Knowledge

I have been thinking a lot about learning and knowledge. I feel that gaining knowledge can be compared to being in a room. You start out in the darkness, stumbling around trying to make it through life, hoping to find some light. At some point you find a wall and feel around until you find a light switch. Flipping on the light switch brings great relief. You can now see! There are things in the room you never knew existed or couldn’t identify. What an amazing room you are in!

As you explore your surroundings and learn from what is there, you find a lightbulb. Upon investigation you discover that the bulb is labeled as 40 watts. Curious, you switch the lightbulbs and find that the old lightbulb was only 20 watts. The new bulb lights up so much more of the room! You can see colors that you couldn’t before. You can see that the room is bigger than you first thought. You are aware of all the things you already knew but add new knowledge because of the brighter light.

Exploring brings you to another bulb, this time 60 watts. Once again, changing the bulb brings new awareness and new learning. The more you learn, the more bulbs you find, making your world brighter and bigger with each new bulb. At one point you even find a window with a dark curtain over it, discovering that there was always a source of light, even when you thought you were in darkness; all you had to do was open the curtain.

It is possible that at some time in your learning you go behind a wall and lose sight of the first things you had learned, but overall the new knowledge just adds to what you already know.

An interesting side-affect happens as the light gets brighter in your room, you not only become aware of the wonderful new things the light illuminates, but you also become aware of the dirt on the floor, the cobwebs on the ceiling, and the clutter building up around the edges. If you aren’t careful, this awareness can cause self-judgment, self-criticism, and depression. In reality, becoming aware of all these things is just an opportunity to clean house, to get rid of the things that are not serving you in your life, to become a better and wiser person. The interesting thing about knowledge is that it is not automatically transferred into wisdom. Knowledge is becoming aware of the things in your room, wisdom is knowing when to clean house.

Until we return to the Ultimate Light, God our Father, we will never run out of higher wattage bulbs. There is always more to learn, more to see, both in ourselves and in the world around us. We may even find that there really are no walls to our house, the boundaries of learning are really only an illusion.

What wattage is your current bulb?