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If this was true, there would be no discovery, no learning, no theorizing, no propositions, no imagination and no growth. We can experience things without understanding them.
And a similar post from Quantum....
You misunderstand. It's not that we are incapable of acquiring knowledge outside of experience. We can all acquire more knowledge, add to our personal knowledge from the knowledge of our time, even add to the knowledge of our time.
The first step, naturally, is language. We are born without it. We acquire it, from our culture, from our family, from each other, wherever. It then delimits our experience. It would seem to be the beginning of separation.
In the beginning was the Word, yes? Even that nothing-to-you, doesn't exist fairy tale God allegedly had to use language to create the entire Universe, in that silly story. Language creates the Universe? What on Earth?
Hermes, Woden, Thoth, Mercury...all language guardians...silly, I know, but there you have it. These ideas, which are not real, or not as real as a carrot, nonetheless are as widespread amongst unrelated cultures across centuries as...well...as real stuff. They have some kind of reality, they exist just like your thoughts exist, just like grief exists, just like joy exists, they have 'isness'.
That we are able to 'know' things we haven't experienced is obvious. Though, its arguable if thats 'really' knowing...I haven't experienced Antarctica, but I 'know' it's there.
But in the absence of knowledge there can be no experience. In fact, in the complete absence of any knowledge there is absolutely no experience. Because without it, there is no experiencer. Just a unitary movement of sensation - sensed. Your perceptual organs do not require the intervention of your memory and it's knowledge of what they contain to function. Not at all. Your knowledge of what is flowing within them is completely unnecessary to their perfect, harmonious functioning. Without your description, based on what you know, there is no experiencer and hence no experience. Because your knowledge of sensation is the experiencer...
Only if 'you' intervene and catalogue, name and describe the movement does experience arise. This is what 'you' do constantly, because if 'you' don't, 'you' cease to exist, and all that remains is Unitary. The experiencing structure fears this more than anything else, the exposure to itself of its own ephemerality, it's own transparency, it's illusory nature, and so creates the illusion of continuity, endlessly stringing thoughts together, utilising memory and knowledge to create experience and hence the experiencer. Ask Ev. He'll tell you. Without this movement, this cascade of reference to your knowledge, all that remains is a perfectly functioning organism in a made to measure environment, with no separation. No Self/Other.
The Universe.
Example 1: When the first audiences were shown Windsor McCay's animations - of mosquitoes, and Gertie the Dinosaur - they believed them to be somehow live action trickery. Real, performing mosquitoes, a real, live action Dinosaur.
People can be so daft.
But - they had no knowledge of animation. None. It had never been seen before. And they were unable to experience it as such. Their brains, aching as they must have been, simply informed them that what they wwere seeing must be real.
Example 2: An anthropological study of the BaMbuti tribe of pygmies who lived, and had lived, for many generations, in thick, thick rainforest tropical jungle, where visibility was less than 100yds, were taken out of their environment, and shown open plains, mountains, that kind of thing.
They were unable to experience perspective. They simply did not have it. They could not tell what Mountains were. No description. Clouds? What? Beyond their experience. But the most interesting thing, to the study, at least, was a distant herd of buffalo. The MaMbuti saw insects. Becuase they were so far away, and their knowledge did not include perspective, they saw insects. They became agitated and itinerant when the anthropologists insisted they were large animals. Upon being driven up close, the MaMbuti wigged out, and accused their anthropologist companions of sorcery.
They were, you see, unable to experience that which lay outside of their knowledge. Until they acquired more. The knowledge of their time. |
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