The Consequences of Wrong Knowing
At the outset, to avoid getting too terribly serious, let us make it clear that knowing is open territory and there is no standard by which one’s chosen knowing is “right” or “wrong”. Feel free.
That said, there is a terrible consequence, little known and less often detected to electing to know wrongly, in the sense that chosen knowing serves purposes one wishes not to serve.
Assume, for example that a human being wishes to survive well, achieve success in one or another field,. And be honored by those near to him or her. If he/she then elects to know that he or she is contemptible, the cognitive dissonance ensuing will be deafening. The deafness resulting from that dissonance will make it impossible for the individual to be sensitive to her own choices, intentions, and best affinities.
Face it – personal affinity and intuition are quiet, still voices. Knocking oneself in the headf with a mallet is no way to appreciate delicate chamber music.
Suppose, for a moment, that these quiet, still voices are spiritual in nature – by which I mean simply that they are not electronic, biochemical or force-based but come from within a deeper seat not necessarily part of the material universe. If our heroine or hero – in the course of some life-threatening confusion or other – adapts the reliable, unshakeable but lethal truism that “we are just monkeys” (as one young woman put it) – in other words that the highest nature we have is protoplasmic in character–how deaf will she or he get to those gentle figures seeking a hearing from the “other” haf of her nature?
This is a bit of a joke, because the “otherness”, when all is told and assessed, is more attributable to the solids and spaces of our common material time frame than it is to our individual and infinite natures.
The consequences of knowing not-A while knowing A are uncertainty and cognitive friction, a dissonance in thought itself that is literally painful to the soul. And, naturally, pain hurts (harmful or not). The result – depending on the natural powers of the being and his ability to confront ambiguity – is a flinch, a pulling away from the conflict. This is usually accomplished by electing to know something else such as “I’ll think about that tomorrow” or “Well, in any case, love is certainly a painful experience and should be avoided in the future because I have goals to achieve”.
Some conclusion like that makes it possible to paint the confusion black and walk away, constrained and reduced but at least momentarily free of pain-in-spirit.
Another common example of wrong knowing derives from being given knowing by others. When your mother tells you that you will never amount to anything, it is ill advised to take this knowing on board. Preferable: recognize the inaccuracy of it and the turmoil behind it. Truth is rarely something spoken out of turmoil. If you were to adopt this viewpoint, the ramifications could be sickening, over the long term – an endless career of violent roller coasters in self-esteem and competence, feeling fine and brave in the morning and useless and without value in the afternoon. Of course you could solve this confusion, in its turn, by electing some permanently stupid but robust conclusion such as “I’m allergic to air” or “I’m just naturally manic-depressive and should take drugs for it so I can be a better person”., In this particular jungle of mismatched knowings, with its psychopharmaceutical obsessions, the impact of such cross-knowing can be quite deadening.
Recognize untruth when it is given to you and treat it the way a duck treats water. Even when you are swimming around in it, you don’t have to let it soak in.
