PARTICIPATORY KNOWING

In the biblical story of the fall from Eden, we traded our place in the garden for a new type of knowledge.  

Perhaps this story is points less to something that happened one time in the past, and more to something we do to ourselves in each moment.

Something, that if we so choose, we can stop doing.

The new type of knowledge is 'knowing as if from the outside'.  And the ancient, more fundamental way of knowing that knowing as if from the outside eclipses is participatory knowing - which can also be described as knowing from the inside.

Our modern world emphasizes a type of knowing that presupposes it is seeing from outside of things.  Our ancestors emphasis of this type of knowing has given us increasing access to power, but come at the cost of an arguably decreasing connection with wisdom.

This way of knowing has brought us power. There is one problem though: knowing from the outside is a hallucination. We are not outside and can not be outside.

"The universe does not exist 'out there' independent of us. We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening. We are participators. In some strange sense this is a Participatory Universe."  ― John Archibald Wheeler

"We elicit what is potentially 'out there' in continuous acts of participation. Participation is of the essence not only in our cognitive acts, but also in our social activities and political endeavors. Tell me what you participate in and I will tell you who you are; and what the meaning of your life is.

We become that in which we participate. As we participate so we become. If we participate all the time in trivial matters, we become trivial persons."  ― Henryk Skolimowski

Many people that I meet presume that other people are a certain way, and if they are perceptive then they can correctly apprehend the truth about an other or others.  

What these people fail to see is that they are unconsciously participating in the generation of their own experience of others.

These people throw away their own power, because they fail to see that they have any.  they are not awake to the process of perception in themselves.  it therefore proceeds according to their unconsious tendencies and emotional repression and scripts.

This is easily demonstrated through a relatively simple thought experiment.  

This presumption fails to adequately account for the mysterious and wonderous complexity of this universe that we are.  

Participative knowing is an attempt to describe