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| Improbable (Impossible) Hotbeds of Fecund Knowledge |
What
is the most direct and essential source of knowledge? That has to be
and can only be the core value of integrity and honesty as it relates
most fundamentally to one's perception of experience, reality, and
truth. We can run into a 1000 forces that would confound this simple
relationship. I can substantiate this based on my experience at
school and work. For example at school I've heard it said that
professors must "publish or perish." Of course this applied
to students as well. We were obligated to come up with term papers
that gave new insights to some issue – say a literary issue. We
were to do all this – exhaustively study the original work of
literature as well as related critiques and come up with fresh
revelations about it – due upon a date certain regardless of the
inner workings and leadings of the mind. I would look at a work of
literature after having read and studied it, and frankly conclude in
all honesty that I was not moved to any new or fresh conclusions and
insights but, nevertheless, was compelled to fake it in order to meet
an artificial deadline. In other words I was driven to manufacture
issues and pump up similitudes of insights to meet some publish or
perish date. So one of the key lessons learned at school was how to
be intellectually dishonest. This basically fraudulent exercise can
be replicated at work. Goals and objectives committees can have
artificial deadlines set to come up with ten-year plans – plans
that everyone knows full well will have virtually no chance of
equating with actualized reality, but nevertheless the plans must
"sound good" and give the semblance of buttoned-down
planning and control.
Knowledge
based on original insight and inspiration that has some chance of
furthering the human enterprise comes about much like the spirit: The
wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot
tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone
born of the Spirit” (John 3:8 NIV). Spiritual
inspiration shares much in common with intellectual insight.This
is one reason in our time why we have seen significant advancements
made not at formal institutions but by free spirits tinkering in the
garage comfortably accommodating the facile functioning of creative
minds. Inspiration, like true love, will always have aspects of
mystery. It is not readily susceptible to timetable deadlines and
demand performances. Knowledge to be truly productive and intimately
entwined must pass into the hidden circuits of the brain where honest
conviction, integrity, and experience help transmute thoughts and
images into creative, reliable insights at the brain's own given
pace, in its own given way. We must frankly admit that institutional
architecture designed to convey respectable predictability and authoritative staidness does not always accommodate nor encourage nor generate this
singularly fecund type of knowledge.
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