Category: writings

What is love of “knowledge”?

1. 0  Love of knowledge means to love knowledge for its own sake, without seeking any external or material benefit from that knowledge.

2.0  Such ‘love of knowledge’ is very rare. It is associated with a sense of discovery, wonder, a seeking for truth, a quest for a greater understanding of the universe, a yearning for a deeper perception of reality.

3.0  When such ‘love of knowledge’ is awakened within us, we learn go to beyond the material four-dimensional existence we live in, and learn to see life as a vast, multidimensional universe with infinite possibilities beckoning us.

4.0  With ‘love of knowledge’ is born the attitude of a seeker, an explorer, an adventurer – an individual who wants something beyond acquisition and experience of life.

How to develop this ‘love of knowledge’?

Love of knowledge is developed through four means:

First, love of knowledge is born when we seek to discover the underlying ‘order’ or ‘structure’ beneath life and all we experience.

Second, love of knowledge is awakened, when we recognize that concepts, ideas, words, stories, etc. silently shape everything around us – science, technology, human relations, our thoughts, feelings, culture, society, everything.

Third, love of knowledge comes when we recognize that in the final analysis, what we think determines what we see.

Fourth, love of knowledge comes when we appreciate that the whole universe is the nature of consciousness. Then knowledge becomes nothing but consciousness revealing its contents and secrets to us.

This “revelatory” nature of knowledge is one of the most enticing and beautiful aspects of knowledge.

What is knowing?

Knowing means many things.

At the primary level, knowing means “being aware of” – the light of knowledge dispels the darkness of ignorance.

At the next level, knowing means “recognizing, classifying, naming, relating” – the sense-making function of the human mind that helps us find order and meaning in the world around us.

At the third level, knowing means “engaging with knowledge” – manipulating, shaping, narrating & re-narrating, presenting, communicating – the ability of the human mind to use knowledge as a means for interacting with and modifying the world around us.

At the fourth level, knowing means “going beyond” – the ability of the human mind to seek new possibilities – to go beyond what we ‘know’ already and create new worlds, new realities, new visions of life to be pursued by us.

At the next level, knowing means “evolving our state of understanding” – to come face to face with deeper and deeper truths about oneself and existence – and thereby transform ourselves and our vision of life forever.

Finally, knowing means “becoming” – to know means to realize a new state of being and experience that state in all respects.

Thus, knowledge (seen from these perspectives) provides us with profound benefits

1. It enables us to become “aware” of things – both outside and inside
2. It helps us sensemake the world around us and the word within us
3. It helps us – using knowledge as a resource or a tool – understand and manipulate the world around us. It further enables us to ‘respond’ to the challenges we face and find ways in which we can overcome these challenges.
4. Knowledge helps us go beyond our current reality and create new worlds, new possibilities, new visions of life.

 

Knowledge is that which leads a human being from the “darkness” of being lost in a confusing world, to becoming a creator of his or her own destiny – a creator of new possibilities – a creator of a world beyond that which is known today.

Love of knowledge is therefore the love of this extraordinary freedom that is conferred upon us by knowledge – the freedom to live in the world around us – not as animals but as beings with a greater destiny.

This love of knowledge we all seek when we sincerely desire a life beyond the cage of our sensory existence.

I

Why should everyone perceive value creation?
So that each one feels valuable.
But in order that each feels valuable, one must not only define global “value” but also local/ located creation of value. i.e. each one must feel, we have created great value and I have contributed genuinely to this act of creation.
This is human fulfillment at work.

II

So how to define global value creation?

We have tried out two distinct approachesa.

1. We asked whether value resides in what the customer ‘received’ i.e. I am as valuable as what my customer perceived. This is limited as an approach.b.
2. We asked whether value resides in the ‘act of creation’ – the how? Primarily because human fulfillment is itself a two part journey, one creating value as a group (what the customer received) two, contributing as an individual (act of creation).

III

So the question becomes:
How to combine ‘customer value’ creation with ‘individual contribution to value’ into a integrated definition of value. i.e. value is neither ‘outside’ in the customer’s world, nor ‘inside’ in my mind, it is in the integrated ‘whole’ that transcends both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.
This integrated ‘whole perception of value’, we call enablement – both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ and more….

IV

How to ‘uncover’ or ‘unearth’ this value?
If it is located in the totality of ‘engagement’ (both act of creation and customer value delivered) then it cannot be mechanistically or logically isolated. It is not a product of reasoning. It is a ‘collective act of individualized seeing’.

V

This is what leaders do
They enable “collective yet individualized seeing of an emerging whole”.

VI

This is what every person must do in the world to unfold. Each one a leader. Each one a follower.

VII

It is this ‘collective act of individualized seeing’ that results in 

1. purposive behavior in system,
2. the ‘owning-up’ of responsibility by each individual to a common purpose, and
3. the ‘agreement’ – tacit – among all that each will do what it takes to make it happen.

Why is there so much resistance to a positive, developmental approach to the country and economy?

It is obvious to all of us that the cause of this resistance is a deep self-serving behavior that pervades all parts of our society.

This deep self-serving behavior – a collective selfishness – must be seen in the light of the ideals that this country stands for. Such noble ideals, and so much resistance to living them in our personal lives!

Is this self-serving behavior born of our utter lack of faith in our collective ideals? Does it come because our civilizational ideals have been systematically questioned by the alternative ideals proposed by waves of conquerors over the past 1000 years?

Is this self-serving behavior born out of several generations of slavery and a sense of scarcity and submission that came out of a nation living under the rapacious control of generations of rulers who came to take and not to build?

What is the way forward? The experiencing of abundance through economic growth? The willingness of our intellectual class to examine their own frames of thinking, so that the space is created for new ideals to emerge? And the willingness of a new generation of people to put the past behind them and commit to new ideals?

Is this the shift we need to make?