# KNOWLEDGE AND KNOWING By Kyle Hinton Knowledge and knowing are not the same thing. Knowledge can be taught. Knowing cannot. A person can be told about love. They can read about grief. They can study fear. They can listen to someone describe parenthood, betrayal, poverty, wealth, addiction, courage, loneliness or loss. They may understand the words perfectly. They may possess knowledge about the experience. But they cannot know it until it has been experienced. Knowing is born from experience. Therefore: EXPERIENCE → MEMORY → KNOWING The experience creates the memory. The memory creates the knowing. And once something is truly known, that knowing becomes part of the deeper architecture through which the person experiences what comes next. KNOWLEDGE CAN PREPARE. IT CANNOT REPLACE. Someone can teach another person what fire is. They can explain heat. They can explain combustion. They can warn that fire burns. That creates knowledge. But the experience of being burned creates a different thing entirely. It creates knowing. The difference is not intelligence. It is experience. This is why one human being can understand another person's experience intellectually while still being unable to completely know what that person knows. They have not lived the same experience. THE CHAIN The sequence is therefore: EXPERIENCE → MEMORY → KNOWING → EMOTION → THOUGHT → ACTION → TRAIT Knowing produces an emotional relationship to what has been experienced. Emotion influences thought. Thought influences action. Repeated patterns of action contribute to the expression of personality traits. Those actions then create further experiences. So the complete cycle becomes: EXPERIENCE → MEMORY → KNOWING → EMOTION → THOUGHT → ACTION → TRAIT → NEW EXPERIENCE → NEW MEMORY → NEW KNOWING The cycle continues throughout life. WHY PEOPLE CHANGE This is why traits are not destiny. New experiences create new memories. New memories create new knowings. New knowings can change the emotional meaning of earlier experiences. That changes thought. Changed thought changes action. Changed action changes the way personality traits are expressed. A person therefore does not simply accumulate years. They accumulate knowings. This is one of the foundations of wisdom. An older person may possess perspectives unavailable to their younger self because they have now experienced things their younger self had only imagined, feared, desired or been told about. The younger person may have possessed knowledge. The older person possesses knowing. PERSPECTIVE Knowing is also bound to experience and therefore to perspective. A person may know something deeply at twenty and understand it differently at forty. The original knowing was not necessarily false. New experience has created additional memory. Additional memory has created additional knowing. The person's perspective has expanded. This is why wisdom does not necessarily destroy earlier knowing. It places it within a larger experience. What I knew then came from what I had experienced then. What I know now includes everything I have experienced since. And what I may know tomorrow depends upon experiences I have not yet lived. THE PRINCIPLE No soul enters a human life already consciously knowing every human experience. That would defeat the purpose of experiencing it. Knowledge may describe an experience. Information may prepare someone for an experience. Another person may attempt to explain an experience. But none can create the knowing. Knowing must be lived. That is why experience matters. And perhaps that is why the soul experiences life at all.