“A young boy with endless creativity and imagination, able to make it all happen, able to overcome and dance with everything that waited to be experienced. A young boy, a powerful presence, with so much love and dedication to everything he did, ended up imprisoned by unconscious behavioral patterns that have been forged through knowledge. “
I remember, as a young boy, I was so fascinated by everything around, by the possibilities waiting behind every corner to be explored. Adventures had emerged from fantasy in the forest of my childhood. No day was like any other.
“It was like awakening from a dream captured in a maze of knowledgeable thoughts that were perceived as the only reality.”
Today, again, I can sense the limitless opportunities of life. A sense of adventure for whatever comes along. A sense that is not bound to youngsters, but to every being, to life. A sense that I’ve lost while growing up.
“Knowledge is not power, it is only potential. Applying that knowledge is power. Understanding why and when to apply that knowledge is wisdom!” — Takeda Shingen
This is a powerful quote that took me time to understand with my heart.
Knowledge has become a construct of shifted reality since it isn’t developing in time. Now that sounds not entirely true, so let me shed some more light on it.
Whatever we experience in life, we store it into our knowledge-base. We even store cross-references between them. Like having tasted an olive when we were 6 years old and the result of not liking it. This experience has become our reality, to which we stick to unconsciously for the entirety of our life.
This knowledge is not developing. It doesn’t consider inexperienced additional variables, for instance: the change of taste as we grow up. An unconscious reaction to this knowledge is to avoid olives in whatever form. An olive, however, is not only an olive. It can be an ingredient or become oil. Like I don’t like pure avocados, but I love them as an ingredient in a salad. No matter, if we hear there are olives in. We wouldn’t try.
Another example: You avoid talking about relationship issues with your partner because it failed in a previous one. Or maybe it failed in two previous ones. That makes it even more real to you. Fact is, however, that a new relation means a different person, circumstances, environment and a lot of other variables.
This also is true about every object we encountered. Everything we have seen in life is stored like a picture of that object at that moment. Trees, birds, flowers, insects, cars, materials, plants, mud, rain, clouds, sun, moon, stars, lights, shades — you know where I’m heading. While we walk around we barely experience all of these things the way they are right now in that moment. There’re a numerous different kind of trees, flowers, insects and so on, and even the same kind is different to its own. But because we know, we’ve become blind to the richness of the world and perceive it boring.
As long as we don’t get conscious about this, we’re passing by life. Sometimes we feel bored, since what we experience is only a review of the stored knowledge and its cross-references, but not what truly is at this moment. Or we simply don’t dare, since we’re knowledgeable about our past telling it goes wrong.
This present moment is never the same as one of the past moments. There might be similarities, but it’s always different. The knowledge we gained, if we’re not conscious about it, overlays the current experience at this moment.
Becoming aware of it unveils how the current experience really is and feels like. It requires focus and the ability to notice subtle differences. This comes with practice and after a while, ordinary moments become more colourful.
No one can predict the future. But notice that this moment comes in as the future of that past, where your knowledge was captured and stored. Key is to understand and make use of this knowledge. But not letting knowledge dictate the moment.
Enjoy the moment.
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