On The Other Hand…
The other pathway to knowledge would seem less amenable to logical processes. There are times when we simply ‘know’ something. Psychology has tried to tell us it’s because much of our input is subconscious and we’ve picked up cues and hidden data and that has influenced us. Personally I think Edward de Bono has a better grasp of what is happening and Sheldrake and Lipton are providing us with mechanism.
de Bono says, (and in the following any errors are mine - it’s more than 20 years since I read this) the Mind is not the Brain. He proposes a scenario like this…
Imagine every child gets born with a mind that is like an almost featureless plain, stretching off into the distance in every direction. There are some small hills and valleys, but they’re all nicely rounded and hardly more than bumps and hollows. These correspond to the genetic heritage - there’s a valley that predisposes us to using language, to seeing colours, to processing sounds etc.
Now imagine that each piece of data that comes into our sensorium is like rain, falling onto the plain, with the location decided generally by topic. As we grow, the rain will start to alter the terrain. Streams will form, cutting away the ground, Occasional boulders (blocks) will appear, holding back the water by creating dams - eventually a datum will come that fatally undermines the boulder and with a rush of awareness, we have a new paradigm and see the world in different ways.
Over time, our landscape comes to look nothing like the gentle rolling plains that were first there. We have deep river valleys, rugged terrain and treacherous cliffs as the things we sense through our lives change our internal landscape.
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