Communications are experiences - not knowledge...

What we term communications, of all sensory sorts - the spoken or written word, images, sounds - including music, smells, tastes, touch - are not knowledge, but they are experiences.

Our mortal life is about experiences, and how we respond to them; so communications are very important. But we should not mistake communications for knowledge.

Why not? Well, that is obvious - in the sense that we have many generations of philosophical reflection that emphasise how unreliable are communications, that they cannot be relied upon for knowledge (or 'certainty').

This for multiple reasons - to do with limitations of cognition, of biased and incomplete sampling, of the multi-step nature of communications and so on. Some have concluded that therefore there is no possibility of knowledge - e.g. that knowledge is entirely subjective, based on arbitrary information, a matter of opinion, contingent, labile, uncommunicable etc.

But the inference that there because communication is non-valid therefore there can be no knowledge includes a false assumption - which is that only the material world exists...

We assume that this non-material world does not exist - but that is merely an assumption; furthermore a very modern and entirely Western assumption...

One implication is that when we personally are communicating, we are providing experiences for others - but we are not transmitting knowledge.

By contrast, when we are engaged in primary thinking we are engaged in direct knowing - and, because knowledge must potentially be universally accessible to be knowledge, others may also know directly what we know.

Thus knowledge is not communicated, and communications are not knowledge...

A fuller version of this is at Albion Awakening