Something We OverLook...

There’s something essential about how our species relates with knowledge that we overlook. Something so fundamental (pun intended), that it would change what it means to be human very rapidly were we to discover this hidden thing. The modes of relation we use with what we understand to be knowledge are only a tiny portion of what is actually accessible to us — and the modes we’ve been taught to credential and enact block access to the innate gifts we have long carried.

There are two basic species of learning-ways. One is very self-important, and likes to make endless copies of itself, which acquire the title ‘knowledge’. This way of knowing is the source of what we call machines.

There is another mode doesn’t care about itself at all, but instead actually serves as a transport — its mission is to lead those who interact with it to a direct experience of its sources, and then dissolve to make way for a far faster and more useful transport to arise.

‘Access’ tends to enhance and celebrate our potentials of human unity. ‘Knowledge’ tends to accomplish the opposite, while pretending to be a unifier. I suggest that a different way of relating to knowledge is a big part of what is missing from our human lives and history, and the fact that it’s missing has been the primary source of human atrocity for over 5000 years. It’s the primary source of terror, despair, suffering and peril in our own lives and families.

What would happen on our world if this other way was suddenly commonly accessible again?

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Cognitive Activism: Exploring the Hidden Potentials of Human Cognition

Cognitive Activism begins with the realization that our potentials and problems as human beings have their basis in ideas, and our largely inherited relationship with them. For thousands of years, our species has been plagued by a cornucopia of fundamental errors of understanding, many of which are implicit in our relationship with language and knowledge. These obstacles commonly render our intelligence either largely ineffectual, or openly catastrophic.

Together, we will explore the cognitive evolution of our species, ourselves, and our cultures, with an emphasis on key elements in the human relationship with knowledge and understanding. Employing a novel set of highly effective models, we will discover and directly experience new ways of relating with language, knowledge, and our own intelligence.

The process will involve presentations, group activity and experiment, readings, and role-playing. Our goal will be to establish and experience profoundly active and creative relationships with each other, our world, and knowledge itself. We will learn and develop entirely novel ways to examine and experience meaning and relation, in a nurturing and challenging environment.

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Some topics we will explore include:

Understanding Language and Metaphor • Our Transentient Heritage • Evolution of Biocognition • Evolution of Representational Consciousness • Julian Jaynes / Bicameralism • Alfred Korzybski/Null-A/General Semantics • Mimicry in Culture and Cognition • Lucid Dreaming / Dreaming as Language • Nonordinary / Visionary Experience • Wisdom Traditions • Animal Communication • Contact with Nonhuman Intelligence • Intention and Emergence • Movement as Language • Heroic Activism • Deep Ecology • The Roots of Metaphor and Simile • Mutual Catalyzation of Prodigy • Biocognitive Hyperstructures • Children, Imagination and Knowledge • The Power of Authorization in Human Consciousness • Hypnotism • Applied Poetics • Rhetoric and Sanity • Autopoiesis • The Power of Agreement • Multiordinal Approaches to the Assembly of Meaning from Experience.

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Meetings for this group will be monthly, at a location in the Inner Sunset (SF). Please contact us now if you are interested in participating. Our next meeting is Wednesday, December 10th. Meetings are free.