I don’t have any knowledge (in the objective sense). I only “know” what the world looks like from where I’m standing.
It seems we all stand in slightly different places, which is a feature, not a bug. By standing in different places and reporting on our experience, we can give each other a fuller picture of reality. That’s the only way I can extend my experience of reality.
Everyone’s experience is theoretically valid, because no one can have anyone else’s experience. I would be wise to just trust that anything you say about the world is the way the world actually looks from where you’re standing, the way the world would look to anyone if they stood there.
100% of human leadership is the blind leading the blind. We can only know our own experience. We can never know the whole truth. That is why it is endlessly fascinating to hear how it looks from someone else’s perspective. It allows us to navigate a shared “world.” Our “world” is your experience plus my experience.
You cannot know my world. Only I can do that (so I can stop trying to get you to live in my world - It’s not possible).
I cannot know your world. Only you can do that.
I cannot even know our world. Only we can do that.
If I ignore or dismiss your experience, I am not living in our world. I am living in my own. Which is totally fine. But it would be absurd for me to go to war with you over it. You have no access to my world and so you can’t affect anything in it, much less take it away from me.
Conversely, I have no access to your world. I rely on you to tell me about it, and then, when I hear what I hear and assign it meaning, it’s just my experience.
And when I’m looking for the TRUTH, the actual reality prior to any story, I can’t fully trust my experience. Experience is incomplete because it takes a separate self to have an experience. And a separate self is a false limitation of what is. So separate selves have no access to anything beyond their experience. Therefore they never experience actual reality.
So I don’t trust my experience, I trust how I feel about my experience and let myself be guided by that. When I am at peace I can be pretty sure I’m experiencing something that’s at least aligned with reality. When I’m not, I can be pretty sure I’m not.
Because without the limitation of a separate self, there is wholeness: simply what is. I know this because whenever I drop my story, whenever I am able to forget about any notion of a separate “me” (in dreamless sleep or total presence in what I am doing) all that’s left is a sort of “non-anything,” an absence of past, future or separation, totally perfect and peaceful and safe and kind.
Mind tells me this must be a glimpse of True Reality (and how could I ever really know?). If it is - and so far, it hasn’t hurt me to believe it - all I can ever lose in reality is my sense of a separate self.
My separate self is the root of every instance of experience and therefore every instance of any THING I experience including joy and sadness, peace and suffering. And if the absence of experience is perfect and peaceful and safe and kind, then all I have to lose in losing my sense of a separate self is my suffering. So I can confidently explore an ego-less existence freely and without worry. There’s nothing to lose but suffering.
I cannot know whether it’s true or not that what anyone else is reporting is true for them. I can only know whether or not I believe it.
When I “understand” your experience, I am understanding my experience of a “your experience.”
It’s me thinking and believing something.
Which is all I can ever really “know.”