Knowing Deeply - The Act of Knowing

Sometimes I wonder if I'm 'in my head' too much. And other times (like recently) I avoid thinking deeply because I know that the time commitment and emotional energy required of it is more than I have available. But those times of avoidance are times when, in addition to not thinking deeply, I'm not living deeply. Things are happening around me, I'm reading good books, listening to interesting lectures, sermons, etc., but I'm an observer, and they aren't sinking into the depths of me. As a result, those interesting conversations, etc., don't stay with me: I can't remember much of them within a day or two, and they aren't changing me the way I thought they might when I was first listening or observing.

Why does that happen? Why can't I recall those things that really did seem significant when I heard them? What does it take to make something 'my own'?

Charlotte Mason would likely say that the very fact that I didn't make it my own was the reason that I couldn't recall it, the reason it didn't change me. It was like a lovely dish placed before me at a buffet, but not partaken of: I only looked at it while someone else enjoyed it.

Here's what Charlotte Mason has to say about how we acquire knowledge:

Knowledge is that which we know; and the learner knows only by a definite act of knowing which he performs for himself... (Vol 6 p. 255)

The mind refuses to know anything except what reaches it in more or less literary form...Persons can 'get up' the driest of pulverised text-books and enough mathematics for some public examination; but these attainments do not appear to touch the region of the mind. (Vol. 6 p. 256)

I've seen this phenomenon; perhaps you have, too:

One day, as we walked into an examination room while undergrads at the University of Manitoba's Faculty of Education, one of my fellow students was cautiously maintaining a safe buffer area around himself. His arms were stiffly bent before him, his head posed immobile upon his neck. "Don't bump me," he said now and again. His fear? All that he had crammed into his head the night before would be dislodged and forever lost. He hadn't made the knowledge his own. It was still someone else's knowledge, precariously balanced on his mind until the exam was done, after which it would no longer be there.

How do we make it our own? How is information received transformed into knowledge that impacts?

Charlotte Mason says that for anyone, child or adult, brilliant or slow, rich or poor, there is but one main act of knowing: Narration. Telling back what has been read or heard or seen.

Now this art of telling back if Education and is very enriching. We all practise it, we go over in our minds the points of a conversation, a lecture, a sermon, an article, and we are so made that only those ideas and arguments which we go over are we able to retain. Desultory reading or hearing is entertaining and refreshing, but is only educative here and there as our attention is strongly arrested. Further, we not only retain but realise, understand, what we thus go over. Each incident stands out, every phrase acquires new force, each link in the argument if riveted, in fact we have performed THE ACT OF KNOWING, and that which we have read, or heard, becomes a part of ourselves, it is assimilated after the due rejection of waste matter...We realise that there is an act of knowing to be performed; that no one can know without this act, that it must be self-performed, that it is as agreeable and natural to the average child or man as singing is to the song thrush, that "to know" is indeed a natural function. (Vol 6 p. 292)

I love these words! I love to think about how natural this is to humans, to have the words and ideas we come upon sink into our lives through narration, through journaling, through analysis and conversation.

So I'm going to just spend some time thinking on all this, seeing how I can get out of the shallow place I've been for a while and move back into the depths of knowledge. God has so much for me - I don't want to waste another minute!