental choice point. I cannot yet tell how it is going to go due to the limitations of my personal bubble of information/knowledge. I just know my preference and the fact that inevitably, eventually the light reveals both itself and the darkness and ultimately, the light wins. This is because even the apparent darkness is made of the light of the original Singularity that expressed Itself as all this.

I am wondering, are we, am I, so afraid of the new that I/we’re compelled to try recreating our old world of separation and dissatisfaction, even as it has begun to self-destruct? Be it ever so horrible, there is no place like home? Or, are we, am I, willing to interrupt the flow of thoughts through our/my distorting field of representation long enough to notice what this is that is always, already here? Are we willing to consciously shift the focus of our attention to the direct experience of the ongoing presence of awareness-being which is who and what we already, always are and always will be; are we willing to turn toward the living light of being, regardless of how long our vivid, dark enchantment with this misguided out-picturing of separation and reification has been running through our awareness?

Speaking for myself, I can say that in the moments when I choose to turn away from experiencing the seemingly incessant mind stream in which I find myself in my current version of this world, when I can interrupt the flow of thought for a moment and give my attention to the living sensations that are the non-verbal, non-conceptual experiencing of being here, just now; something wonderful reveals itself. It is a direct experience of our natural, silent, intelligent presence. This alert sense of just being here is wide-open in an undifferentiated and all-inclusive way, while it pervades everything that happens to be appearing within it at the moment. The actual experience is inexpressible.

These short moments last as long as they do before I am distracted by thought or engaged in labeling and describing my experience to myself; this is usually my next on-ramp to the narrative freeway.

Short moments of re-recognition of our natural state, repeated many times, leads to relaxed presence of our innate, alert intelligence in all situations and circumstances because the repetition retrains our nervous system both into our natural state and out of neural habits which constitute our experience of being the character in our mind’s representation of our conditioned world of separation and reification. Our whole organism is getting attuned to the underlying and always present resonances of the Always True reality of our being.

We are awakening out of our dream of separation and into the re-recognition that we are and always have been an immortal spirit emanating into a biological entity and, most essentially, we are all the same one immortal spirit. This is because there is only One. The One that is All-That-Is is, necessarily, always, all of Itself. This is what Jesus was saying, when he noted, “I and the Father are One.” This singularity obviously includes our human species of consciousness currently embodying itself as this world of separation and reification.

There-in lies the koan of our lives, as humans together here, at this time. How do we shift from seeing ourselves living within this mind-made misrepresentation of reality? How do we begin living the natural dynamic harmony of being the ones we actually are – each one of us a unique expression of this One, in, of and by whom we live and move and have our beings. What a mystery! What a miracle! What a challenge!