Epistemological Pragmatizm

This excerpt from a letter to my Spiritual Master sums up my approach to the mystical journey. I share it with you here…

“I have been contemplating one of the lessons that you presented to me earlier in my training. You said that we, as students of the M’TAM School do not base what we do or learn on belief. While observing a class that Nehez was giving to a younger generation, I observed several of the students struggling with this.”

“In my contemplation it occurred to me that this is a very reasonable perspective to have. What value is there in learning something that you already believe?”

“I came across the colonial classification of this philosophical concept while doing research for my column. This is the concept of Epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge. This is the foundation of colonial scientific thought. The ancient Mediterranean philosophers defined knowledge in the epistemological sense as “true justified belief”. I questioned this. Who is it that will evaluate the justification of a belief? If I must justify it myself, this will be a waste of time. I can just choose to believe anything that I want to. If I must justify it to others, then this opens up the opportunity for political conflict as to what is justified. This seems to be a corrupt definition of knowledge. It also relies on a reductive argument due to the fact that the “truth” that is to be justified, must somehow be objective and absolute. Since a human being is not capable of objectivity and not cognizant of the absolute in an impure state, each truth that a belief is based on must also be justified in and of itself. This concept suffers form an error of reductionism.”

“As a seeker of knowledge, how can I approach its acquisition honestly? I cannot rely on perception because it is too easily fooled. Perception is also subject to the corruption of the culture in which these perceptions were trained. There is something however, that perception does provide, information.”

“Information does not have the requirement of truth. It may be consistent or inconsistent. It simply exists in and of itself. It is only conclusions about the information that can be defined as knowledge. The justification of these conclusions is a personal matter. One person’s knowledge can only be information to another.”

“How then, can I transform information into knowledge? That process of transformation I would call learning.”

“So, what is the process? The process must be action. Knowledge is acquired by honestly testing the veracity of the information that I have been given. Here is a concrete example.”

“Let us say someone has told me that they can walk through walls. They demonstrate this ability and assure me that I can do this also. At this point, all I have is information. I cannot conclude that what this person has told me is true. I cannot even conclude that what I have seen is true. I have no knowledge. I only have information.”

“Now, suppose this person gives me the juju that he used. Suppose also that I use this juju and actually walk through a wall. Now I can claim that I have actually acquired knowledge. I have acquired the knowledge it is possible for me to walk through a wall and the knowledge of the means to do so.”

“This applies equally well to what we learn in the M’TAM School. We are given the information on how to achieve a level of purity sufficient to interact with our ancestors. We are given the information on how to do so in the form of the ZemZem and the offerings that we perform. We are given the information of how we may communicate with the divine world through the intersession of our ancestors. It remains information until we honestly execute the procedures and raise our dead relatives to the status of ancestors, but it is the consequences of this that allow us to acquire the knowledge of our relationship to the world of the dead and to the divine world.”

“This concept is what I have called ‘Epistemological Pragmatism’.”