Could this saying possibly be true: "To Know and not do, is not yet to know"?

It is amazing to me how much we desire a "fresh message" or a "new approch".  How we longingly keep seeking out THE answer.
I catch myself doing it a lot, I am a seminar junky, I have what one might call an information fetish, I LOVE discovering new things... but sometimes I wonder how much I am actually retaining, how much am I left KNOWING... I do get caught in the trap of... yip... "switching off" because I confuse "hearing something before" with "knowing something".

So it is not suprising to me when I hear the protest from my fellows, participants or from clients "...but I know all this already!"

"What does it mean to know something?" I have caught myself wondering more than once, and "why if I know don't I do?"
 Observing and Hearing are quite different from Knowing.  (And again, motivation for doing... well that is a whole other blog post).

I guess it's like driving a car... you can have grown up beside the best driver in the world, you can have heard all the things involved in being a good driver, steer out of a skid, accelerate out of a corner, use your gears rather than just your breaks when driving down a steep hill.  Don't have your foot on the clutch and the accelerator at the same time, keep your hands at 10 and 2.  You can watch Top Gear and Formula One every chance you get.  Yet, it is not until you sit in that drivers seat and you attempt to co-ordinate all of the actions involved with driving... and pull it off... and it's not until you are comfortable that you have mastered the art (you can get from a to b in a car in one piece) you can really say that you KNOW how to drive.  And arguably EVEN THEN that does not mean you know everything about driving or even that you will be a good driver.

It is the same principle with information.  You may have heard something before, but there is a stark contrast between this and knowing something.  Let's consider the example of healthy eating, you have heard that you need to eat a balance of natural live food (fruits and vegetables), enough good fats, enough proteins, and limit your intake of caffeine, sugar, and alcohol if you want to have vitality (energy and health) in your life.  Unless you put these principles into practice and have experienced them, it is unlikely that you know them,  you merely know OF them. 

I realised that knowing is almost about an intimacy or awareness or ownership and experience of a principle, it does not matter whether you decide it is truth or fallacy. One thing is certain, hearing is not knowing.

The challenge now is to expose the blindspots around knowing, to question that which is seemingly so familiar to the ear it has become "white noise" and mistaken as "known".  Be careful of those assumptions, it is these little truths and answers that are sitting right under your nose, the very ones that cross your path daily, that house the hidden treasure of your dreams.  Awaken to the knowing... by owning them... becoming intimate with them... trying them out... testing them out.

Do I really KNOW this all already?  And if I do, why am I not doing it and experiencing the truth of it?

So "To know and not do, is not yet to know"?  Perhaps it's a little more complicated than that...  we can know and decide not to do... but generally I would agree we need to have experienced something before we can truly know it.

It's time to GIVE IT A TRY!  Implementation and action is part of learning... this is what gets us to the point of KNOWING.  Woohoo, glad we got that one figured out ;o)