The meaning of knowledge
We live in a world where the boundaries of words and concepts such as truth, information, knowledge and indeed intelligence and creativity are blurring more and more. What has seemed fairly clear and universally accepted for millennia all of a sudden has become relative and almost unimportant. This is a shift that has no real basis in our internal structure which is of course unchanged and the fact that is cannot see its normal reflection in the outside world is a continuous cause of stress for our system, that may well go unrecognized unless we are aware of the mismatch.
At the deeper level, the journey starts with the question: what actually is knowledge ?…For the longest time 2 sides of knowledge were the most apparent. One dealt with describing the beautiful world around us and through repeated observation trying to understand its laws. The other side encompassed the realities that are beyond the matter and for the longest time was focused on the spiritual world almost exclusively. And knowledge was not at all synonymous with information. How many leafs are on a tree is information. What time of year the leafs fall is knowledge. We can think of knowledge as the most meaningful kind of information and which is worth passing on, that can endure the passage of time. It is mostly about laws and important patterns, all imbued with meaning and a degree of collective understanding and agreement.
When knowledge was about the inner or spiritual world, the measure of its worth has been its universality as well as the ideal level of its source. We have all agreed for millennia that knowledge that came from great beings of ideal nature - saints / spiritual teachers / incarnations / etc - was above all doubt. Some questions were raised about the stream of knowledge having passed through many mouths and ears before being written down, and through a number of hands afterwards. Despite that, the universality of the teachings from those sources is obvious. So is their eternal applicability for our spiritual evolution and human fulfilment that can be directly tested and experienced by anyone, especially after Self realization.
Indeed many statements that seem very poetic and/or downright cryptic reveal themselves through our inner sense of pure knowledge that is awakened by the Kundalini. As important is that all true knowledge appears integrated and the material and psychological and spiritual sides do not appear anymore at odds with each other. In the light of the Self we understand their connection with different aspects of our subtle system and gross body as well as the world around us. We start spontaneously veering away from meaninglessness and non-knowledge, both more abundant than ever in human history. And, when needed, through the new awareness in our hands and chakras we can directly verify, individually and collectively, the purity of a certain source or body of knowledge.