Three Questions

How do we know things, and how do we know that we know? That's what epistemology is all about, and in the process of figuring it out, we all come up with theories of knowledge.

I think there are three main questions.

1. What led up to this?
2. Where does this lead to?
3. Is it good?

I suspect that no matter how humans think, it all boils down to these three things because I haven't found any paradigm that needs any other questions. In itself, this isn't proof that there aren't any other key questions, of course. I'm just saying that you need three for human inquiry.

Why these three? The first one establishes cause. The second one establishes effect. And the third requires value judgement, whether relative ("Is this good compared to... ?") or absolute ("Is this good in itself?").

It is certainly possible to use fewer questions in some disciplines. However, it doesn't seem profitable to use more except as elaborations or refinements of these three, for a specific purpose within a specific kind of inquiry.

Oddly enough, the 'Rule of Three' is one of the rules of human stories; things always come in threes. Maybe the Rule of Three is like Finagle's Law, one of the great meta rules of human existence.

Gnosis and Inkery

In Atlantis for the last few years, there has been a course of study in which novices may elude the crassness of general papery and switch to inkery instead. For those who are less informed, papery is the process of wielding paper, whereas inkery is the superior art of wielding ink, which defeats and dominates all paper (except perhaps blotting paper).

This inkery learning is a subtil (as our forefathers would have said) beast. By careful questioning, as if from the mouth of that ugly Socrates, one is to somehow draw out (Latin: educare) meaning from knowledge (Greek: gnosis). This is thus supposed to make one less agnostic (or more gnostic, if you think that way) through a process of diagnostics (which does not mean two agnostics reasoning together).

But because of the historical origins and biases of Atlantean education, most of the wise men quoted and imbibed (metaphorically) are of Greek origin; and if not Greek, otherwise Mediterranean; and if not otherwise Mediterranean, European. This has led some to misperceive the nature of the world and assume that there are no wise men of Sind or of Cathay.

On the contrary, it has to be said that all our Atlantean wisdom is primarily the legacy of Mu and Lemuria, of the chilling Plateau of Leng, and of long lost cities buried deep in the history of the greatest of continents, Asia. This is what the novices are missing, as they pursue gnosis and inkery.

The disconnect between where wisdom lies, and where superficial knowledge lies more heinously, is what leads to the horrible lacunae that commentators find in the minds of these novices. They are extremely good at spouting Teutonic names, steeped in primitive barbarism, but extremely bad at quoting the Sanskrit masters who gave us words. This means that their idea of the Logos is one based on mnemonics, and not on the essential nature of language, structure, form and being.

It leads to nihilism, abolitionism, and other forms of reductionist philosophy which make the task of thinking less important. It is like the famous proof that invokes the idea that all numbers are nothing compared to infinity, and hence numbers have no significance — or the obverse, that all numbers are so much greater than zero, and hence all numbers have equal significance.

I think that any novice wishing to prepare for the higher levels of education should begin with simple things. Start with epistemology, the basic ideas of how things are known, before you try elaborate games with paper and ink. People who seek wisdom through inkery often come to a sticky end.