Knowing

There are actually many levels of knowing. Hearing, understanding, agreement, empathy, creativity, experience sharing.... They are kind of steps towards change. For to know another person is to be changed.

Our zombie culture started when men and women are used as domestic animals, cogs in a machine, pawns on a board, potatoes on a couch and most recently appendages to tiny touch screens. It's not technology that is to blame but it just makes it easier for temporarily powerful people to control the willing masses. Our innate desire for acceptance, stability, predictable futures and complete risk aversion makes us willing prisoners to half truths and social contracts that limit personal growth.

Unfortunately, this is now normal. We assume that no change is better than the risk of the unknown. People who want, yearn, dream and are haunted by possibilities (like me) are weird, creative types who don't fit in. Birds in cages think flying is a disease. But we can't fly so this analogy is shit right? Wrong because we do fly in planes, balloons, gliders and whatever we invent tomorrow. Caged birds...

If you want to know me, as I yearn to be known, my blog's biggest hint is how much art influences me. I believe all human expression is art. Even the mundane things like language, mathematics, conversation, posture, our stride, smiling, crying.... And there is beauty in all of it. To see this beauty in the best of human kind is my passion.

Because all of it is art, I include pictures and music and (soon) video. I write with the music blaring, with many images floating in my head. Even the formulae (which is correct spelling despite the insistence or our popularity based spell checker) that some memorize as law, inspire me to think about the limits of the assumptions that frame the logic. Passionate people and what they say inspire.

Many scholars though, have lost their passion because it is so easy to make propositions about a slither of knowledge and test it by algorithmic models on fast computers. Universities employ cog-like "researchers" with PhD's to churn out as many papers as possible to increase their international ranking. Is this really a search for knowledge or just safe-guarding a salary?

Religious leaders instead of inspiring the human spirit with the infinite possibilities that an all knowing intelligence created us to seek our potential, instead use gods to limit risk, to instill fear and prejudice. They avoid knowing oneself, let alone a Creator.

Passion for life is what drives me. To know is to embrace this life by sharing all of it with another. We start with the finite beings around us while the Universe points to the infinite. Somehow, the fact I'm writing and thinking about the infinite, makes unlimited potential feasible and worthwhile.

To know.