Pre-PhD Workbook 3: On Knowing Without Being Taught

Some knowledge doesn’t arrive, it's been there the whole time. Like… if I reached into the ether I could grab it, two hands, full-bodied. It just is.

I don’t always realise I’m carrying something until someone else speaks it out loud and then without hesitation, i'll just say or think to myself “well duh, yeah”, and shrug like the person im listening to is saying the most obvious thing in the world.

It’s not a surprise. It’s recognition. A deep thud in the chest. Like someone’s named something I already knew, but hadn’t had language for yet. Not new knowledge. Just a light turned on.

And it’s not metaphorical, either. I mean that physically. My whole body will respond before I even understand what’s been said. Something locks in — heart, gut, lungs. A full-body yes.

I’ve started trusting that.

Some people call it intuition, others wairua, but for me it’s a knowing that is woven in. It comes from whakapapa; of people, places, and moments that I wasn't personally there for but still carry the imprint of. Not in a mystical, floaty way; I’m not sure that it’s mine, exactly. I think I’m just the one holding it right now.

I used to think I needed to prove things. To show my working. To make it look like knowledge, with sources and steps and tidy logic. But that was a translation exercise. Making something I already knew sound like it came from somewhere else. Like it had to be justified to count. And, in the current world, maybe that’s true? I wish it wasn’t. I know sometimes it isn’t. But in academia?  Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Man it’s strange, isn’t it, the way some systems can only see knowing if it arrives in their format. As if anything that lives in the body, in intuition, in whakapapa, needs to be made palatable before it can be real. Someone else needs to have said it before it could possibly be true, but what is truth anyway? (God, that's a topic for another time).

But some truths don’t show up as arguments. They arrive as signals. Repetition. Vibration. A word that won’t leave you alone. A fragment that keeps turning up in your dreams. A pause in a conversation that hums with meaning. These things matter. They are the work.

I don’t always know what to do with them straight away. Sometimes I sit with the weight of them for a while. Let them move around in me. Te Korekore, maybe. Or Te Pō. The part before the light. Before the naming.

This is the shape of it:
A knowing that shows up uninvited.
A body that recognises it before the mind can.
A rhythm that doesn’t rush toward clarity.

I don’t want to misrepresent here, because even with this obvious “well duh” thinking. We still have an obligation to question, to analyse, to see what parts we want to keep and what parts can be left where they came from (even if we don’t know where that might actually be).

This is how I move through the world. Not in straight lines, but in returns. In loops and recursions and soft repetitions. I come back to things I thought I’d already worked out and find a different kind of knowing waiting there. The kind that doesn’t explain itself. It just settles in and stays.

I think I used to be afraid that wasn’t enough. That if I couldn’t explain it, I shouldn’t trust it.

I don’t feel that way anymore. Maybe I'm getting too old to bullshit myself anymore. Because now I think: if I feel it that clearly, there’s something true there. Whether or not I can say what it is yet.

Not everything needs to be spoken to be real.

Some things need to be carried.

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Pre-PhD Workbook 2: When the Goalposts Keep Moving