On 27.04. I get up at 5:30 a.m. because my Kundalini won’t let me sleep any longer. I sit down at my computer and write down what comes to my mind.
What is knowledge?
Knowledge alone is not education. It is a part of education, but education is knowledge + knowing the meaning of knowledge.
You can acquire all kinds of knowledge, but if you don’t know its meaning, then your knowledge is only half-knowledge. When I see the moon, I know that it is a satellite orbiting the earth, that it takes so and so long to do so, that it is made of such and such materials, that it is so and so old, and so on. But what is its meaning? It is too complex to discuss here, especially since it has a different meaning for every living being on earth.
Knowledge without knowing its meaning is like a buoy floating around without an anchor; it has no meaning.
Only when you anchor it in the ground, it gets its meaning, namely that of a boundary marker. Meaning is independent of knowledge. It is something abstract and depends on the observer. For you, the buoy is a boundary marker; for the mussels that have settled on it, it is their home, their habitat.
Or take a splash of blue color in a painting. You know it’s the color blue. You know it’s made of pigment and oil, and you could even measure its thickness and width. You would then probably say that you know everything about that dab of color. The knowledge about the color spot, no matter what physical data you find out about it, is exhausted at some point, you cannot find out more about it. Its meaning however, you must feel! It was put there for a very specific reason, where it is, in the neighborhood of other color dots.
It is there because the painter assigned it a meaning. The meaning was there first, then followed its creation. For the painter it has exactly there and with exactly the qualities, which you found out about it and call knowledge, another meaning, than for you. You can ask the painter why he painted it there and he will answer that it is a part of the sky that he painted. Again you will say that now you really know everything about that spot of color. But that is not true. You now know the meaning that the spot of color has for the painting, but you don’t know what meaning it has for the painter. What did the painter feel at the moment he put it into the picture, and why did he want to paint a blue sky? Why did he become a painter in the first place, it’s much easier to photograph things?
Or take ayahuasca. You know everything about the medicine. Its ingredients, its history, its effects, but the meaning of the medicine is different for everyone. For some it is life-changing, for others it is life-supplementing, and there are also people, very few fortunately, for whom it can be life-threatening. If I have a weak, vulnerable heart, then it has a different, overriding meaning than for the one who takes it anyway. For the person who takes it despite a weak heart, the meaning is probably that he expects to be cured by it. But if he then dies from it, the overriding meaning is to restore the soul to the divine source. One medicine, two meanings. One subjective and one objective.
Meaning is not something you can learn by heart and then file away in long-term memory, because it is mutable.
If the lake in which the buoy is anchored dries up, its meaning changes. If the buyer of the painting hangs it upside down, the blue sky becomes a blue lake and the meaning is now different. And also working with ayahuasca has a changing meaning for each individual. First one takes it for mental healing, then for cleansing the chakras and at some point to connect with the spirit beings of the universe. But it is still the same medicine, with the same ingredients, and it is still prepared the same way.
The meaning is the essential thing. Without the knowledge of the meaning every knowledge is meaningless.
Only if a scientist also feels his findings and thus recognizes their meaning, he knows completely what he has discovered. A scientist who goes to his work without intuition and feeling is a bad scientist. It is true that he „creates knowledge“, but only that. If Otto Hahn had been aware of the importance of atomic fission, he would have destroyed all research results about it. But he was so fascinated by the pure knowledge about it that he probably had not even bothered to fathom the meaning, while it should have jumped into his face.
Knowledge obliges. It obliges to deal with the meaning as well. If a scientist is not able to do this, he has the wrong profession.
