how far can you see?

“Only as high as I reach can I grow, only as far as I seek can I go, only as deep as I look can I see, only as much as I dream can I be.”  – Kevin Ravn

Photo by Esparta

Knowledge is Power – the more awareness you have, the more capable you are of surviving and succeeding. Now we can turn things around and say: Lack of Knowledge is lack of Power. When we think of something to be true we are basing our belief on the information and the perception over it. In other words we are limiting our powers because our individual “truth” is limited. Ingo Swann has a wonderful essay on awareness, perception and individual realities and here is a small excerpt:

Individual “realities” are easy enough to perceive on their surfaces, so to speak, generally because most people will tell you what they are. But otherwise those “realities” are made up of a number of complex factors. Thus, any discussion of individual “realities” requires the drawing together of various elements that can, in some general way, be thought of as relevant to the formation of individual realities.

Individual realities are usually seen as meaningful and important by those who hold them. These “realities”  are obviously erected out of mixtures of direct experience of what one encounters in life and various kinds of information packages one has taken on board, mentally adapted to, or socially conditioned with, etc. What is not so obvious about individual realities is that their psychodynamic functioning tends to set margins that contribute to two factors.

The margins, in some psychodynamic way, limit the parameters of awareness and perception to those that fit within the margins; and, conversely, the same margins therefore must somehow psychodynamically exclude, or desensitize, possible other awarenesses and perceptions that do not fit.

Thus, it can be thought, on the one hand, that awareness and perception of something makes it possible to acquire, recognize, and realize information about it. On the other hand, absence of awareness of the something makes perception of it impossible, and, therefore, any information pertinent to the un-perceived, so to speak, cannot be recognized as such.

In any event, it would seem that awareness, perception, and information somehow go hand in hand, so much so that if one of this trio is deleted, the other two delete also. This trio is therefore mutually interactive, and so they altogether constitute some kind of SYSTEM.

Most have some idea of what a system is. But what is not generally realized is that an individual biomind is entirely composed of various kinds of interacting systems that are incorporated into the systemic whole of its life form. It is thus possible to assume, for hypothetical consideration, that awareness, perception, AND information in-take and out-put, are composed of specializing systems within the greater systemic whole of the biomind.

Reality is what one thinks it is WITHIN the contexts of whatever information one is utilizing to mind-dynamically construct what are but tailored versions of “reality” – which are built out of versions of information – and which information can consist only of available information.

As it would be, then, non-available information cannot be incorporated into the versions of realities largely because if it IS unavailable there can be no awareness of it.

[ …] outside of everyone’s individual realities there exist great numbers of additive information packages that can be pointed up. And, if seen suitable at the individual level, they might act to expand various margins of awareness and perceptions. 

“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.”  – Confucius “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.”  – Confucius

At least part of the meaning here is that if real knowledge activates and contributes to empowerment, the extent of one’s ignorance could contribute to one’s depowerment.

As another example, the somewhat older contemporary of Confucius, the venerable Lao Tsu labored to point up (via the eighty-one chapters of his TAO TE CHING*) that clear-cut thinking based in the “laws” of real phenomena leads to natural activation of empowerment.

If this would be the case, then non-clear-cut thinking based or trapped in ambiguities would not yield very much regarding empowerment.

To be continued….

*you can download a version of the TAO TE CHING from my Boxnet shared files from the homepage of this blog. 😉