I’m not sharing “knowledge”. In fact, none of my essays communicate knowledge in the typical sense. I’m sharing encounters with absences of knowledge. It starts with the recognition of the categorical illusion of positive or conclusive knowledge — not the illusion of all knowledge, but the illusion of ever being able to know anything in a final form.

Science itself was built on this categorical realization that its theories do not lead to conclusive knowledge. However, even science seems to have lost sight of this initiating insight.

Or, as I said in an earlier essay: “This is what bothers me about the debate between evolution and creationism. Creationists criticize science as “mere theory.” And science usually stupidly responds by touting all the “facts” backing up evolution. It rarely says, “you’re damn right it’s “only” theory. Theory is what makes science great. We don’t settle on a dogma, on a literal interpretation, on a fixed position. We allow our perceptions to change with discovery. And we don’t believe in a final explanation because actuality exceeds every formulation. We can always learn more.”

The closer we look at knowledge itself, the more contextual and temporary it starts to look, built upon assumptions that are more faith-based or creative than solid. Just like an atom — the closer we look at solid form the more it turns to mostly emptiness and occasional energetic flashes of insight from the void.

New evidence is constantly calling everything into question. What we end up with are provisional structures of thought (or stories or theories), but no final answers. No such thing as Positive knowledge exists. It’s one of the many fairy tales we have swallowed, and it has led our culture towards disaster, as I’ve been discussing in all of these essays.

Most people think we already question things too much. But we’re only questioning specific portions of knowledge. We’re not questioning knowledge categorically. Schools, for instance, never helped students learn to examine the creative or downright fictional assumptions that underlie conclusive knowledge itself.

As I said in another essay, “It’s the rare school…which leaves a student without an allegiance to some fixed position. Most schools teach only a short-term open-mindedness in order to gain, in the end, conclusive confidence in what is “real.” Few schools help students discover a more ineffable confidence in uncertainty, in remaining alert to where conclusions diverge from reality.”

Insights are treated like disruptions that need to be accommodated in a new answer. As if someday we’ll have perfect knowledge of enough little pieces of the universe to weave together a “total picture” of reality. And that assumption underlying our approach to life and learning is not much different than a religious fundamentalist’s insistence on “God’s Truth.”

Yes, insights are disruptions. But they aren’t necessarily “asking” to be placed in a new and improved conclusion (which puts an end to learning until the next disruptive insight, which is a herky-jerky way of seeing the world.

So, at present, we tend to see through our certainties only in flashes. At irregular intervals, holes in the fabric (in the yarns) are pierced here and there by these insights. And we seem compelled at present to re-connect these holes (or dots) in our theories, in order to restore confidence in the fabrications and blanket assumptions to which we still cling for security.

And by now, the yarns that filter perception are patchwork quilt. Now all the patches – all the efforts to hide anomalies and contradictions as a way of extending the life of a yarn – are disintegrating faster than they can be repaired.

For many, this can induce panic at the loss of certainty, and the exposure of an emptiness behind most forms of identity. This panic tends to make people too intent on restoring the illusory “greatness” of the old fabric in some regressive revolution. That’s why some don’t want to teach our children the full and honest history, because it would undermine the illusion they’re trying to preserve.

And all the various top-down proposals for controlling life are doing the same basic thing. Maybe the new answer is socialism (my preference, given the alternatives), or religion, or communism or fascism or a new capitalism, or a panopticonic AI state run by a self-described elite hiding in some redwood groves in northern California. They’re all driven by the assumption that we need an Answer to life.

In every case, we’re still sticking to the maps, as though certainty was a necessity, when it’s not even a possibility. Or, as if moments of uncertainty (or wondering and learning) were only holes that needed to be filled as quickly and tightly as possible.

And when this certainty-seeking obsession begins to realize its own futility, that’s when the panic starts. There is no more yarn left.

But maybe panic isn’t necessary. Maybe the categorical insight into the limitations of Knowledge itself is no more confusing than what a caterpillar experiences as its cocoon deteriorates. But we’re like caterpillars who keep re-building the disintegrating cocoon of Thought (of rational planning and top-down control) that has (arguably) served us so well in our development till now, keeping us trapped in a reductive phase of development.

We seek insights in science and politics and everything imaginable as if they could provide salvation from what we think of as the chaos of uncertainty. That’s because an insight tends to be associated with a “new idea” (a new fabrication) in the popular imagination. But an insight is mainly an erasure. It’s the negative force that removes a beam from the eyes, and which gives space in which new ideas can form. But the primary force of an insight is the deletion of a false assumption; not the impatient postulation of a new idea or answer.

And our culture has never had a sufficient insight into the fabric of thought itself; only (as I said) into particular forms of that fabric.

So, what is an insight if it isn’t used to fill every hole with a new idea?

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