The Struggle for Knowledge
Why do I think it is important that we struggle for knowledge? This is not to be confused with stopping others from becoming knowledgable or limiting access to knowledge, but more to do with the abstract. It is a statement suggesting that anything worth pursuing is hard and thus valuable and inversely worthless if it were easy for everyone. Education gives you a more sophisticated view of the world and replaces your old low-resolution, one-size-fits-all theories with a more differentiated and more noble vision, but as the saying goes, ‘If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.” This means it is wiser to teach another how to solve their own problem then it is to do it for them in the attempts to make them self-reliant and autonomous.
You will learn very little from your successes, because the correct moves are seen as matter of fact and therein, passive knowledge that’s temporarily stored in memory. While in failure, on the other hand, is a priceless experience in that it not only opens up the way to a deeper truth, but forces a changed view or method onto the learner. The failure hits you like a spiderweb to the face, an unforeseen obstacle that stops you in your tracks and forces you to deal with the immediate obstacle at hand. It is a new and sometimes profound and therefore memorable experience requiring our full attention. Or worse, it is now a repeated issue that was not resolved in a past experience.
“Fool me once, shame on You. Fool me twice, shame on Me.” -Anthony Weldon
“Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.” -Paulo Coelho
Continually living out experiences and therein, lived-knowledge, goes on to become a spotlight that pours out attention to the world around. This is because a seeker of knowledge is typically more interested in expanding his/her horizons. A lived-knowledge draws from within, proving itself to itself (internal validation) and gains value from concurred strife. The fed experience and therein, fed knowledge goes on wanting to be in the spotlight and absorb the attention of the world around. This is because the one who is fed-knowledge has not yet put into practice the lessons and until then, will be prone to see its value from external validation.
So long as everything goes well, most are seldom unaware of their deeper self-awareness in the materialistic world, and even further along the scale, their self-spirituality. This is not to say that they are more or less of anything, but to point out that under ideal conditions, individuals who are sheltered from struggles (of any kind) can go on for years without knowing how deep the well of their potential actually can go. By exploring our own souls, the powerful spiritual depth and vastness in our psyche, we may discover parts of ourselves we once assumed we knew fully to now be merely the shallow wakes along a shore to a vast and deep lake beyond our perceptions and a much richer sense of self. You would be surprised to know that the human brain uses a lot of psychological strategies in order to distance itself from unwanted feelings and threats, such as guilt or shame, stress and pain. We have to wrestle with our conscious, negotiating boundaries and removing layers of defense continually to expand ourselves, sliding our bare feet along the sandy floor over rocks and creatures towards deeper and deeper waters if we hope to one day swim in the lake of self-awareness and self-spirituality.
Without opposing forces, there then is only one force with which nothing acts upon it. Without an opposition, a questioning or persuasive notion of alternative modes of being, all things that can not last, won’t. Although they can do a lot of damage in the meantime, as a result of continual effort, these things become time-tested and battle hardened truths that rise to the top by way of natural-selection one way or another. No matter how well-intentioned, the censoring and banning on one side will only produce a host of problems on the other side. You have to battle these things out in the spiritual domain, the domain of ideas. You defeat a bad story with an even better story and you invite people to participate, you don’t impose it onto them. It is a pendulum eternally swaying from the dark to the light. The more intensely the light shines, the darker the shadow it casts. It has never been a battle to win, it is an eternal dance. And like a dance, the more rigid we became the harder it will get. The more we curse our clumsy footsteps, the more we will struggle. As we grow, learn to relax, and learn to soften, the dance will get easier.
More abstractly, the brightest light can not know it is bright until contrasted against the darkest shadow. Inversely, the shadow does not emit darkness and is merely the absence, resistance or absorption of light. Based on my experiences, this analogy points to the duality of knowledge given versus knowledge earned as mentioned earlier. Shadows can be casted onto us by a variety of methods - the cuddling of parents or perhaps the censoring regulators of the state. In either case, the individual who rests protected in their shade will grow weaker, their skin more delicate and too sensitive to the direct exposure of the light. They then favor the shade, taking less frequent and less expansive trips away from the shade as not to get burned and in turn, slide towards the unremarkable splendor of false ideals. A spoon-fed softened bite where those within are quick to bark when signs of opposition are near, but rely on the spoon holder as a last line of defense. A fantasy comfort zone where everything can be ‘just and right,’ but to whoms standard? This quasi-utopia looses all sense of importance and therefore meaning or hierarchy which in turn dissolves all natural order.
-Busy Brain