KMbeing

Some people  narrow their minds and limit themselves with what they think is knowledge of “the truth”.  Knowledge isn’t about “truth”. “Truth” can be very different from one person to another.  Knowledge is about connecting personal knowledge to our collective knowledge, then using that knowledge in acting – hopefully, for benefit and not harm.  Knowledge is also about seing knowledge as an ongoing process that is influenced by, but also transforms old knowledge. Knowledge is dynamic and always moving. If we can only see one frame of knowledge (no matter how beautiful or true it might seem from the narrow, limited view) we miss the bigger picture beyond.
Yet for some people they are still chained with trying to stifle knowledge. They refuse to expand their knowledge by only speaking as people of the past spoke. They refuse to think except as people of the past thought.

There’s nothing wrong with knowledge being passed down to us from generation to generation over the course of many, many years. But why do we so often see the words of some person who wrote thousands of years ago as somehow more valid than our own knowledge.  We need to respect past knowledge, but trust our own knowledge today.  Trust our own experiences as we live right here, right now.

It’s unfortunate that we don’t give our own knowledge more credit, and that we stay tied to the thoughts and beliefs of people who came before us.  When we do so, it keeps us from exploring our own contemporary understanding in order to develop new knowledge that we can live by for current social benefit.  And any time we try to live by someone else’s beliefs about what our lives should be like, we do ourselves a great disservice – and we keep ourselves from growing and learning from our own mistakes and successes.

We can learn much from historical knowledge, but that history should help us to develop new knowledge, and not keep us chained to the beliefs and thoughts of people who didn’t have the advantage of many years of the development of newer thoughts and advancements.  Progressive knowledge is about learning from those who came before us by adapting that knowledge to new techniques or policies for social benefit.  Any person or society who doesn’t do so stays stagnant – not progressing.