Declaration of a Heretic

Our consciousness has been so rooted in the idea that knowledge is power that we find it difficult to even imagine that there might exist another completely different way to exercise the human mind.  Yet there is, as far as we can surmise, no firm rule etched into our psyche that requires that we use our consciousness solely as a weapon for capturing and controlling the world around us.  It is conceivable to entertain another approach to the pursuit of knowledge: one that would fundamentally change the very basis of sociality.  Instead of pursuing knowledge to gain power and control, we could just as well pursue knowledge to experience empathy and participation.  Instead of using knowledge to increase our rule over, we might just as easily use knowledge to become a partner with the rest of the earthy creation.

With the old form of knowledge our interest is always focused on knowing how things manifest themselves so that we can use, exploit, harness and control them.  In the exercise of this particular approach to knowledge, we separate ourselves from everything in the environment around us in order that we might then turn all things into objects to be manipulated, used or consumed.  It is this basic alienation that drags us further and further away from our first home, that beatific estate where no differentiation existed, where there was no awareness of self and other.  Where all was harmony.

In contrast, empathetic knowledge reaches out in a very different way.  The mind is not interested in controlling but rather in connecting. With this new approach to knowledge we are constantly asking about the many ways in which we are related to everything else.  We seek to identify with the things around us, to recognize ourselves in the other and the other in ourselves.  Our goal is to join with, to become one with all of the rest of creation.  To "know," under this new schema, is to know how to participate with our surroundings rather than how to control them.

An excerpt from a Declaration of a Heretic