The central question of The Cosmic Fly Swatter

Knowing

What is Knowing? It's a pretty big question. So as not to give away the Mystery of Thanoma Mabo, the two words written inside a matchbook, that set Daniel Hightower off in the first place, we are inserting a couple of excerpts from the book, one from the beginning and one from Chapter 28 whose title is Knowing.

We live in a universe of contrarities, and this is evidenced no more clearly than what is found in the advancements to natural science. The yin and yang of the Eastern philosophies are surely in part true. But it is in the perception of things that any clarity resides. And clarity cannot be found in the models of relativity. C.H.Pinkerton sensed this from his work and it is the reason he had Daniel cooking up an incomplete yet interesting model for human perception, the individual version of which he calls the Lens Pole. He was inclined to believe that there is a lot of evidence to support a model, fashioning realities observable in the physics of the natural world, into a paradigm for human perception itself.

The slow and arduous mental process that our protagonist undertakes in reaching his conclusions about knowing are integral to those understandings. So we will simply include two excerpts to help define the area, the position and the momentum if you will, of Daniel Hightower's journey through the Seas of Knowing.

Excerpt from Chapter 3 Brass Tacos

...All right, enough of this metaphorical nonsense about ships, Amigos. Let’s get down to Brass Tacos! What is Knowing?

If you ask the question, what do we know, the answer depends on who we is. Is it all the people who agree with you? What about the people who don’t agree with you? Or is it both? If it is both, which would be my inclination, then you don’t know anything for sure because half the people don’t think that what you say you know is what you know. It’s a bad question. Besides since what you know, is what you know, no one can surely disagree with you.

It looks like there are two parts to knowing. There’s “I” know, and “we” know, and they may or may not be the same thing. I think we spend most of our lives like the spinning yin yang coin. We are more or less both of them all the time going back and forth within the moment being aware of what I know and think, and what we know and think.

If you think about it, everything has an opposite. We live in a Universe of Contrarieties. Is life just a true or false test? We are all trying to remove uncertainty, aren’t we, except maybe the Buddhists. The problem is that as an individual I can be certain of very few things. I know the sun will come up every day as it has in the past as far back as anyone can remember. I know I am here, and I know I am going to die. I am surely more certain about these things than anything anybody else knows.

Instead, I ask “what is knowing?” This has to be a better question than what do we know? To know anything is to apprehend its existence, to be aware of its being. But one’s knowing is true, according to one’s capacity to acknowledge what actually exists. Immediately then, we run into perception problems. No one perceives anything perfectly, do they? What actually exists cannot be seen perfectly from a single point of view, and every individual point of view will be at least slightly different.

It can be no other way since we are all individuals, no two of us, identical. Just look at fingerprints...

Excerpt from Chapter 28 Knowing

Tell me about your knowing
Say it isn’t growing
Running to and fro
I want to know what’s left to know
Down here, and in it
We down here, we in it

When I started out on this project, I asked myself what is Knowing? Though my efforts were valuable to me for understanding and meaning, they can be judged just as easily by anyone else as a wasteful use of time and resources. But I have answered some things about what is Knowing.

Knowing is personal, and it is a combination of all things that make up a human being. We are all little knowers and observers. What I have in my knowing cannot possibly be exactly like anyone else. For anyone to have my knowing they would have to be me. They would possess my Lens Pole. My Lens Pole holds a position in time/space that no other little knower can possess.

My knowing is the personal sum of knowledge of many kinds; one type of which is provable facts, and another is what I believe. What I believe is provable only if it agrees with the facts. A lot of what I believe is strongly evidenced and yet without proof. I believe it nonetheless since it more closely approaches what I observe to be the way things really are, the first and prime cognitive universal for all little knowers.

The lives of all observers seek to know the way things really are; it is truth itself, unattainable perfectly as it is since it resides in the absolute. The word perfection is interchangeable with the word absolute. But perfection is a fabricated observation more than a reality for little knowers. It is a choice to move in a direction. It is a momentum giving the meaning to the acts of little observers.

It is possessed and is real only in the Single Observer. Its pursuit, however, is the sine qua non that separates man from beasts...