When a goal orientation prevails, and ‘cognition’ is put to the use of the ‘self’, ‘cognition’ is typically directed toward ‘explanations’ that are put forward to account for the results of observation in terms of the established ‘order’. Explanations indicate why something happened and even why it could not have happened otherwise. KTS 414
Reading the underlined phrase above, I wonder how difficult it is to move from a first level perspective of knowledge to a second level one. Trying to explain something seems always cognition put to the use of the self.
Therefore, in the light of a deeper perspective I can say that allowing other possibilities, not knowing can shine through. My understanding of not knowing is not knowing the pattern, not knowing the established order, or in other words not following the pattern or the drive to repeat it.
Thus, being able to see the self in operation or see the drive to repeat a pattern, can be considered a deeper perspective or a non-first level perspective of knowledge. Being able to see the self I operation opens the possibility of the choice of following the pattern or not.
I am sure I have in my life many situations in which I have the opportunity to choose to follow the pattern or not, but simply I am not aware of all of them. But, I can tell some of them that can mean a gateway to a deeper knowledge.
Once I was insisting in have a task done by other person, an all of a sudden I realized that the insistence was because I was not sure I could do the task in the best way. When I realize this I dropped the other person and did it with good results.
The other day I was in a meeting and when a question came up I felt a strong drive to speak what I knew. When I realized it I simply became silent and heard an interesting answer from another person.
And also, feeling a strong will to continue reading my book but stopped to listen to a person who wanted to speak and fell she was not alone.
When choices are made with an open mind, the heart becomes warm and fulfilled.
Hi Eliana,
I agree with both your original post (in which hesitations in conditioned action led to a recognition that others are also able to carry the ball across the goal line) and your PS (in which you explicitly see “knowledge” as the sponsor of how we discover “patterns within experience” and recognize them “as the manifestations of knowledge”).
Changing how we see things, how we personally behave, and how we interact with the larger inertias in our society (if that is even possible)–all feels like one concern. As in the Mahayana path, the issue arises: can our individual realizations (of the limited agendas of our individual selves) help heal the broader inertias of our world (and thereby benefit everyone)?
A perspective in this weeks TSK reading felt hopeful to me. In pages 240-242 of the original TSK book, there is a striking invocation of the “continuum” that embraces both lower and higher knowledge. Although our individual selves are stuck in a lower perspective, a higher knowing is as close as the knowing that manifests in both our world and our subjective realtionship to that world. Since “our world” seems to be heading off in a wrong direction at tremendous speed, it is reassuring to realize that we don’t have to deny, resist, or combat forces too powerful to be overcome. An entry point is available in the recognition that “it is all just lower knowledge” which is in turn on the same continuum as higher knowledge. Accessing a higher knowing that is already present in what is feels so much more hopeful than feeling that the fate of our world is in the wrong, uncaring hands.
PS: Real access to knowledge seems to depend on a more basic intelligence that discovers the patterns within experience and recognizes them as the manifestation of kowledge. KTS 294
Discovering the patterns within experience, we recognize them as the manifestation of knowledge.