The world of knowledge and information is fascinating when examined.
Let’s begin with children; between the ages of few months up to the age of six – they exist in children’s wonderland; they play games, have plenty of toys. They have at their disposal an open and free yard or garden, in which there is a sandbox and maybe also some trees they love to climb on.
On the whole they experience fun and games which they share with friends with whom they can play social games like: hide and seek, Tag, and a lots of varied children games.
But then when they approach the age of six, their parents approach them with the announcement about the big day; going to school.
And they get there, all festive and dressed up, and soon they realize; the magic wonderland time is over! And it is quite a shock, for it is the complete opposite of the kindergarten; they seat crammed in a long room, in front of then a wooden writing table, and at the top of the class stands an authoritative teacher, she/he are more severe than the friendly kindergarten teacher, and soon they realize that the teacher is there for one purpose: to cram and stuff into them great amounts of information which usually is boring, and not at all not fun, but very quickly they realize: they have no choice here, They must cooperate and obey, and here it is not ended, for when they get home, before playing (which they yearn to do) they have again to fulfill tasks put upon them by the teacher, tasks which come to ensure that the information of about 5 or 6 different subjects – must memorize by completing the tasks which are going to be checked tomorrow, and if they did not do the homework – soon they are going to be treated as bad boy or girl. And the worst is yet to come; the exams, the periodical tests, and if they don’t remember enough of the new knowledge in the exames – they get bad marks which makes them feel that they failed and get the stigma from the establishment, fully supported by their parents.
In one word or another, they enter now and for the next 12 years (at least, as we will see soon) into a pressure cooker, they are becoming exposed to very great pressures exerted upon them by the authorities of school and their parents which fully cooperate.
From now on they are in the information business, they must internalize and memorize incredible amounts of knowledge which they feel has got nothing to do with their real life out of school, And all is going to be measured from now on by their marks, and so, if by the end of the term their marks a low, their parents are going to be called to the high authorities of the school for a telling off session, if not worse: to remain in the same class again (great shame), or even worse still: being kicked out of Scholl, God forbid…
So in one way or another they release that from now on they are becoming stuffed duck, and above all they realize that if you want to be loved and treated like as good boy and girl -there is only one way, you should from now on dedicate most of your time & life to become the house and the storage room for the unending collection of more and more facts and information.
So from the age of six and onwards our life are ruled, governed and dominated almost completely on our ability to learn and learn and learn, more and more boring and unrelated information. Most of this information in the long run, is not going to give us any advantage in our private lives as adults; not with friends, not in love and relationships, not in being able communicate better, to in understand people, not in the wellbeing of our mental and physical health, not as parents and not in our marriage, not in any aspect and quality of our life. In that – it is mostly, nonevent.
In the important aspects of one’s life the huge piles of facts and information is a load that gets forgotten as soon as you leave school. For it is divorced almost completely from the real ongoing life of the individual and from what could make his life meaningful and of value.
Now this is just for starters, because if after school you don’t get registered into a college or university, everyone will look at you as failure, and your prospects of finding a respectable line of work like a lawyer, a doctor, psychologist, engineer, computer programmer, etc. – would be very slim if not Neil. Of we course we all know the successful businessmen, that did not finish school, but like the famous expression: “The exception that proves the rule” is often used to describe a case (the exception) which serves to highlight or confirm (prove) a rule to which the exception itself is apparently contrary”.
The more valued and respected is the aspired line of work – the more years you have to invest in further study, learning and memorizing. The high valued jobs usually will arrange for you a nice salary. A nice house in a nice environment, and this in turn will be an important factor in finding a high quality partner.
But here it doesn’t end, facts and information become a very dominant and present factor in our life. For example if you listen to normal frequent conversation between people, whether they know each other or just met, it is by majority revolving around the exchange of trivial fact and information’s, such as: how much this car costs, what is its advantages, or the very popular subject of: buying an apartment:, how much it costs, how high is the mortgage, where is it located and so on, and if it is a parent is talking about his child that got a prestigious house, they can go on and on describing all the details and facts which are included in the successful purchase.
But not only cars and apartments, facts are surrounding us all over; what is good to eat (in order to be in good health, or to lose weight?) How many exorcise one should do in a week.
All this is called by Heidegger: spreading the Rumer, or the word. And it goes on the lines of: did you hear that? Did you know that? I just read that… etc. etc.
And it is interesting to watch the faces of the people exchanging this useless facts and information; they become full of light and life as though they are now discovering a certain truth and not just another mechanical fact amongst many, that tomorrow will give way to thousands more and will be forgotten.
I witnessed such a conversation between two nurses at a hospital while at work. Patients were waiting, but they were so deeply engaged in the exchange of as many facts as possible about world word two (What started it was the invasion of Russia into Ukraine), and they were so engrossed in what seemed to an impressive flood of facts from both sides, that it seemed that they could go on for hours and hours, it had nothing to do with their work at the time or the patients, it was all pushed aside, in favor of the amazing ritual of endless facts that could not be stopped.
It was highly strange phenomenon to watch, the kind of which most of us witnessed many times. It looked more like a worship of a trance that they were captured in, rather than a friendly conversation. They were worshiping the goddess of information. And this is what is happening almost in every meeting of several individuals: all are taking part with great enthusiasm in this worshiping of exchanging facts.
(This is almost in any communication between people which is not purely professional).
But this is far from innocent exchange of more and more useless fact, for under the surface – there is a fierce completion: who knows more? Who can quote more facts? Do I have more facts than you? Or God forbid maybe you master more facts, can quote more information. And the one who did not manage to master more information than the other – is going out of the communication feeling lesser, smaller, as though he lost in a tournament, those who could show more mastery in more fact go out as winners.
Another good example of the overtaking of information over our life is the great increase in the frequency of news reports and broadcasts; in radio, television, and any internet media – not many years ago news there were restricted to very few newspapers that appeared only once a day, and it was enough, not anymore! Reports in radio and television are so frequent they are appearing almost after every program, and if it seen as important news, it interrupts the program.
Now the main, most respected program of every television channel is in the evening news, which accrue after dinner, when all the family is free and gathered together, and it lasts about an hour, and with the highest most expensive commercials in between. This news program took the place of the main collective prayer at church, it is the worship of everyone.
So it is no longer under our control, we are contorted and are taken over by the new religion, that seemed to be worshiped by all: the religion of information, knowledge and facts.
The understanding, ability to penetrate into the heart of the matter, comprehension of what is going on, having the ability to expose what is behind the public factual mask – not to mention the value that once was giving once to wisdom and wise people – are now evacuated for this growing amount of more and more mechanical information. Every day, we are drowned in it, but we cannot stop. You open television and many programs are Quizzes shows, testing the participants: who masters greater amount of knowledge.
Facts with no meaning, just facts for show off and passing the time – which are not only unnecessary weight on our brain and mind, but is making a kind of a human being which is flat, one dimensional, lacking the ability to discover what is behind the empty talk of facts for facts sake. Shallow and very much uninteresting human being. This is making people with no ability to think for themselves, or evaluate or analyze a complicated situation. The overtaking of so much empty information is making us very practical, technical and mechanical human beings, and anything above the technical level of facts, seems to most people as a waste of time, so much so that the use of the word philosophy became a synonym of abstract non relevant concepts.
So all this information is the king’s new cloth, the mastery of great amounts of knowledge are giving us the illusion that we are fully dressed, because we know so much, but under those imagined cloths we are stark naked. Naked from depth, naked from inner values, naked from the ability to recognize what is really going on between us, and live in a land of worn out cliché, which are used and overused by everyone in the same “passing the Rumer way”
Deep in ourselves we are convinced that our lack of happiness and satisfaction in life – is mainly and only because of knowledge we don’t yet have, and the moment we would have it – our life would improve greatly.
The ongoing factual chatter is there because of a hidden function, and the function is: Not to know, to cover up, to escapes the anguish, and meaninglessness of our existence.
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“I think of the need for more wisdom in the world, to deal with the knowledge that we have. At one time we had wisdom, but little knowledge. Now we have a great deal of knowledge, but do we have enough wisdom to deal with that knowledge?”
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A truly wise man or woman are much much better than thousands of qualified doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists, who are restricted mostly to common general knowledge, that mostly hase nothing to do with the original purpose and reason of why the poor individual turned to them for help at all .
a truly wise man or woman has the gift and ability of being able to penetrated beyond what is irrelevant information that they studied for so many wasted years.
Which at the moment of analysis is always is either completely useless or just distracting and misleading. And instead they can do rather a kind of a quantum leap straight into the core and the heart of the cause of the suffering of the human being that turned to them for help in the first place, fully trusting them because of their credentials of study, training and qualification
The only problem is that in order to qualify in one of the 3 hugely valued occupation he or she had to go through a long and strenuous training by the end of which – if they got the desired certificate of qualification – their original wisdom (if they got any wisdom there at all to begin with…). And the ability above the ordinary to analyses and penetrate into the core of the matter – the long study
becomes ay the end a complete set of mechanical procedures and dead knowledge- which would be complete useless for the poor human in need, and indeed a miracle if any of their original wisdom did not get evaporated and disappearing on this long way of becoming qualified.
Gabriel Raam Quote
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Gabriel