while taking a quick look at my bookshelves i realized how a single topic can evoke so many different approaches - even colliding against eachother. it's funny how the human mind can rearrange ideas in such a way that even facts are subject to fantasy and history to perspective. so how trustworthy are our historical notions? (i.e. "second-hand" knowledge; passed on and not empirical)

take this for example: from the 3rd to the 16th century, the dominant view held that the earth was the rotational center of the universe. this theory came to be by aristotle and only centuries after dismantled into what we now know as heliocentrism - a completely different model.

so knowledge can be imo, for the most part, a matter of perspective and opportunity rather than fact (or at least the observable fact). although my memory is not the most accurate i recall j.krishnamurti saying that the only knowledge you can acquire by reading - let's say - freud is the comprehension of freud himself and nothing beyond.
on the other hand, all these embedded modern cultural values, religious dogma and just about everything else that diminishes the individual mind into pattern-like thought creates a model in which knowledge like this can appeal to mostly everyone.

so how certain can knowledge really be if it is limited by condition, perception and comprehension?

thanks for reading and sorry for my rusty english, hope you can share your own insights too

It seems Eastern philosophy has been around for thousands of years and is still ever increasing in terms of the correlation between this philosophy and scientific fact. I don't think you can know the answer to that question, everyone will interpret the world differently due to the chemical/genetic make up which deciphers their intelligence, as well as their personal experiences here on Earth. Ultimately everyones journey up the mountain is different but the view of the moon is the same, you can all experience knowledge, communicating it can be done, but its also secondary knowledge, for words are only symbolic of "knowledge", and so, it is of no real use, you can only experience the True Reality and you're free to interpret it however you like, knowledge or not.

Yes, there are some similarities between Eastern philosophies and modern Western science, except that Eastern philosophies were teaching those things for 1000s of years. I think that today science has come pretty far, and that's awesome, the problem is that some scientists think that all that can be known is already known, and that there are only few gaps which remain to be filled and then, voila!

But still...

...I think that Terrence McKenna was right when he said that "nobody knows jack sh*t about what's going on". I have a feeling that all our knowledge that we possess today is just enough to scratch the surface.

I think there is a certain kind of comfort in not knowing that can seem terrifying or uncomfortable to many minds. I think a big part of the psychedelic experience is learning to live in uncertainty. I find it entirely compelling and exciting that we can be so wrong about so much, and that we don't in fact have everything figured out. Life should be a mystery. I hate to make a video game analogy...but here goes:

If you're playing a game, and you've got everything complete, the whole game figured out, everything unlocked, etc...the game becomes instantly boring. It may be fun for the shortest of times, but it quickly loses its point. There needs to remain certain things you cannot do or do not know about the game for it to continue its interest. When people think they have life all figured out, the joy and mystique of it all flies right out the window. Although science essentially maintains the viewpoint that we will never truly know everything, and that knowledge is in a constant state of revision, many of the material-reductionist types don't seem to actively exercise this viewpoint when it comes to the way they typically view their realities. Life quickly loses its savor.

I suppose this isn't necessarily exclusive to the material-reductionist mindset either. If you have a "psychedelic" mindset, and you feel you have everything figured out, the same thing can happen where everything can become boring...only in perhaps a bit more of a colorful way. There needs to be this open-ended kind of view on reality to maintain excitement. The closer together the intervals of time are when revisions to one's world view are made, the more exciting things can be. Of course some people long for a grey, stagnating view of reality out of fear for revising too heavily that which they already believe, and is a big reason for why some people actively avoid psychedelic use because obviously anxiety can be part and parcel of this revision process, but I think ultimately if you want to be as conclusive as possible, it's practically improbable to know just about anything for certain.

Well said Global. Knowledge is an ever-evolving, highly novel process of ever-unfoldment. And Mystery is what continue to spin the ever re/evolving wheel.




I find this here quite a bit here. Well said.

Thats why science isn't fix. It's evolving. You say A, A needs to be make predictions which needs to come true. If someone comes and says A is acutaully wrong, take B, the process starts again. So, you will never know that you really know A or B but you can assume, it's quite accurate. If it weren't like that, we wouldn't have been able to create all the crazy stuff we have.

But others already said this.

You should read the "sherdinger cat" Experiment !! , it proves your point of science being somehow subjective