052 - Current Openings #7: The Knowledge Problem

Portals of Perception

Most of us would probably agree that our brains and minds are restless: continually consuming (unless we’re asleep) vast amounts of data and information from limitless sources, sometimes of dubious quality, a behavior that is often the direct result of how we programmed ourselves to think. They usually run on automatic pilot, craving a high-calorie diet of constant stimulation.

We know our body and physical systems will suffer from a diet too rich in the wrong kinds of calories and energy. So too our brain, mind, and higher faculties can’t function near their natural capacity and ability on a diet of ‘junk food’ — knowledge with potent energetic content that can supercharge the brain, but leave the rest of our systems deprived of real mental and spiritual nourishment.

Our freedom of choice as human beings means we are free to fill our minds with toxic and self-destructive patterns and programs, or the knowledge and awareness that feed our natural intelligence and connections to greater universal possibilities. But how do we improve our mental diet?

In the latest chapter of the Portals series “Current Openings: What the World Doesn’t Quite Get Yet”, Aviv Shahar and David Price Francis explore the seven types of natural knowledge that nourish our mental activity and support change and personal growth. Among their insights:

• Unless we are able to source knowledge within ourselves, we are not going to be very good at loving and caring and being compassionate with other people.
• Only humans have a knowledge problem. Squirrels don't. Cats don’t say “What's going to happen when I die?” Everything else in the planetary program is full and complete.
• There are addictions to foods that are bad for us physically, and similarly to ‘foods’ bad for our mental diet, like when we get addicted to provocative headlines created to actually hijack our brains.
• Many may say that you cannot think of anything original, so why try? That’s an abdication of the capacity to live into the fullness of our humaneness as a source of new discovery.
• We have privileged the telescope and microscope over and above the ‘energy scopes’ of ourselves and our natural technology, sometimes with detrimental results.
• You can’t find character-forming knowledge in any app online. How is a young person to realize this unless they are guided to discover their passion and build a character?

This conversation builds on concepts and insights first explored in The Human Predicament and Planetary Program and The Addiction Trap. It is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also, visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

TWEETABLE QUOTES

“So the planetary program is an operating system that converts energy through a plethora of living forms, like the tree, squirrel and humans. And, within that, what we said was that the universal feature that enables that evolutionary capacity that we call program m ability that appears up and down the evolutionary track, then what it does is it really enables all that we see and that the brilliance of this universal innovation is how once a solution is developed, it becomes open source, that coded program is available for all forms of life.” (David)

“If you want to be a person that is ready to discover flow, it means you will have to find what in you is stable and firm, like a rock and lead, that supports the power that wants to be in flow. You need to integrate these polarities if you want to be in flow. You need to be in another part of yourself, very firm. So that’s the provocation we are making, that so much of what we stuff in our heads is truly dead knowledge. Because it is dead knowledge, it is deadening to our natural faculties rather than alive knowledge.” (David)

“So there's that massive difference between the integration that experience brings and then purely mental knowledge, and I think a good example is that real experiential knowledge can be accessed and we can even have a complete life experience of it if it reappears in our presence. Like when a person has gone down for the third time, their life flashes in front of their eyes. What they Googled is probably not flashing in front of their eyes. The act of Googling something that will be there, but the actual mental reference is not hardwired in. So we get this ephemeral, we think we've experienced something, but really, we haven't, and that is a big loss.” (David)

RESOURCES MENTIONED

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