Meditations on the Art of Grasping Reality
What does not stand up to scrutiny cannot be real. ‘What is real?’ is a question worth asking again and again. Not because reality changes. In fact, what is real never changes.
It is important to keep asking what is real because it reveals what is not. One day we might conclude thing A is real. We are convinced it is. Ten years later we look at thing A again and find it has transformed into thing A2.0. It is not unrecognizable. You can still see that A2.0 came from A but you cannot ignore the differences. In situations such as these, what you had thought of as real was an error. You can either choose to discard your notion of the reality of the thing A or you can choose to be irrational. If you adopt the first alternative, you again have two options. You can either give up and prematurely, and most likely erroneously, conclude nothing is real, or you can go about your search again, with a beginner’s open mind.
I used to think knowledge was real. I have devoted a substantial portion of my life acquiring, storing, cultivating, curating, classifying and nurturing knowledge, for myself and others such as students or employers. But taking a close scrutinizing look at knowledge shows you it’s malleable nature.
Then again what I may mean as knowledge is only partial knowledge. Partial in two senses. First in the sense that my…
