Being as Knowing
- Centre for Cognition, Culture, and Childhood
Fresh research on Children, Cognition & Culture
- Children as equipped by life to create knowledge autonomously
- Cognition as the holistic process of life, shaped by context,
- Culture as the interface humans create to live in harmony with nature’s laws
INVITATION
​Join us in sensing to know
—beyond the distortions of reading
Restoring the primacy of
the senses, body, experience, WORLD, and intuition
Of Eyes, Ears and Earth is an initiative aimed at addressing a fundamental crisis in modern cognition. It is designed as a space for modern, educated individuals to critically examine the assumptions that shape their understanding of life, and to begin a process of recovering natural, embodied cognition. Modern education has produced individuals who are deeply disconnected from the realities of life. Conditioned to rely on abstract knowledge, linguistic constructs, and institutional authority, they have become alienated from their own biological intelligence. This disconnection has not only undermined personal well-being but has also contributed to ecological destruction, social fragmentation, and a growing inability to live in harmony with the natural world. This crisis is accidental—it is the result of a paradigm that prioritizes knowledge over experience, language over perception, and mind over body. The modern paradigm breeds a false sense of certainty and independence, shaping individuals who are confident in their concepts but out of touch with reality. In the process, even fundamental human capacities like creativity, perception, and meaning-making have been reduced to technical or conceptual activities, detached from the lived world.
This initiative is built on two complementary paths of inquiry—distinct yet interconnected. One invites direct, embodied engagement with life to awaken natural cognition; the other offers a reflective space to examine how modern knowledge systems shape and limit our understanding. Together, they provide a way to both experience and critically question the foundations of how we learn, know, and relate to the world.
Observation to See
Engage directly with life—no books, no theories. Unlearn the conceptual, reclaim natural cognition, and reconnect with the world through direct experience.
Read and Let Go
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Read just enough to see how reading shapes thought—how it builds conclusions and the illusion of understanding. Then, let go.
Institutionalization of learning and academization of knowledge is the biggest crime against humanity as even the primary existential knowledge of child-rearing has become absent amongst the so-called educated and developed people. There can't any more proof of the failure of modernity. The appearance of life coaches says volumes about the total failure of this mayhem as even the life coaches are a bigger threat to life – spontaneous, playful, and mystical. There are no solutions in the Western paradigm as the solution lies outside its paradigm. The only place to look for is children- right from the womb till they are three. That is before the modern adults condition the child. Modern educated are ignorant about knowledge creation as they are brought up with ready-made information, mistakenly thought of as knowledge. Hardly any of them has asked this simple question as to what is knowledge and how is it created.
Culture, in its essence, is a system of collective knowledge creation and adaptation to life’s demands. Indigenous societies embody this through their continuous, life-driven processes of creativity and learning. Modernity, however, replaces culture with an obsession for the written word and market-driven objectives, stripping humanity of its natural cultural anchors. Modern humans find themselves estranged from both the world and their inner selves. They live in a paradigm that prioritizes the consumption of pre-existing knowledge over the natural, autonomous creation of it. This alienation manifests in crises at every level—personal, societal, and ecological.