taking a step back

The last few years were pensive. I realized quite a few subjects of interest were not done justice. I started revisiting these areas. My awareness of the fractal nature of knowledge expanded. A realization occurred to me that brought great sadness: in the hurry to survive, I had overlooked existence. Regrettable indeed.

Thus I decided to fork a new pathway. It was time to go back in time and choose a different path. A more alive direction. A road free from goals, constraints, conditions, expectations. A journey that emerges as one travels; a dimension that opens as one blossoms. It was time to invoke chaos into my life of ‘order’. It was time to start teaching myself that which I wished to learn. It was time to become curious again.

It turns out this was how it always has been. Learning, or rather, grasping is a manifestation of the primal curiosity. This curiosity in turn seems to manifest in all manner of living beings. It has led me to guess that curiosity is a manifestation of life. After all, after everything has been said and done, one can only take a guess, educated or otherwise, at explaining nature, i.e. this prodigious space that one finds oneself in, after birth.

I asked myself the question: if I could go back to the past, what would I tell my past self. Not much I figured, since knowledge is synthesized out of experience; any helping hand would only decelerate my evolution, just as helping a butterfly to escape it’s cocoon is detrimental. I could however leave clues to obtain information, perhaps early access to the then infantile internet. At this moment a profound insight enlightened me: the children of today have the internet! Rearranged: the internet has us. Wake up. The internet has you.

Information is now cheap. Anyone can “google”. Knowledge, however, is not information. Knowing how to know is the real skill. It is the age of meta-knowledge. Teaching never was passing on information; that’s genetics! Libraries (books), and now the internet, are repositories of information. However language presents a barrier. It is the vehicle of knowledge, yet it is not knowledge itself. It merely points to that which is.

Information is the pointer. Technology is the tool. One must dereference the pointer. One must learn the tool. But most importantly one must imagine. Imagination, in my experience, has brought me knowledge. It is the secret key that unlocks Gnosis. Once everyone learns how to effortlessly imagine, they will truly learn how to learn. In the process they will have learnt how to teach themselves.