Here’s to
reclaiming the primacy of personal experience over what we’re told. We have
heard that the Earth goes round the Sun, and it would be unreasonable not to
believe that. But our experience is
of the Sun moving across the sky – ie the Sun going round the Earth. That, in
my book, makes it also true. It is not that the Sun SEEMS to go round the earth, but
that REALLY it is the other way round. No, we have to believe our senses, or
where are we? Both are true, and if anything I think personal experience needs
to be given the greater weight.
And it is
the same with astrology. Statistical testing has repeatedly shown that
astrology does not work, and again it would be unreasonable not to believe
that. That debate, in my opinion, is over. But our personal experience is that
astrology does work, that it is powerful and descriptive and full of strange
and magical coincidences. Both are true, and they are contradictory, and I
think it is good to have to live with such contradictions. They push us to
ponder the nature of knowledge itself. What is knowledge, can anything really
be known in this vast ocean of unknowing in which we exist?
Ignorance is
not so much lack of knowledge as thinking you know when you don’t. When you
think about how much consciousness – or the brain – structures experience, then
what’s REALLY going on becomes all the more mysterious. It’s not surprising
that there are contradictions between different ways of knowing.
Our job is
not so much to push at the frontiers of knowledge, as it is to deconstruct our
natural tendency to think we know more than we do.
Modern means
of knowledge have disempowered our sense of knowing based on experience. It is
the ‘men in white coats’ who know best, who have ‘proofs’. Psychologically I
don’t think it is much different to the medieval priesthood knowing best.
It is interesting
that ‘men in white coats’ are the people in authority, the arbiters of what is
real, and that the term applies to lab scientists as well as to the people
who take you away to a mental hospital. Is there an unconscious connection
here, a collective knowledge that rationality pushed to its extreme is a form
of madness?
