Knowing it all

I feel uncomfortable when meditating mystics claim that they have achieved omniscience. They presumably have some special meaning for the word. It literally means all-knowing - and not even Wikipedia claims that.

So what does Wikipedia have to say about omniscience? Aha – since March 2011 “This article needs additional citations for verification”. But it has some interesting ideas anyway -like the distinction between:

• inherent omniscience - the ability to know anything that one chooses to know and can be known, and
• total omniscience - actually knowing everything that can be known.

Total omniscience does not make sense in that there is an infinite amount of stuff that can be known but, to survive, any given individual will need to know only a tiny amount of it. And is it nature or nurture that is responsible for depositing the infinite knowledge bank in a particular mindbrain? I cannot imagine why such a system would have evolved.

It might be useful from a socio-political point of view to imagine that there is an omniscient and omnipotent, supernatural, father-figure as the agent behind acts of God. That line of thinking is the stuff of myth, magic and the divine right of Kings. There has been and still is a lot of it about but it now seems old fashioned and childlike so I will pass on.

Inherent omniscience is ‘the ability to know anything that one chooses to know’. So what might someone choose to know? There is a continuum of possibilities with parochial pragmatism at one end and cosmopolitan abstraction at the other.

Parochial pragmatism involves fitting into your culture and having your basic needs met. You go along with your group’s myth and magic story and take pride in being normal. Salt of the earth cannon fodder in the hegemonic system.

Cosmopolitan abstraction comes in three age related flavours:

• Mildy sceptical and radical, especially when young;
• Strongly critical of the status quo and supportive of reformation, especially when middle aged;
• Acutely aware of what goes on in your mindbrain and knowing that you wear mind forged manacles, especially in the wisdom years.

The first two options involve elementary thinking. There is fine tuning within the pre-existing, cultural paradigm. This is not what I would call omniscience.

The third option is transcendent. More than a change of gear there is a change of vehicle or perhaps the realisation that there is nowhere to go. Present moment, wonderful moment.

I was free to choose to sit quietly to notice what I notice and to think about thinking. Stop the mind from wandering. Focus. Flow. Flourish. The unconscious is constantly churning and dropping mental stuff into the attention centre. Short stories appear and I post them to a blog. Pebbles in other emerging ponds.

Mindfulness makes it possible to know all that matters to be known. It facilitates both WHAT to know (ontology) and HOW to know it (epistemology).

Changing Minds – Yoh!

“That man thinks too much, such men are dangerous"