March 2017
Tacit
Knowing by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, BA, BA (Hons), M. Couns., PhD
Perception is a
funny thing. You can notice some things straight away but not even see other
things, and we are quite different in this way.
For instance, I have a large Japanese torii painted red in my front
garden. It is in plain sight, but not everyone sees it. A friend came by and
had to be shown where it was, even though he’d parked his car directly in front
of it. A torii is a gateway with no walls and symbolizes the passage from this
world and the next. It is a very visually pleasing structure and frames my
garden beautifully.
Not seeing
something doesn’t mean the object is completely out of awareness. A person
encountering my torii for the first time would not attempt to walk into the
wooden frame; some knowledge of its existence is present, albeit not conscious.
At some level the person has some tacit knowing of this
thing, but there is nevertheless a certain blindness that needs to be
addressed. What else, I wonder, in my friend’s life that is not seen? What else
might he benefit from seeing?
Tacit knowledge
is defined as knowledge that isn’t explicit and cannot be easily transferred
via direct language. This is the kind of knowledge we have when we have
acquired the ability to ride a bicycle, or play a musical instrument, or get a
sense of the geography of a town. We can speak of elements of the negotiation
of these things, but a large knowledge base is known at another level. We can
convey a sense of it through artwork, hypnosis, stories and poetry, and we
explore it also in our dreams and reverie. It is a kind of knowing that is very
rich and, when understood better, can enhance our lives through offering solutions
we didn’t even know we had. In my psychotherapeutic and clinical
hypnotherapeutic work I deliberately set about bringing those partly obscured
knowledges into the light so they can be consciously accessed.
I’m thinking here
of a woman client who was feeling bereft at how the people in her life were
apparently trying to strip away everything she loved. I reminded her of how
each time she settled in a place, she created great beauty, even with very
little. In other words, she had unconscious skills to make spaces that are
lovely. Certainly others had abused her by taking her for granted and stealing
things from her as well, but her inherent knowledge of the right placement of
things , the feng shui, meant that,
at a tacit level, she knows (although she doubts) what should go where, and
what should be left out: the very skills needed to create boundaries around
herself so that she cannot be abused. By drawing attention to her tacit
knowing, she begins to have the skills required to take back her life and live
the life her heart desires.
Tacit knowing can
be built upon and strengthened. Regarding the woman just described, the
reconnected skills of boundary making and right placement of intent in relation
to certain other people that I suggested she deliberately utilize will, over
time, become a second nature, a tacit knowledge. For now, though, the knowledge
she has in the making of beautiful spaces needs to be explicitly utilized in
the right placement of those people she can trust and those she feels are not
right for her. This kind of knowledge has to be worked upon deliberately and
face on and simply and with regard to ethics and the law. The explicit is not
subtle. There is likely to come a time when she just knows what do, what to
say, how to be in a way that nurtures her in the way she knows as the creative
person she is.
I like my torii
and I like the symbol it portrays. It is a gestalt figure that is both figure
and ground and explicit and implicit being in the one thing. Walking through
the torii I move from space to space acknowledging the many kinds of knowing,
and it is a delight. Neither matters individually, except as the whole.
