Another Way of Knowing

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking
we used when we created them.

~ Albert Einstein ~

A growing number of people are beginning to realize that not only have so-called human “progress” and “civilization” led us to the point where we now stand on the edge of an ecological catastrophe, they have also been the cause of a growing human disaster. Granted, a relatively small minority of the world’s people lives the so-called “good life” in the (over-)developed countries, but only at the cost of dire poverty, suffering and injustice for the majority of the world’s people and increasingly severe global environmental degradation, to the point that almost all life on earth is now threatened. And as the rates of cancer, diabetes, depression and other dis-eases of civilization continue to skyrocket, even many of the supposedly affluent are beginning to realize that their material wealth has not brought them true ease, health and happiness. Thus we have, for example, the growing popularity of the “simple living” movement in the over-developed countries.

Alarmed by the global environmental and human crisis we now face after 10,000 years or so of human “progress”, many people are now engaged in trying to envision new ways of thinking about and living human life on earth that are truly sustainable, just and healthy for all life on earth. Most of these efforts are primarily concerned with what I call “nuts and bolts” issues: how to grow food sustainably, developing sustainable and non-polluting forms of manufacture, transportation and energy generation, designing more livable cities and towns, devising new methods of conflict resolution and decision-making, and so on. I have no doubt about the good intentions of those engaged in grassroots efforts to formulate such plans, but I do think they have missed a necessary step in the process of fully understanding the underlying causes of our present situation: that of probing the profound impacts of what has become the dominant mode of gaining knowledge about the world since the advent of agriculture and human civilization.

In other words, before getting caught up in designing grand schemes for a hopefully more sustainable, peaceful and happy way of living human life on earth, we need to ask ourselves, How has our current way of gaining knowledge about the world led us so far astray that we now stand on the precipice of an environmental and human disaster? Can we use the same way of knowing that got us into this mess to now get us out of it, or do we need an entirely different way of knowing?

I would argue that our present way of knowing the world leads to “knowledge” that is so fundamentally wrong about how the world really works that there is no way it can be safely used as the primary basis upon which to develop a sane and sustainable way of human life on earth. That is, we urgently need to shift to another way of knowing the world if we are to have any hope of having any sort of decent future.

What is the dominant means by which we humans now gain knowledge about the world? As described in the essays by John Zerzan, Laurel Thompson and others that have been collected here, it is a way of knowing based on the reduction of supposedly discrete elements of the world (plants, animals, minerals, atoms, lungs, hearts, ourselves, etc.) to the status of isolated and named “things” that, ripped from their actual embeddedness in a unified whole, we then manipulate and use in the service of other language-mediated constructions such as “human progress”, “solutions” and the like.

As we are now finding out to our increasing dismay, the reduction of the world to a utilitarian collection of isolated pieces - a falsification inherent in the very process of naming - is profoundly out of touch with the reality that existence is a unified whole. That is, we are discovering, as ecologist Garret Hardin puts it (in what is now known as Hardin’s Law), “You can’t do just one thing,” because everything is connected to everything else and so everything we do ultimately has impacts on everything else: We develop and use a new pesticide (DDT) to kill malaria mosquitoes, and wind up fatally thinning the eggshells of raptors and other birds at the top of the food chain. We develop and use a new cooling lubricant (PCBs), and the result is polar bears being born dual-sex (hermaphroditic).

The list of the unintended consequences of human activity driven by a way of knowing ruled by the dictates of the subject-object split imposed by language is potentially endless; indeed, we are undoubtedly not even aware of most of them yet. This has led to the recent “discovery” of yet another “law”: The primary cause of anthropogenic (human-caused) environmental problems is — solutions. As ecologist Ernest Partridge notes, “Public health measures explode the population, pest control ’selects’ super-pests, the stuff that cools our food erodes the ozone, and so on. … Touch a strand, and trouble the web.”

Given all the above, it seems to me that we desperately need another way of knowing the world before charging off to design yet another vision of how human life on earth should be lived. This web site therefore takes another approach, that of looking for guidance about how humans should know the world and live their lives from the example of how the rest of life on earth lives, as well as the millions of years of human existence on earth during which we managed to not lay waste to the environment. That in turn inevitably leads to what I have come to believe is the fundamental difference between life lived sustainably and that lived destructively: whether one’s way of knowing the world is primarily based on non-verbal perception that directly and intimately experiences the essential unity of the world, or is dominated by a mode of knowing predicated upon the analytical tearing apart of the fundamental unity of existence into discrete parts to be named, represented and finally manipulated via abstract symbols - that is, words and numbers.

It is my belief that the necessary and urgent efforts to envision new ways of living human life on earth will inevitably fail if they are primarily based on the use of the same mode of knowing that got us into this mess in the first place. The basic focus of this web site is therefore directed towards exploring what I refer to as another way of knowing as a prerequisite for being able to envision a way of living human life on earth that is truly sustainable, sane and graceful.

Although what I call ‘another way of knowing’ is often a significant part of many so-called “spiritual” traditions (for example, shamanism, Buddhism and Taoism), there is nothing intrinsically mysterious about it and the non-verbal way of knowing is not ’spiritual’ per se. Basically, all that is required to access the non-verbal way of knowing is the willingness to work at turning off the relentless verbal chatter that typically fills damn near every waking moment of our “modern” minds. There are many simple techniques for shutting off that mental noise so that one can access the non-verbal, experiential way of knowing, some of which are described on this web site, and one certainly doesn’t need to master a library of esoteric knowledge in order to use it or be “initiated” into a non-verbal way of knowing by a shaman, guru, lama, priest or other “spiritual expert”.

I hope you will find this web site to be thought-provoking and stimulating to your own efforts to understand the world today. The information presented here is based on over 30 years of political activism, years of meditation and wordless wandering in nature, and the reading of literally thousands of books and articles as I sought to figure out why 10,000 years of civilization, progress, science and political struggle have not only failed to reduce the amount of suffering in the world, but have actually increased it to the catastrophic proportions we see around us today. As such, it is my small contribution to the global community of those desperately struggling for a truly graceful and sustainable way of human life on earth and a reduction in the overwhelming amount of suffering - both human and otherwise - in the world today.

Thank you for visiting,
Oneida Kincaid
February 2005