The universe is information. We gather that information through our senses; utilize, process, and generate information with our minds; collect, distribute, and destroy information with our bodies.
“Knowledge” is the experience of information, and so is fundamental to the experience of the universe. It confines and creates the conditions and understandings that define a person. Veil or map, existence does not exist without it.
My relationship to knowledge has evolved over my life. To begin, I took it for granted that my little sponge of a brain absorbed the world around me as if by osmosis, conjuring a representation of the concrete reality within which I came to understand myself. Optical illusions suggested some disconnect between my perceptions and the world, but for the most part an acceptable fidelity was assumed.
I soon became enamored of things like history, fiction, and science as knowable sequencing of information beyond my experience, continually enriching my life and understandings. Eventually I ventured into the nature of knowing, challenging received epistemology and seeking other sources of meaning and truth. Awareness of cognitive biases and non-Western critiques made me doubt some of my prior, and a priori, assumptions.
Today, I accept the irreducible necessity of information to my experience of existence, but beyond that I understand it always as a process of continual reevaluation and exploration. To make choices and judgments I always seek more and better information, new perspectives, and trustworthy experiences. I try to question what I think is better, what I think is new, what I think I trust, and why.
Many traditions and ways of describing the universe include some similar recognition that knowledge is fundamental to our experience. This is hinted in the text without judgment: “veil or map, existence does not exist without” knowledge. But recognizing it as one of the four Cardinal Aspects does not place over-importance on facts, sensation, history, tradition, or any of its concrete forms.