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Writer's pictureSattvananda

The Nature of Empirical Knowledge, Vol 2

Imagine being in the forest, extremely hungry and coming upon a huge poisonous mushroom. By operating from a limited state of awareness, a person may be driven by hunger to eat the poisonous mushroom and die; however, a person who employs wisdom has the awareness to identify the poisonous quality of the mushroom and resist eating it, despite intense hunger.


Such a conceptual model begins to elucidate the dangers of depending on empiricism or the belief system that knowledge, and therefore decision making, comes only or primarily from sensory experience.


With intuition, like the magic found in the animal kingdom, thinkers can wield a special magic in their own favor. Like the birds driven by instinct to fly toward warmer lands without GPS, or like the animals who can magically sense forest fires or earthquakes, humans too can be so attuned. Practice generates the confidence necessary to defy our baked-in dependence on empirical knowledge. Like a person removing their blindfold for the first time, it takes confidence to explain the nature of possibility to others and it takes more time for others to identify wisdom withheld by the establishment. Eventually, a properly trained thinker can experience true freedom by creating enough confidence to reject what we perceive as the validity of empirical knowledge.


Empiricism

Theory that states that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience

Wikipedia


Definition: noun

  1. The view that experience, especially of the senses, is the only source of knowledge.

  2. Employment of empirical methods, as in science.

  3. An empirical conclusion.


With only knowledge, all we have are useless facts without life or purpose, but when we apply wisdom, those facts suddenly turn into medicine or invention.


Similarly, empirical logic fails to make adequate sense of politics or religion, coming off as mere useless trivia. When we employ wisdom, useless trivia suddenly becomes universal philosophy.


The entire point of politics or religion is to improve our lives through intellectual expansion, by the identification of what we want, much the opposite of what we see in politics or religion today.


Why, then, does there exist such an emphasis on empiricism? Empiricism forms the mental fence holding back our people from roaming free along the pastures of authentic intuition, like the bird who flies south for winter. Supported by wisdom, in addition to mere facts, a properly formulated intuition looks like magic to the average person.


Mastery looks like miracle to the unread. To the millions of followers living life on autopilot, slow-drip empiricism maintains the boundaries between what's possible or impossible. Conveniently, empiricism seems to lack any relation to reality, as continually proven by its own scientific proponents, choosing instead to focus on the confines of perception, from within a limited state of conscious awareness.


In the Yoga Sutras, thinkers rightfully learn to question the nature of perception rather than depend on measurement or other forms of substantiating mentality. Within the plantation of empiricism, thinkers are instead taught to negate intuition itself and replace it with cold, hard facts.


What I have thus described functions like a motor for the establishment, a lifeless machine composed of real people, towing the line of the dominant narrative toward all the things we detest. On one side of the isle, supposed freedom of choice advocates attempt to force innocent people to undergo dangerous and experimental medical procedures. On the other side of the isle, people who claim to be upholding freedom attempt to stop the freedom of choice. Both groups operate from a fundamental contradiction, foolishly thinking they are correct and of a moral high-ground. How?


From a limited state of conscious awareness, cultivated by deficits of empirical knowledge, bad ideas look like good ideas and good ideas look like bad ideas. The trick then becomes evolution of our own thinking by the transcendence of our own perceptions.



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