Knowledge Up and Down
In an era of data and proof, we trust what can be observed, measured, and verified. It’s a habit born of science and one that has served us well. Reason and empiricism have built the modern world, from aspirin to space travel. Yet data and proof are also promoted as the boundary of what we can know. Everything outside their reach such as intuition, revelation, inspiration, is dismissed as poetry or superstition.
The Bhagavad Gita invites us to reconsider that boundary. In the Gita’s fourth chapter (4.1-3), Krishna tells his warrior-disciple Arjuna that he first taught the science of yoga to the solar king, who passed it down through generations until it was lost and now, through Arjuna, revived. Followers of the tradition embrace this description as historic fact. Others treat such imagery as mythic embroidery, but even then, the story carries a deeper meaning, one that is critical to the search for knowledge.
The Gita describes two currents of knowing: the ascending path, where knowledge arises from observation and reason; and the descending path, where knowledge enters consciousness as revelation. The ascending path (aroha-pantha) builds from experience upward. It is how science works, and it remains civilization’s best defense against chaos, since rational inquiry protects us from dogma and wishful thinking. Still, even the sharpest intellect can mislead. Perception is partial, memory selective, emotion intrusive. We often see only what we are prepared to see. Reason itself is shaped by assumption and desire.
At those limits, another way of knowing appears. The descending path (avaroha-pantha) suggests that truth is not only constructed by the mind but can also be received by it. This is not blind belief or divine dictation. It is knowledge that comes to us, rather than knowledge that is assembled by us, what philosopher Jean Gebser called the transrational: understanding that includes reason yet also transcends it.
We experience such descending knowledge all the time. When a teacher explains something that we could never have deduced alone, that is descending knowledge. When an artist is inspired by an image that came unbidden, when a small flower triggers visions of a majestic natural world, or a scientist sees the solution to a problem in a flash of insight, such moments feel given, not earned. We admit that such knowledge approaches revelation, though the word may make us uneasy.
To receive knowledge in this way requires humility: a willingness to see intellect as a doorway rather than the whole house. It requires at least the willingness to consider that consciousness may be more than a by-product of neurons; and that when we know something, it may be the result of something more than neurological functions. There are current theories of mind, stripped of mysticism, that hint at such a possibility, in particular that self-awareness may be more than the output of particles and forces. Self-awareness may also be a separate and essential feature of reality, waiting to be recognized.
Seen through that lens, Krishna’s statement that he spoke the Gita “at the dawn of time” can be understood as more than ancient cosmology. It can be understood as a metaphor for consciousness itself: the proposal that awareness precedes intellect, that knowing existed before any individual knower. The “solar king” becomes more than a Puranic ruler; he becomes the luminous principle of awareness through which knowledge is first received.
Both paths, ascending and descending, are essential. Without the ascending path of analysis, revelation degenerates into blind faith, and without the descending path of receptivity, reason becomes sterile. Knowledge ascends through effort and descends through grace. Together, they sustain a fuller vision of truth.
In an age where information eclipses reflection, this balance is worth remembering. The challenge before us is not to choose between reason and revelation, but to keep both alive, to sustain the rigor that tests what we know and the openness that welcomes what we cannot prove.
Only then does knowledge become wisdom.
