"These earthly godfathers of heaven’s lights that give a name to every fixed star, have no more profit of their shining nights than those that walk and wot not what they are. Too much to know is to know nought but fame" - Love's Labour's Lost (Act I, Scene I)
I am blinded by the assumption that if I accumulate enough scientific, evidence based knowledge - then I can make the right decisions and be free to live a good life.
Knowledge is the currency of the mind. Without it I starve, with it I can function, once I over-dose on it, I am its prisoner. It is only meaningful when it serves - as means to an end.
"O knowledge ill-inhabited, worse than Jove in a thatch’d house!" - As You Like It (Act I, Scene II)
A singular obsession with knowledge is another form of lust that blind and bind us. This is a praised addiction and it is the cause of many an emotional ailment. How is the obsession with accumulating knowledge any different than being an alcoholic or an entrepreneur trapped on the treadmill of making more money than one can ever spend or put to good use?
I need intellectual nourishment to activate my sensibility for the truth, to keep me awake. A gluttony of ideas, only clogs the senses.
Ideas are inventory, too much ties up the flow of thinking, blunts my intelligence, buries the very truth I search for, so lustily in its own noise.
"O! where hath our intelligence been drunk? Where hath it slept?" - Life and Death of King John (Act IV, Scene II).
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