“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” – John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, Chapter 6
When I read accounts of successful people, there are striking elements of similarity that to me reveal a connectedness of meaningful knowledge.
Take for example: “Visualization of the world you want as a catalyst to achieving it”. Over the past two years, I encountered many sources who provide their own lens through which to embody this truth:
Each one of these minds has created his own lens to view the same central truth. All of these lenses are slight variations of each other. Some may be rose tinted, others may be grey tinted. Each may have a different degree of clouding in the lens or a different amount of distorting imperfections. But they all orient towards a singular underlying truth that exists with or without the existence of each particular lens that is viewing it.
Most meaningful knowledge can be accessed from a multitude of varied lenses. One of the biggest issues of fragmentation of knowledge relates to the zeal with which people defend their particular lenses through which they view truth. They miss the inherent connectedness that underlies all meaningful knowledge. It seems human nature to purse with vigor a particular medium for viewing the truth rather than truth itself.
In putting these thoughts into words, I hope to better identify how I can purse truth that is decoupled from bias of specific lenses.
“There are hundreds of thousands of stems linking us to everything in the cosmos, supporting us and making it possible for us to be.” – Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step, Part 3
All real knowledge is connected.
I have come to think of knowledge as a lens. It is the lens by which a mind accesses truth. From the farthest reaches of the earth, the mind, and history, knowledge is connected by its very existence as the lens through which truth is interpreted and experienced.
To visualize a vastly simplified physical representation of the web of human knowledge, imagine a pyramid. The pyramid is of mixed hues and transparency, and it has equilateral triangles for all four faces. Imagine truth, crystalline, clear, and pure, sits at the heart of the pyramid.
As you extend outward to the limits of the object, the clear truth is obfuscated by an assortment of tints and occlusions take shape. If you could take the viewpoint of any point inside the pyramid, the closer to the center and to truth you were to stand, the more clear your interpretation of truth would be. As you take a viewpoint further from the center, your interpretation of the central truth is altered by an increased amount of imperfect lens. Yet what you see remains a representation of the truth.
While the view from every apex of the pyramid looking inward may be tinted each with a slightly different combination of lenses, you will see an interpretation of the truth at the object’s center. No matter which apex you look through, the truth at the center remains the same. It is merely your interpretation of this truth that has shifted.
While vastly oversimplified, this visualization is helpful for me in seeing the connectedness of knowledge on both the level of any individual truth and the level of the sum total of human knowledge.
Once comfortable with this visualization of a pyramid, it is possible to consider variations of this representation, which I have only just began to do.
One added layer of complexity is to imagine the pyramid as the macro-level representation of the complex network of human knowledge. When “zooming in” to the micro-level, you can imagine the crystalline atomic structure of the pyramid extending the metaphor of the visualization. Each atom in the structure is perhaps a bit of information and bonds between them are relation or connection of those bits of information.