Quote:

---

BrendanFlock said:
The mind that is worthy is worthy of anything relating to anything that is currently going on.. in space of perception(space) (da'at)

---

Quote:

---

Lion said:
There's a saying that every politician wants people to believe he gave birth to and raised himself, in a log cabin that he himself built.

I think that's an American phrase and one of the things behind it is a tension between "earned" and "received" knowledge, or value gained by direct experience, trial and error, versus knowledge given, guided and honed by a mentor or authority. Maybe the individualistic U.S. has more of this tension than other countries that value custom, ritual, authority, the family unit and the community unit more.

I often reflect on the fact that everything has more or less been done - "There is no new thing under the Sun" as it's put in the Bible. In most cases, whatever thing you're working on - unless you're really on the cutting edge of complex technology - other, more intelligent people - or more intellectually organized, or more uninhibited, or more intuitive, or more or less ethical people, or whatever the case might be - have already spent a lot of time working on it and accumulating knowledge.

If your thing is to do amazing wood work, or program video games, or cultivate excellent organic crops, or whatever it is, at some point it becomes really foolish not to look at and study what others have done before.

I feel some kind of visceral dislike, not of receiving knowledge - I love to learn - but of making the effort to get better at something I want to be good at by using lessons or instructions that someone has put together. My mind just recoils at the idea of taking specific practices and techniques and working on them in a methodical way. It just wants to get into the groove and learn by imaging how it all might be done. That can lead to some great, flowing experiences, but it can also leave you frustrated if you spend hours and hours practicing something you like and objectively do many parts of it poorly, or in an unnecessarily inefficient or difficult way.

Ideally there has to be some mix of discovery, exploration, free form interaction, and regularity, structure, and incrementally received knowledge. Depending on who you are and what you're involved with, the balance between those two approaches can probably shift in one direction or the other for long periods.

This might also have a lot to do with different personality types, but I think it also goes deeper to something cultural or innate.

---