Marie Foster <mfos@ieway.com> wrote:
> No, I kid you not... The more we think we know... the more
> mystery we find attached to it. The older I get the more I
> find this personally true. And if you read the greatest
> thinkers closely, you will find they agree with me.
Interesting. It certainly has not been my experience. Sometimes, you are
right that when we get exposed to a new field, we suddenly discover that
"why here is a whole *area* of knowledge I didn't even know existed!" I
would maintain, of course, that the unknown doesn't actually grow when we
find things like that. Infact, it shrinks, becuase now we at least know
that we don't know!
And as to great writers... the only one *I* can think of in this context is
Mark Twain... who said that once he had the knowledge of how to sail a boat
down a river (I think it was the Mississippi), the river had lost it's
"magic" or "mystery" for him.
You may have seen my own three fold description of the "pleasures" of
knowledge... 1) Ignorance is bliss, 2) Knowledge destroys "happy"
illusions, 3) Internalization -- where by knowledge brings enlightenment.
I think that most of the population is happy in state one, that a sizable
fraction of the people who go through our modern coersive education system
end in state two (with a related hatred of knowledge and learning) and that
state three represents the real goal of the sciences. (thus the change of
orginization to "Religious Engineers inc.)
On a related note, I think that the Indian concept of equating
"enlightenment" to "omniscience" is probably correct. This can be seen
most clearly amoung the Jain's.
ERiC