032- The Doorway to Relatedness

How do we know what we know? One of the differentiators of the human species is our accretion of knowledge, in various forms, and our ability to pass this forward. From the great library of antiquity at Alexandria in Egypt, all the way to Google, our species differentiates itself by our ability to aggregate and pass forward what we know. Modern humans are literally swimming through information. Drowning in it, at times.

And yet there is a fundamental distinction be made between knowledge-as-object, as edifice, as thought architecture that is accreted, and knowing-through-feeling.

The heart of this book, in a way, turns on the distinction between I think, therefore I am, and I feel myself, therefore I am. One is knowledge in thoughtforms, the other is the verb of feeling.

The second formulation is, I would propose to you, a more Indigenous view. It regards our purpose in life not as a function of how much knowledge we accumulate, but in our ability to feel kinship with one another, and all of Life, in ever more refined and beautiful ways. As we experience this kinship ever-deeper, our sense of ourselves as individual, isolated, and disconnected islands dissolves into a deeper experience of being part of something larger.