The paradox in knowing is
evident across the world today – we see the beauty of the earth but systematically
steer for its destruction. The knowledge ‘I think therefore I am’ has
predicated existence to appear after the mind has asserted its own authority.
We pilot a machine insensitive to our own good in the flying.
It is to the heart of this
deepest mystery into which this issue steps to reveal the trick of the mind we
think we have. Emilios Bouratinos challenges science to move from the question
‘what do we know?’ to ‘how do we know?’ Henri Bortoft in detail charts Goethe’s
method to integrate and go beyond these two ways of knowing into the unity of
the phenomena. Iain McGilchrist navigates, in his expertise of both medicine
and literature, between the evidence and experience of the two ways of knowing.
When science dissects
consciousness with the lens of the analytical attention, it is ignoring both an
internal and external aspect of our living relation to whole nature. It is imperative that we open up to the
consequence of this.
The issue delves into an exploration
of time; Newton’s absolute concept of a time standing eternal outside the
influence of change, was challenged by Einstein’s theory of relativity, where
time is a dynamic parameter of the action it measures. Time returned to its
whole source becomes a quality of living, rather than a fragmented commodity
which can be parcelled out.
The thread of knowing follows
into the question of biological formation. We explore how hermeneutics, the
interpretation of texts and biosemiotics, the study of signs, enter into the
living dialogue of significant parts into an overall meaning.
We arrive at creative unity,
about which Tagore wrote (From ‘East and West’ in Creative Unity, published by Macmillan, 1922):
‘Truth has its nest as well as its sky. That nest is definite in structure, accurate in law of construction; and though it has changed and rebuilt over and over again, the need of it is never ending [the analytical mind]. For some centuries the East has neglected the nest- building of truth. She has not been attentive to learn its secret. Trying to cross the trackless infinite, the East has relied solely upon her wings [the intuitive journey] . Shall the messenger of the sky and the builder of nests ever meet?’
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