There is a popular saying, knowledge is power, but why do we believe this? Does knowing something really change our ability to act in the world directly?

DO we believe it? I would offer that you likely do believe it. There are a good many spoken beliefs that people arrive at naturally.

Perhaps another tack, does knowing everything about someone really give you any extra ability to influence them? You can know everything society associates with that person’s identity. Would that let you decide their mood in any given moment?

Knowledge is a representation of experience in our brain, like a memory. Though, in fact, knowledge and conscious knowledge are not one and the same thing.

Does “power” mean “manipulation?” I am using the term power to refer to ability. Does knowing how to fix a car actually change the person’s ability to fix cars or did they not already have that level of ability? Does athletic knowledge create athletic ability?

The reason I ask all these questions is the relationship between knowledge and ability isn’t perfectly clear is it?

Willingness, skill (knowledge?), and capacity. Having willingness and skill does not mean you have the capacity.

Knowing how to dunk a basketball doesn’t necessarily give you the ability to.

Is it any different with any other set of activities? I know people who know how to cook, but the quality of their cooking is mediocre. So, what power is there in knowledge? Why do we seek knowledge really?

It’s a combination of knowledge, genetic predisposition as regards ability, and practice. Are you practising knowledge? The law of knowledge is that knowledge brings control. How could that be possible?

Practice doesn’t make perfect if you are practising the wrong technique. We all know people who really “know their stuff”, and they stand out from those who just have the skills, is this not so? In what way do the knowledgeable differ from the skilled? The knowledge person seems to be able to transform the task. The skilful person can only execute the task.

You can see skilful athletes in every game. They play their roles as well as their peers, but the ones who stand out are those who seem to be able to change how the game is played. Do they do that through skill? Can you learn a skill without creating the context for its practice?

Knowledge, true knowledge, arises from seeing connections between a skill and its purpose, and connections between that purpose and other purposes as well. The skill transforms into their life, takes a place in your heart, but can it do that without touching on other parts of your life?

It’s been tested even scientifically in recent studies. The more you think about a thing, the more it can seem to be possible, and we become aware of things not in a linear way, but in a networked way. Life is not analogue, it’s parallel.

Another aspect of this process in the human mind is what they call availability. The more we see a thing the more we will think about it. The more we think about it the more we pick it out in our environment. So one can become engrossed or knowledgeable in an entirely automatic way, but is it knowledge when you have no actual command over it?

It’s lucky? Perhaps is why they say better lucky than good, but why would they say that?

Sometimes knowledge seems to get in our way, makes us stumble. It can appear to do that. So another question… Is knowledge the same as ideas or thought?

We create novels of behaviour in our thought, but we also create models of circumstances and events through our thought and analysis. The brain itself cannot tell the difference between these two things.

Knowledge would be more connected? Thoughts and ideas randomly put together into understandings. Exactly. Knowledge, true knowledge, is properly oriented.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~