Do we know more than we can use?
“If knowledge outweighs being a man knows but has no power to do. It is useless knowledge. On the other hand if being outweighs knowledge a man has the power to do, [but] the being he has acquired becomes aimless.”
“And knowledge and being must not diverge too far, otherwise understanding will prove to be far removed from either… understanding grows only with the growth of being.”
These lines from P.D. Ouspensky pressed upon me when first reading In Search of the Miraculous.
A deep friend of mine reminds me of the difference between knowledge and being. He left school at 14, and eventually became an actor, studying Shakespeare. But his formal schooling was abandoned early in favor of real world experiences. Up to today, he has no television and does not seek the “news.” He had difficulty with test questions for his citizenship about who was vice president and branches of government. He has more than enough knowledge to navigate the world, but his being is equal to his knowledge. What knowledge he has, he puts into practice.
Can we be what we truly know?
We can know that negative emotions, for example, destroy our inner fuel for hours or days at a time. Fuel that we need to reach higher states. But who among us has the being to avoid their expression?
We know much about the human body and its eventual decline. Our knowledge is a few clicks away on the Internet for this and much more. But can we face the death of a friend calmly? Can we put our own affairs in order and live each hour in a state of readiness for anything?
How to rebalance the difference between knowledge and being? There is no quick answer. It helps to read less, read only what is essential to the task at hand. To avoid unnecessary exposure to media. To not consume more than we can use, not just intellectually, but also in other centers.
As Gurdjieff said, “Sin? Sin is what is unnecessary.”
An aim for the New Year
Increasing our being is possible. We can pose the aim to “do” less and “be” more. To be more quiet within, more capable of receiving impressions from the world around us.
Perhaps all our work is to see what is actually in front of us. To be right here. As in this from T.S. Eliot:
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
–Four Quartets, Little Gidding
Rowena Taylor is one of the editors of FourthWayToday.org. Prior articles can be seen at https://fourthwaytoday.org/author/rowena/, such as this one: