Letter #33: Knowledge vs Truth
Trekking in the Annapurnas, Pokhara region, Nepal
Dear Friend
I start this week’s Letter with a necessary mention of caveat emptor! ‘Buyer’ beware…
As we get towards the end of this Letter, you may find that you simply don’t agree with me, that I’ve made some errors in my interpretations of life, and that is of course fine!
My purpose, as always, is to trigger you into your own thoughts and discernments and understandings about our world. What I’m writing about today is a very difficult aspect of human life, albeit one central to our human existence, to describe in language. However, my aim is to help you make greater sense of yourself and your world and your place in this world.
Therefore, here is a quick pre-reading task for you before you read on.
What do you think the difference is between knowledge and truth?
Have a ponder and then read on.
“Knowledge is power, lack of knowledge is lack of power.”
~ Dr Bruce Lipton
Let’s play a game. If you don’t like games, pretend you are a child again!
Just imagine, for a moment, that such a thing exists as a £1,000,000 bank note… and imagine further that you are in possession of this bank note. Why, you have a million pounds to spend, how good is that! What will you do with it?
Let’s continue with our dreamscape… now imagine that you are President of the USA or Prime Minister of the UK for one day… what actions will you take?
(Assume they will not be undone by your successor.)
One more… you are given precisely the amount of money you need to live for one year any which way you would like, without having to go to work. Whatever it is that you want to do, the money will cover it. After the year is up, your job awaits your return, no problem... should you still want it, that is. What will you do with your year of free time?
Oh go on then, just one more! Imagine, following the flick of a switch, that you can instantly be 100% informed on one aspect of our world. What would you like to be fully informed about?
What is learning?
I have done a particular workshop for several different groups of teachers or educators. The theme of this workshop is Task-Based Learning, a teaching methodology which motivates, inspires and empowers students to love learning and to master the skill of learning. It also means the teacher loves teaching, and is always learning themselves.
After a short introduction and fun start to the workshop, I ask for two volunteers who come to the front (all participants are sitting in a U-shape, thereby meaning everyone can engage in eye contact and facial interaction with everyone else).
I give one of them a smallish container of sand, and I ask the other volunteer to hold out their hand, or both hands together. There are four stages to this activity, which in order are:
hold out one hand flat, with fingers apart
hold out one cupped hand
hold out two hands cupped together
hold out two hands cupped together again.
Each time I ask the volunteer with the sand to pour some sand into the other person’s hand/s. Can you imagine what will happen to the sand in each case? It goes like this:
most of the sand falls to the floor, with just a little bit captured by the hand
all the sand poured into the hand is captured within the hand
all the sand is captured within the two hands, and, of course, there is more sand captured this time
we repeat #3, but I now ask the sand volunteer to keep on pouring, even when the two hands are filled, meaning extra sand falls to the floor.
I now ask the others what they just saw, and as a group we recall each of the four stages, and what happened in each.
I then tell them that the sand represents the knowledge that the teacher wants to teach to his or her students. I put them into pairs to discuss what they can deduce about attention and learning in each of the four stages we did with the sand activity.
You might like to think on that yourself before reading on.
Knowledge is transferred from person to person
In traditional education that you will have experienced during your schooling, the teacher ‘hands over’ the knowledge for you to memorise.
In my field of student-centred learning and teaching, they talk about this being the jug and mug approach: the teacher pours the jug of knowledge into the mug in your head as you passively receive it. There is very little actual learning going on.
Pretty much the only thing you will do with it is retain the memory of it long enough to pass the test or exam that will be checking up to see how good a memoriser you are. However, if you were so bored during the lessons you may well have spent much of your time daydreaming, and then really struggled to pass the exams.
What we can say is that the teacher gives you the informational input - the knowledge to be memorised - and whatever you retain is your intake. Often the intake is a fraction of the input due to the boring nature of the knowledge, and the boring nature of sitting in your chair in rows and columns, unable to actually DO anything, and having to just sit there quietly.
In real learning, if there is no attention there is no learning. If the teaching is drab and dreary, and/or the topic matter is boring or too difficult for you, you will find it really hard to pay and maintain attention. Little is learned or understood.
I might add that teachers (and parents) think that input = intake, that whatever the teacher teaches should all be learned and understood by the students, regardless of the teacher’s behaviour and ability to ‘teach’.
This is definitely not so!
Yet, when students struggle to learn or understand, they are blamed, or made to feel stupid. The adults—the teachers, the administrators, the curriculum writers, the parents, the political appointees—will never look at themselves and ask what their role in this anti-education is. Much easier to just blame the children.
This is a terrible thing for children, and has long-lasting negative consequences that can stay with them for their whole life.
In our sand activity, the sand is a metaphor for input and intake, while the sand pourer is the teacher, and the sand catcher is the student…
if you are daydreaming most of the time, your attention is elsewhere; you will derive very little intake from the teacher’s input, and most of the sand slips through the fingers… most of the informational input slips through your brain
if you are paying attention for a short time, you will catch most if not all the teacher’s input, giving you a full hand of sand… most of the teacher’s input becomes intake in your brain
if you are paying attention for a longer time, you will catch even more of the teacher’s input, giving you two full hands of sand… and your brain gets even more intake
if you are paying good attention, but too much sand comes your way from the teacher, it will overflow from your hands… your brain has received too much and won’t be able to process all the input; the teacher has overestimated things.
Attention is vital! Ability to process and understand the information is then the next step of the cognitive work required of learning something. Your brain has a natural capacity for workload, and if you go over that you will struggle. I’m sure you’ve exhausted yourself with too much brain work in the past!
(I’ve personally put in a request to God that when I come back in my next life I want to be a gardener because I love nature and the great outdoors, but more importantly so that I have a non-brain job - my whole life has been about using my brain, I want a rest from this next time around!)
Let’s extend our understanding of the true learning process by now assuming we were on the third option, namely you received a goodly amount of sand in two hands, or, your brain has now grasped most of what the teacher transferred to you by way of informational input, usually knowledge. Your intake nearly matches, or does match, the teacher’s input. Congratulations, you now have some knowledge or information you previously didn’t know about, and it makes some kind of sense to you.
But now what? What are you going to do with all this sand? You’ve got the sand, the knowledge, but unless you do something with it, it’s just going to sit there in your memory.
Well, we can make sandcastles, we can make some glass, we can use it to create a flat underlay before laying down some tiles in the garden, or we can mix it with other stuff to make concrete. If you want to think outside the the box and get creative, then I’m sure you can add some other uses for the sand.
This third stage of learning (#1 attention +input >> #2 intake) is the ‘doing stage’, where we actually do something with the sand, and is called output.
This is how it works with a meaningful learning of knowledge or any other kind of information. What we really want is to understand it for ourselves so that it’s useful to our own life. And that means using it, doing something with it, in some way. We need to apply what we have just learned to our own life and in this way we can make full sense of it. Through the output activity our understanding deepens.
This third stage of output is really the key to learning, where we gain an understanding and engage in the process of building up our intelligence and wisdom. You can do something with the information or knowledge with your mind (eg have a discussion about it with other people), or actually do something physically with it, doesn’t matter which… this is you proactively applying the intake, and in this doing you gain the deeper understanding.
It is also in this doing that the learning experience becomes really motivating.
Understanding is personal and unique to you; knowledge itself is impersonal and external, it comes from out there, and is handed on between people.
What you understand about something can be enhanced, adjusted, or completely changed at any time during your life. It is fluid, flexible and marks your current relationship with the knowledge or information. Knowledge itself is fixed, permanent; on its own and without any activation, it is of little use to us.
Your understanding and application of knowledge and information gives you your relationship with the world. This is super important to grasp: hardly anybody ever describes this learning process because hardly anybody knows about it!
Schools do not care about understanding, they are only focused on the transfer of what they call knowledge, and they choose the knowledge that you are to memorise, and you get no choice in the matter. So if it’s irrelevant, boring, or too difficult, tough. Your intake may be quite minimal compared to the teacher’s input. And if this is the case for several years (and it is)… then what a waste of time!
But it’s worse. Because we don’t get the output stage, we never get to see how this knowledge or information fits our own world, how it works for us, what it can do for us, etc etc.
(This has extended consequences: we don’t really get to learn about our own world much at all. This means we don’t really know who we truly are… until or unless we proactively educate ourselves.)
And it does get even worse… what if the knowledge is actually just ideology or beliefs masquerading as knowledge? As children we will assume that the teacher is not in the business of lying to us, and trust them that this is the knowledge. But even then, the teacher may themselves think it’s knowledge, when it could in fact be wrong.
Let’s look at the broader meaning of information. We find there are different types: for example, we have knowledge, opinions, beliefs, facts, ideas, memories, stories, processes. Then there is the nature of information that is shared: true information, misinformation, disinformation, wrong information, censored information, propaganda. There is also the intention behind the giving of information: to indoctrinate, to manipulate in some way, to educate, to share, to entertain, to learn for ourselves by seeing what others think of it, and so on.
And while it’s a topic for another day, there is how our brain actually discerns the incoming information, or the input, thereby converting it into intake, which itself influences our output.
If there is any.
If we are merely accepting ‘knowledge’ from another person without challenging it in any way, without doing something with it, without verifying what it means to us, then there is no output. We are depending on them to be correct.
Knowledge vs Truth
So we now come to the Letter’s title to wrap things up for this week. There are lots of misconceptions about ‘truth’ and even ‘knowledge’. They are different things, and knowledge—which we might expect to be true, or a fact—can be pretending to be knowledge in the manner of wolves in sheep’s clothing. Often what we might accept as knowledge is in fact an opinion or, worse, ideology, or somebody’s beliefs which they hold to be true and factual.
We allow ourselves to be misinformed. That we do this is down to our schooling, which you know by now is a hot topic of mine.
Truth, on the other hand, at least so far as I’m concerned, is a personal affair. I may be wrong, but after thousands of hours of reflection on my own, and discussion with others, over many years I am sharing my understandings.
There is no ‘the truth’, no ‘existential truth’, only ‘my truth’ or ‘my understanding’. But when I say ‘my understanding’ this is equivalent to ‘my relationship with the world’.
It may be that you hold the same understanding and therefore what is true for me is true for you. We can easily share the same truth, but the vital distinction is that truth includes the subjective element of a human being’s relationship with it, via that human being’s understanding.
I value understandings much more than knowledge. I feel that wars and conflicts in relationships disappear in a world that places greater emphasis and importance on understandings than on knowledge. Knowledge, and just accepting knowledge as passed onto us, denies us individual human beings any say in it, denies us our subjective relationship with it, and therefore with our world.
Let’s elaborate a bit. I am also thinking that I will return to this topic next week as it’s so important. I want to try and start bringing this Letter to an end.
Remember from our above discussion, knowledge stands by itself, it is external to us and requires nothing of us, other than to know it or not know it. You are personally irrelevant to the knowledge you may acquire, same for me.
Polar bears live in the North Pole, but not in the South Pole.
Ice melts in temperatures above 0 degrees centigrade.
Football is a game played with a round ball, and the objective is to kick or head this ball into an area we call the goal.
Russia is the biggest country in the world.
Giraffes are carnivores.
We might call these items of knowledge ‘facts’. Are they true or not? Yes, they are true. Well, as you will have noticed, the last one is not true, it’s an erroneous fact, presented as knowledge or as a fact. But the person got it wrong.
Giraffes are amazing animals with their super long necks, and they move rather gracefully considering their size and strange shape.
Monkeys are great fun to watch.
Thailand is a country that gives me more freedoms in life than in England, the country I was born and brought up in.
Covid was a huge crime against humanity.
School systems worldwide are anti-health, anti-human, anti-love and damage 99% of human beings and the whole of humankind.
Humankind is in an existential crisis, heading towards its own self-destruction.
Now, 1-3 could be said to be personal opinions and cannot be declared to be knowledge. But they are also my truth, based on my own observations and reflections, gleaned from my own direct experiences. They are most certainly true for me. If you happen to agree, then they are your truth too, and we share the same truth.
But this truth takes us beyond mere knowledge, for it is gained from our own relationship with the world. It requires our own involvement, and is that not what human life is supposed to be about? Are we just to be that mug being passively filled up by the jug which decides everything??
Now, with 4-6, these are true for me, based on my discernment and interpretations and reflections. I cannot absolutely guarantee to you they are true, and there will likely/certainly be others who disagree with me.
However, I am completely satisfied for myself that these are truths in the world. These are my understandings. Remember, understanding is fluid, flexible, and if information comes to light to show me clearly how I’m wrong, then that’s fine, I have no ego wrapped up in it, I will adapt or completely change my understanding and arrive at a new truth.
The reason my ego has no agenda in this is that in my life I view understanding as the energy of liberation, whereas knowledge can be slavery, because when the wolf of ideology comes along dressed up as the sheep of knowledge we have a potentially dangerous situation.
So a problem will arise if I view my truths as ‘facts’ or ‘knowledge’. If I think this way, then I will take myself to be right, and take you to be wrong if you disagree with me.
And that’s where so much of our conflict and division and argument and relationship breakdowns arise from, especially in more recent times, thanks to a woeful schooling and the advent of social media. People easily confuse facts and knowledge for truth and understanding.
I am actually an advocate for social media, but we have much to learn about it and to adapt our lives so that it complements our wellbeing instead of compromising it. We’ve barely even had it for a generation, so let’s give ourselves a chance!
If we have a full discussion on 4-6, I will of course share my reasons for my understandings, give support, show my logical deductions, offer you sources of information you may never have seen before, and so on.
The key is that I am not presenting 4-6 is a fact or fixed knowledge to you or anyone.
I will return to this topic next week. I want to read my Letter a few days from now and see how much, if any, I want to change or just to elaborate on it! I am clear in my own mind about things, but it is indeed hard to get this down into language.
Let’s finish off where we started.
There is no power without agency
So the brilliant Bruce Lipton often says ‘knowledge is power, lack of knowledge is lack of power’, and I totally agree with him. But if I’m to get really fussy, it needs expanding upon.
Because, as we have discussed, knowledge—and we used the sand metaphor for this—can be transferred from person to person, but on its own, sitting around doing nothing, it has no power, no force, no energy, no nothing. It’s just what it is, knowledge. It is benign.
The power that knowledge carries with it only comes to life and only influences life when a living being/entity acts upon the knowledge. Power in our human world only does anything when the human being acts on something to create power. Let’s have a look at this. And knowledge is not the only source of power.
In our game at the outset of this Letter, I asked you to envisage four scenarios and what you might do. Each of them in order represented the power of money, political power (backed up by state apparatus, such as military, police, law, media), the power of time, and the power of information.
I look at using money, using authority, spending time and the flow of information is the true power forces in our human world. Either we do it wisely, or not.
So if you didn’t spend your million pounds, if you didn’t change anything while president, if you didn’t do anything with your extra time except lounge around for the full year, and if you didn’t do any learning, then this money, political authority, time and information remained benign and created zero energy.
Their power is only activated when we use them.
What we do with money, authority, time and information could be for positive or negative outcomes.
But it’s important to realise we should not blame any of them when negative outcomes arise. It is human beings who do good or bad things, and we should focus on our actions and the actions of all human beings.
Let’s finish with Bruce’s quote, because he’s so right: if you have knowledge then you have the potential power to do so much good, but you still have to act upon your knowledge, which we said was the third stage of learning, the output. And that means you need understanding of the knowledge, and you need to refine your understanding by applying it to real life situations.
When information flows, energy flows.
Whereas, if you don’t have a certain piece of knowledge, you have no chance of understanding it or using it to benefit you in your life or to benefit others.
We are moving out of The Industrial Age and into The Information Age, and we have seen, with the utmost visibility since 2020, that ‘ignorance is bliss’ is no longer true, and in fact ignorance in our time is downright dangerous. Many have paid the price of their own life since 2020 for not knowing how health works in us human beings.
Knowledge is power, lack of knowledge is lack of power. And you better learn and understand knowledge pertaining to health and wellness!
Understanding (acting beneficially upon the knowledge) is empowering, that is, you fill yourself with powerful energy.
Learning (reflecting upon one’s acting upon the knowledge) is liberating.
And freedom is our highest calling.
And truth?
Whatever is, is, whatever happens, happens. And that’s the truth of it all. Either you know it or you don’t. Haha!
Until next week, all the best.
Philip
