Understanding the Structure of Knowledge

What is the actual substance of reality?

Reality is orderly. It is possible to understand that order and to work intelligently with it. And when you do so, you can remove fear from your life, which allows you to know and rest in your ultimate nature as unconditional peace and contentment.

Conversely, so long as a person lives in ignorance of the actual order of reality, that person will perceive themselves as separate and, to some degree, victims of outer conditions and circumstances. The result of which is fear, which undermines the confidence to rest in and as unconditional peace.

In previous essays I have outlined the natural laws which govern reality. And while that goes a long way in dispelling ignorance and giving practical ways to live fearlessly and authentically, there is still more to understand about the order of reality. I this essay I will cover the structure of knowledge. By understanding the structure of knowledge, you will have essential insight which will allow you to consciously create your reality to align with what you deeply desire to know of life such as peace, happiness, abundance, freedom, and love.

All knowledge has a fundamental three-fold structure. This three-fold structure can be described and understood in various ways, and each of those ways can have different value and application. For the purpose of this essay, I will describe that three-fold nature as follows: beginning, substance, completion. That is to say, all knowledge consists of a beginning, the substance of the knowledge, and the completion of the knowledge. And we typically consider knowledge to only be truly real once it has reached a completion stage.

This is true of all knowledge. If you believe that you experience a harmonious, loving relationship, that harmonious, loving relationship is knowledge that consists of these three aspects. If you believe that you experience material poverty, that knowledge consists of these three aspects. If you believe that you experience expertise in a field of study, that knowledge consists of these three aspects. If you believe that you know something about eating an orange, that knowledge consists of these three aspects. No matter how lofty or trivial, important or unimportant, big or small, all knowledge consist of these three aspects - beginning, substance, completion.

To be clear, I am using he word “knowledge” to refer to both what we typically conceive of as subjective experience as well as what we typically consider to be objective knowledge of the external world. So I am saying that all things which you can know - be they experiences or objects, people, places, things, dreams, visions, or whatever else - have a fundamental structure. And understanding that structure is valuable.

Again, I am sharing this with the intention that this can empower you to consciously create your experiences in alignment with the highest truth of your being. The result of which is that you will know harmony, love, peace, and unconditional happiness. So this is all highly practical.

The beginning of all knowledge is an idea. The idea is that around which the substance will form. If you think about it, you will realize there was a point before which you never had the idea of a bicycle. Before you could have any knowledge of a bicycle, that idea of a bicycle had to appear.

The idea is just an idea. It is so ephemeral that we can hardly say that there is anything there. So there is nothing that gives it any significant form. The initial idea of the bicycle didn’t have much. But it was that around which the substance will form. The idea is like the grain of sand around which an oyster will form a pearl.

At the idea stage, the knowledge is without any meaning or importance from a practical standpoint. That is, the mere idea of poverty is harmless. But once that idea gains substance, it begins to seem more real and starts to hold more sway. So it is only with the accumulation of substance that the idea of poverty becomes something painful. Or, coversely, the mere idea of wealth is mostly useless in a practical sense. However, once enough substance has formed around it, that idea of wealth can be experienced and enjoyed.

What is the substance of knowledge? It is memory. Memory and only memory forms the substance of knowledge. That is why it is true that you are never experiencing the present. The present cannot be experienced. Presence can only be, but it cannot be experienced. Knowledge is formed of the substance of memory. Which is why most people are reliving the past over and over.

Think about this an you will see that it is true. Whatever you think you know - whatever you think you have experienced - is formed entirely of memories. You have memories which tell you that you have the knowledge or experience. For example, it is only because you have memories to provide substance for the experience of riding a bicycle that can give you confidence that you know how to ride a bicycle. Without the memories, you would not have the knowledge.

Now, an important point is that memory is actually nothing other than imagination which you believe happened. That is all that memory is. And that is why memories can be altered. That is why people can have so-called “false memories”. That is why no two people remember any event exactly the same way. Because memory is really just imagination. But it is imagination which you believe actually happened.

So another way of understanding the substance of knowledge is to say that it is imagination. And that is true. Knowledge is really just imagination. And that is why research into visualization consistently demonstrates that imagining something is just as effective as physically doing something when it comes to developing a skill. The experience is just as real whether you do something outwardly and form a “memory” or whether you do it inwardly solely with your imagination. The resultant experience is actually indistinguishable at a practical level.

Next, the completion stage of knowledge is the phase in which the knowledge is stabilized into the subconscious or unconscious level. This is important because this is the stage at which knowledge magically seems to become a thing properly. Prior to that, it is internal only. That is to say, it is happening exclusively in the imagination. And in truth it never leaves the internal domain. All experience remains forever subjective and internal. However, the completion stage produces a hypnotic effect in which it seems that the internal becomes objectified and externalized. It seems at that point that the thing has become something independent of oneself.

In the field of memory research this phenomena is known as memory consolidation. If you think about it for a moment, you’ll realize that an infinite amount of experience is happening all the time. Right at this moment incredible amounts of data are being processed by your nervous system. But you won’t keep most of it. Your nervous system has to selectively choose a small amount of that data to keep long term. And when it does that, it packages it up and stores it away for later retrieval in this process which is called consolidation. I am calling this the completion stage of knowledge.

In terms of memory consolidation, what happens is that the data is packaged to include beliefs, thoughts, and sensory data in a packet that is indexed by association so it can be retrieved when it might be relevant in the future. For example, let’s say that one day while learning to ride a bicycle, you fell and scraped your knee. At that moment the nervous system determined that it was worthy of being stored as memory. So it packages up the beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and sensations which were occurring in that moment and stores it in memory for long term use. That memory packet gets indexed according to the beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and sensations so that it can be easily retrieved again when other data is processed by the nervous system for which that memory might be relevant.

Now, you might be curious to know what determines whether knowledge achieves the completion stage. And to a large extent that has a lot to do with the intensity of the feeling associated with the data. If you are sitting in a park and feeling neutral and non-intense emotions, not much is likely to be stored away for later retrieval. (And, by the way, this is likely a significant factor in why many forms of mindfulness meditation can be so effective, precisely because they remove the strong charges from previous knowledge, mostly negative knowledge.) However, if all of a sudden a firecraker goes off under the bench where you are sitting and a herd of elephants stampedes past while a troupe of mimes act out a scene from a Charlie Chaplin movie, the likely intensity of the feelings you would experience make it highly probable that whatever thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and sensory data was happening in that moment would get stored away.

Let’s consider this in light of the bicycle example. If you had that experience of falling off the bicycle and scraping your knee, but the feeling intensity you had was quite low, it is less likely to be stored for long term use. Perhaps you were used to falling and getting mildly hurt a lot, and so that particular experience didn’t seem significant. On the other hand, if you experienced a high charge in response to that fall, it is quite probable that it would be stored. So if you felt afraid, confused, or angry, that emotional charge could signal your nervous system to take the current thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and sensory data and store it for long term use.

Importantly, the thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and sensory data are actually happening internally. It is not objective. It is subjective. So the same apparently objective experience had by ten different people will be remembered (or not rememebered) entirely differently in each case. One person might not deem it worth remembering at all. Another person might remember it as a great trauma and develop an aversion to bicycles. And yet another person might remember it as a great turning point in their learning how to ride a bicycle. It has everything to do with whatever subjective internal stuff and interpretation is happening in that moment. The person who remembers it as a trauma might have thought in that moment that they were in great danger and that it was all their fault because they were too stupid to succeed in anything. But the person who remembers it as a victory might have thought in that moment that it was fantastic that they had just succeeded in balancing and pedaling forward a few yards before they fell, and they might have thought that was proof that they can succeed. So even though the apparent objective outcome was the same in that the people all fell and scraped their knees, the subjective experience is different.

So it turns out that your knowledge is actually highly biased. That is, you mostly know the things that you have relatively strong feelings about. The nervous system simply has a bias toward storing things with relatively high emotional charges. Presumably this is because high emotional charges ought to correlate to things of significance. (Of course, when a person has a bad habit of excessive emotionality in regard to trivial matters, this assumption leads to unwanted results. And this is yet another reason why mindfulness can be so helpful.)

Another way in which memory can be stored is through repetition. If you do something or repeat something often enough, it is more likely to get stored for long term use.

And while I will not at all deny that repetition is an important way in which we can form memories, by itself, repetition is a poor method for establishing something in a completed or consolidated state. In practice, bringing in a strong feeling charge greatly enhances the effect. So in practice, if you want to store knowledge for long term (i.e. help knowledge reach the completion stage) you want to invoke a strong feeling charge. For example, a feeling of love, strong compassion, accomplishment, or other similar positive emotional charge can greatly enhance the effect of achieving completion on desired knowledge.

One more thing about the completion stage of knowledge is that there is also a sense of release of the knowledge into something greater than yourself. Even though it is a trick of mind (because all experience forever remains internal and subjective) it is important for the completion stage of knowledge that it be released into the illusion of being something independent and objective. This is why many effective prayer traditions complete prayers with a key phrase or word which has this effect.

Now, here’s the real point of all this. Some of your knowledge is positive in that it is aligned with what you truly want. While some of your knowledge is negative in that it is in opposition to what you truly want. For example, if you want to know security but your experience or knowledge is one of lack, you have a problem. And now with this understanding of the structure of knowledge, you have what you need to change your experience to align it with what you truly want.

Practically, what you want to do is dissolve or remove the negative knowledge and you want to install the positive knowledge. For example, you want to remove knowledge of lack and install knowledge of abundance. You want to remove knowledge of unworthiness and install knowledge of inherent worth and goodness.

How can you do that? Well, let’s look at it in the context of what I’ve just shared with you about the structure of knowledge. First of all, you want to reverse-engineer your negative knowledge in order to remove it. That means that you want to bring your negative knowledge out of the completed stage back into the stage of substance where it is subject to change. And in practice, that means making it conscious.

So let’s say that you struggle with lack. Then look a what evidence you have for lack. And you’ll see that you have memories which substantiate it. And those memories are imbued with negative feelings which lend them a sense of reality. Those memories consist not only of those negative feelings, but also images, thoughts, and beliefs, as well as other sensory data. You can begin to dissolve the unwanted knowledge by simply relaxing deeply and letting go of the negative feelings as you recall the rest of the memory data. For example, maybe you have a memory of having had no money to your name, debt you didn’t know how to pay, and threats to evict you from your home. You can slow that down in your imagination and relax deeply, breathing slowly and calmly, relaxing your face, chest, and belly. Notice the negative thoughts and beliefs, and just note them neutrally without any emotional charge. Doing this dissolves the substance which previously formed the negative knowledge.

The truth is, just that one technique of removing the emotional charge from the negative knowledge substance in and of itself can make huge positive change in your life. There are entire schools of therapeutic work which give very good results that do only that. So if you did just that much, you would see huge positive changes.

But you can go further. You can rewrite or re contextualize the memories. For example, even though you might have a memory of having had no money, debt, and an eviction threat, you can reprogram that memory now with a feeling of calm plus the new, truthful, and more helpful belief and thought which is that you have always had enough. You can know that is true because you are here now. If you had not had enough, you would not be here. So it is really true that you have always had enough. If you consciously think and see the truth of that and pair that with the feeling of calm, the memory will change. So the substance of the negative knowledge has changed, which means that negative knowledge cannot remain.

There may be multiple memories, of course. Typically that is true. So it may be necessary to dissolve and/or reprogram multiple memories in order to completely release negative knowledge. But as long as you persist in it, eventually that negative knowledge will go.

Next, you can use this understanding of the structure of knowledge to install the new, helpful knowledge of what you want. If you want knowledge of abundance, then start with that idea and begin to add substance to it. Use your imagination to sense inwardly what it is like to experience true abundance. Imagine the conditions and circumstances in which you find it easy to feel truly abundant. You get to do that because it is just in your imagination, so you can imagine whatever you want. It is pure fantasy. Just imagine it how you want. And then, importantly, feel as strong as possible the positive emotions you want to associate with that. Feel grateful, happy, peaceful, joyful, fulfilled, etc. Feel successful. The more strongly you can feel the positive feelings, the more easily it can reach the completion stage where the new knowledge is working for you unconsciously. Then it simply seems real without you having to do anything further.

You can also enhance the effect of nudging the new knowledge into the completion stage by consciously releasing it into that stage. You can find a mini ritual that works for you to achieve that effect. Perhaps adding the phrase “and so it is” at the end of your imagination work will be helpful. Or if you have familiarity and comfort with a tradition that uses a special word or phrase such as “amen”, you may find that helpful. In any case, the words are just to help encourage the release, and that release is something you can practice and get better at. Just feel that you are letting it go with trust and complete faith that it is now made real. Perhaps you may find certain other cues in your imagination helpful such as visualizing handing it over to a supreme being or spiritual guide. Whatever works for you, practice it and you’ll get better at it which will help to enhance the effect.

To review, the basic process is that you want to neutralize or remove the old, unwanted knowledge of lack, fear, unworthiness, etc. And you want to install the new, helpful knowledge .You accomplish this by making the old knowledge destabilized by bringing into conscious awareness the underlying imagination substance and altering it. Importantly, it doesn’t even matter if what you imagine in regard to the old knowledge is even factually or objetively true (because it isn’t actually factually or objectively true in any case). All that matters is that you feel the association of whatever you are imagining with the sense that the old knowledge is true. Then re-write it. Remove the negative emotional charge. Install new, more helpful thoughts and beliefs in place of the old, limiting ones.

Then, create the new knowledge. Start with the idea of what you want - abundance, health, wholeness, peace, freedom, happiness, etc. And use your imagination to create the substance for the new knowledge. Importantly, just imagine whatever supports the new knowledge. It doesn’t have to seem entirely “realistic”. It should be something you can accept as true on some level, of course. It you are imagining purple aliens covering you in love bubbles and rainbows and your brain rejects that as too absurd to be possible in any way, it is unlikely to work. But you can definitely use your imagination in more expansive ways than what you previously accepted as “realistic”. Meaning, you might find that you can use your imagination to create substance such as having had a loving, healthy childhood even if your previous ideas were contrary to that. It might be a bit of a stretch at first, but if it is within reach, it is workable. Or maybe you don’t even need to install new memories of the past, but you can just install new memories of the present in which you experience love, abundance, prosperity, happiness, etc. in whatever conditions and circumstances you want that are within reach for you, even if they are a bit of a stretch at first. Maybe you imagine relaxing in a beautiful natural setting with loving, supportive, healthy people, feeling secure in having all the time in the world to focus on enjoying your life. Maybe you imagine receiving the check for the large sum of money that gives you a feeling of having enough. Whatever helps you to access the desired feelings. Just imagine that. And importantly, feeling the desired feelings because that is what really gives the sense of reality to the substance.

Then release it into the “universe” or the “creative matrix” or whatever you want. Just let it go with faith and trust that it is already so (because it is in your imagination [which is the substance of all things]). Feel that contentment and peace knowing that it is so.

Then repeat as necessary. Remember that repetition is one way to produce memory consolidation. So it is definitely a valid approach to repeat the process as needed. But also keep in mind that repetition is a relatively weak way to achieve the effect compared to strong emotional charge. And if you anticipate that you will have to repeat the process before you even complete it all the way, that is going to significantly undermine the strength and conviction of the emotion you imbue it with. So I recommend that for best effect, have strong conviction each time and accept that it truly is already complete. Then wait and see with positive expectation. If you find that there remains some residue of the old knowledge and the new knowledge has not yet fully taken, then repeat the process. But don’t just do it dozens of times in a row trying to force the effect. That will be tiring and not very effective.

What I have presented in this essay is a general outline. Take this as your starting point for exploration. Don’t approach it too rigidly, for though it is a science, it is also an artform. So be willing to roll up your sleeves, so to speak, and explore this so that you can truly make it your own. Your personal experience gained through sincere practice and a willingness to learn from your own experiences will be what helps you to gain true expertise and confidence. It would be a mistake to try it a few times and conclude that it doesn’t work just as it would be a mistake to conclude that playing the piano is impossible just because you didn’t become a virtuoso after a dozen lessons. Sincere practice makes perfect. And with that you will dispel fear and come to rest more in the direct knowledge of wholeness and peace. For that is really the point. While it is good and right that you should make your manifest (dream) life beautiful and enjoyable, the real benefit of doing so is that it reveals to you that the true beauty and joy is already within you.