Copyright © 1999 by Anne Herbert. All rights reserved.
By Anne Herbert
{This essay is part of a larger piece, Making Generous Trouble]
The word "impossible" is a kind of an order telling you what you can't do. But orders don't have to be obeyed. For example:
Around where I live we're pretty much trained to think there is no limit to how much money one person can make--though you can't know in advance which person.
Also, we're trained to believe that interlocking human-made what-cha-ma-call-its can do anything, especially tricks that we thought were impossible yesterday.
But how about having an interlocking human world where all beings are having a pretty good time, eating good food, sleeping in good places for their bodies, and creating what they were born to create?
Where I live we are trained to know that that is impossible. We are supposed to settle for hoping that we'll be the ones to have a bunch of money that can buy a bunch of gadgets. We're supposed to not worry about wading through other people's misery to live because we are supposed to know that a great life for everyone is impossible.
But how do we know it's impossible?
Epistemology strikes again!
Epistemology is the theory of knowledge--what can be known and how it can be known, what can't be known, and who is capable of knowing and who isn't.
If anyone ever said or sneered that you couldn't know something or that everybody knows something that you were daring to not believe, or that people like you weren't capable of knowing what you knew, or that nobody could know what you said you knew, they were trying to shut up your mouth and your mind with their epistemology.
Hey, it's only their theory of knowledge. There's a reason they are all intense about making you buy their theory.
It's cheaper for the people in charge to stop your mind now from knowing what you know than stop your body later from doing what they don't want you to do. If anyone's sneers stop you from knowing what you know, their epistemology has struck your power.
You have as much right as anyone who ever condescended to you to have a theory about what can be known and who can know it. It's good to run any ideas you get by air, earth, fire, water and the whole material world dance troupe. There is no reason for taking someone else's snottiness as the boundaries of your knowing. All your ancestors from the fishes and the monkeys to your great-grandma carried your DNA to you and that DNA has never met this way before or had the experiences you've had. All the beings before and beings after could really use you knowing what your DNA, your head and your heart know as they have your experiences.
You are here to know what you know. Maybe one time your heard a song inside and started to sing it, and someone yelled at you, and you remembered the yell and not the song. Maybe now you can hear the song, and sing it whole.