Joan Walton and Athena Potari – Politics of Knowledge: Discussion

Following the publication of Joan Walton’s article in Paradigm Explorer and our Bohm Dialogue in Pari, we wanted to provide the wider Galileo Community with an opportunity to share their experiences in this area. I will introduce the session, then Joan and Athena will briefly share their perspectives before we open up for general discussion. We’d also be happy to receive written submissions on this topic.

Joan Walton writes: “this webinar enquires into the question: ‘what is knowledge, and whose knowledge counts?’ Many people in the SMN believe that knowledge can be gained from experience, through use of intuition and imagination, as well as through empirical study. This view of knowledge is usually grounded in a radical challenging of the materialist worldview, which assumes that consciousness is a derivative of matter, and any sense of meaningful experience is ultimately illusory. However, our voices are marginalised in contemporary society, where government, big business and the media use their social and political power to perpetuate and strengthen fundamentalist materialist beliefs which promote their own vested economic interests.

It would seem that education may be the answer: if people of all ages were to gain the opportunity to learn about alternative worldviews, then surely this would lead to a transformation in consciousness? In my contribution, I will show how education is a victim of the entanglement of knowledge and power, and in fact contributes to the sustaining of the deeply embedded materialist worldview.”

Athena Potari will discuss the analogy of Plato’s Cave in relation to our modern “educational caves” or “educated caves”, visit the Greek definition of knowledge as Gnosis, and quickly demonstrate how the situation we face in modern academia corresponds to a “cave” – which consists of beliefs and psychological attachment to them – rather than “knowledge” which refers to the free opening of consciousness rising beyond concepts into wisdom consciousness that is the actual experience of knowledge . Let us be reminded of the fact that Plato brings up the cave analogy in the Republic in his attempt to define ~ guess what: PAIDEIA, i.e. education!!