2 results for (book:ur2 AND session:705 AND stemmed:knowledg)
You are well acquainted with the exterior method, that involves studying the objective universe and collecting facts upon which certain deductions are made. In this book [Volume 2], therefore, we will be stressing interior ways of attaining, not necessarily facts, but knowledge and wisdom. Now facts may or may not give you wisdom. They can, if they are slavishly followed, lead you away from true knowledge. Wisdom shows you the insides of facts, so to speak, and the realities from which facts emerge.
A cat playfully killing a mouse and eating it is not evil. It suffers no guilt. On biological levels both animals understand. The consciousness of the mouse, under the innate knowledge of impending pain, leaves its body. The cat uses the warm flesh. The mouse itself has been hunter as well as prey, and both understand the terms in ways that are very difficult to explain.
(Any role that consciousness might play in such biochemical processes isn’t considered, of course, nor is there any sort of mystical comprehension of what we’re up to as creatures. No matter how beautifully man works out a hypothesis or theory, he still does so without any thought of consciousness coming first. Through the habitual (and perhaps unwitting) use of naïve realism, he projects his own basic creativity outside of himself or any of his parts. He also projects upon cellular components like genes and DNA14 learned concepts of “protection” and “selfishness”: DNA is said to care only about its own survival and “knowledge,” and not whether its host is man, plant, or animal. Only man would think to burden such pervasive parts of his own being, and those of other entities, with such negative concepts! Jane and I don’t believe the allegations — in its own terms, how could the very stuff controlling inheritance not care about the nature of what it created? I’m only half joking (is there a gene for humor?) when I protest that DNA, for example, doesn’t deserve to be regarded in such a fashion, no matter how much we push it around through recombinant techniques.15
(I continue my projections by writing that to a molecule of DNA the conventional notion of evolution — could such an entity grasp that idea, or even want to — might be hilarious indeed, given its own enhanced time scheme.17 Actually it would be more to the point if perhaps with the aid of hypnosis and/or visualization, we tried from our giant-sized viewpoints to touch such minute consciousnesses with our own,18 and so extend our knowledge in unexpected ways. Some probable realities might be reached — potential conscious achievements that I think are already within the reach of certain gifted individuals, Jane among them.19 Jane and I would rather say that the variability among humans [or the members of any other species] at the molecular level is a reflection of Seth’s statement that we each create our own reality, with all that that implies.