I have a few bad habits. One of them is that I feel as though I have a background program in my mind that — when it recognizes I am not currently engaging with anything — compels me to open either, Instagram, Snapchat, Messages, or YouTube. I reckon this is a common habit for my fellow Gen Z who all got the bonus parent of the internet. However, as I've become more aware in my life, my relationship with this habit has turned from blind performance to a struggle of will. Now, whenever I find myself on one of these apps, I challenge myself to use it intentionally. Of course, this doesn't happen every time, occasionally I succumb to the techno-trance.
The intentional use of the first three apps I mentioned involves connection and talking to my friends, but YouTube is the one I want to tell you about today.
YouTube doesn't let you message friends — yet — so intentional use becomes about choosing what content to watch if you stay committed to watching anything at all. For me, this comes in the form of lectures, video essays, and Ted Talks. That last one is where I'm heading with all of this.
Master She Heng Yi gave a talk on self-mastery, and in it he shared a story that he himself heard from another master in the Shaolin temple. This story impacted me greatly and inspired me to write about it for today's post. Now, I recount the story to you:
A man was living close to a mountain, and everyday he was thinking about how it would be to climb that mountain, and what would he see at the peak.
So, finally the day came, and the young man went on the journey.
Arriving at the foot of the mountain, he met the first traveler, so he asked, "how did you get up the mountain and what did you see from the top?"
And so, the traveler shared his path and also the view that he had.
But then the man was thinking, 'the way this man described to me sounds very exhausting, I need to find another way to climb.'
So, he continued to walk along the foot of the mountain until he met the next traveler.
Once again, he asked, "how did you climb the mountain and what did you see from the top?"
Once again, the traveler shared her story.
But still not being determined on which direction and which way to go, the man asked 30 more people. 30 more travelers.
When he finished talking to all of them, he finally made up his mind. 'Now that so many people have shared with me their path, and especially what they all saw from the top, I don't need to climb there anymore.'
It is very unfortunate the man never went on this journey.
This story is used as an allegory for the journey of one's spiritual life. In it, the mountain represents the ever present pull of the spiritual path, and the summit represents the clarity one finds when they fully embrace the spiritual path.
The majority of what follows will be my own insights and thoughts on the story, but I want to share a particularly impactful insight from Master Shi Heng Yi. A great deal can be conveyed through communication by words, but it is impossible to fully convey the experience of clarity that the summit brings. It must be experienced directly to be understood. This is why each person must find their own way up the mountain and reach the summit.
My mind goes two places when I hear this story: my own spiritual experiences, and the generalized idea of communicated knowledge vs. direct experience. Today, I will only speak on the latter.
Communicated Knowledge vs. Direct Experience
Preamble over! The stage has been set and now we are set to explore this idea. To discuss the topic and its cultural treatment in the modern day, I want to begin by providing a conceptual framework and vocabulary.
Information: is the interpretable set of data that we receive from the world.
Knowledge: is the personal outcome of an experience of information that becomes imprinted onto ones being.
Experience: is the phenomena of receiving information.
So, the general pattern goes: receive information → experience information → develop knowledge.
The kicker, is that when we communicate through words we cannot share our experience or knowledge, we can only share information. Yes, we can shape this information in ways that the experience of information is more or less likely to develop a certain kind of knowledge, but in essence we can only share information to each other.
Why does this even matter? It may seem like an incredibly basic, common sense, thing I have described. Well, not all information is created equal. There are different kinds of information which provide different kinds of experiences which kinds of knowledge. I like to imagine them within a schema of density and depth, where the denser the information, the greater depth of the knowledge, and the way to receive the most and densest information is by directly experiencing what you aim to acquire knowledge about. These are also vague words with a variety of interpretations, so let me give an example:
I am a rock climber. I have been consistently doing this activity for over 7 years now. When I approach a climb, the first thing I do is look at it. This is the sparsest kind of information. I see the holds and then imagine a path up the wall based on the knowledge I've gained from my years of experiences. At this point, my experience of the climb is limited, and my knowledge of it is shallow. The next thing I do is try the climb, and usually fall. This is a denser kind of information. I get to feel the holds under my hands, feel the positions my body must move through, and become directly involved in the knowledge I gained from observation. At this point, I have the direct experience of the climb and the knowledge of the climb I now hold is much deeper than the observation stage. From here, I continue attempting the climb until I complete it (I don't always finish them but bear with me for examples sake). Each attempt brings me new kinds of information, expands my experience of the climb, and deepens my knowledge of the climb until I understand it well enough to complete the climb. Now, my knowledge of the climb is the deepest.
All other fields of knowledge work much the same. The issue I see, is that most of us never leave the observation stage anymore. We have such an abundant capability with modern technology to "see" all different facets of life, but in our abundance we mistakenly gain a feeling of deep knowledge which isn't really there.
Think of all the "keyboard warriors" roaming the digital wasteland of the internet. They consume so much content on a topic that they feel a sense of mastery over it without ever getting close enough to the subject to gain the denser kinds of information that only direct experience can provide.
Talk about a mass scale Dunning-Kruger effect.
Master Shi Heng Yi's story personifies this idea to me. The man hears so many people who gained deep knowledge — through direct experience — offer him their knowledge in the form of information, that he comes to believe he holds this level of knowledge himself.
The reason I bring up this story and describe this phenomenon is because the effects of it are dangerous — especially at scale. When this confused state of mind multiplies within a society, the inevitable outcome is that the bar for knowledge will drop, and an endless game of telephone will be played with knowledge to the point that it doesn't even reflect the lessons direct experience teaches. This would cause an absolute collapse of knowledge as a concept and leave humanity in an epistemic dystopia where we have no choice but to reconnect with direct experience and learn how to acquire genuine knowledge from zero.
I fear this is the path our culture, and AI has set us down.
So, what I call for you, my dear reader, is to be humble. Question how deep your knowledge really is and what information built it, recognize that those with knowledge can only offer you incomplete information through words, and remember that the best way to gain deep knowledge about something is by going and directly experiencing it. Take these general concepts and think about how they apply to whatever knowledge is important to your life, I cannot give you the answers.
Until next communion, all my love! <3
Micah Xavier Probst