Our culture reduced knowing to a single form (the knowledge that something is the case).

But there are actually 3 other ways of knowing, and it is precisely in those three that most of our sense of meaning in life is enacted.

What do I mean?

The one we're all fixated on is Propositional knowing:

Like knowing that a cat is a mammal. That’s a proposition and your sense of realness is a sense of conviction that it is true.

They afford beliefs.

And you have a type of memory for that called semantic memory:
You know that cats are mammals. And that's it.
You have a sense of conviction for it.

Procedural knowing is knowing how to do something (how to swim, how to ride a bike).

Notice the difference there:
Propositions are true or false.
Skills apply or not.

You're not riding a bike right now…that doesn’t mean your skill of bike riding is false.

Skills have conditions of application, not conditions of referential completion.

So you're not talking about something, you're interacting with it:
Which means the sense of realness is a sense of empowerment.

Skills afford power.

You have a type of memory for that called procedural memory:

This is why people with Alzheimer's can still play the piano even if they don’t remember what they had for lunch.

It is a separate system.

Then you have perspectival knowing:

You have a perspective right now and you have a viewpoint (a point of view) from that perspective.
You know what it is like to be you (here and now) in this state of mind in that situation.

And it has its own kind of memory.
It's called episodic memory.

Let me give you an example:
Did you brush your teeth this morning?

Yes?

Okay so what happens when you remember doing that?
Do you remember the series of events?

If so, that means you go back and have a little narrative, a tiny story.

And then what that story reflects is your perspective on the situation.

That's what an episode is:
An episode is a slice of perspectival knowing.

And episodic memory is the one we cherish because it's about the events that matter to us and are significant to us, which are different than facts that we think are true.

And your sense of realness for perspectival knowing is not power.
It's not a sense of conviction.
It affords presence.

That's another sense of realness.

Beneath these sits participatory knowing:

It is the knowing by how you are coupled to the environment.
How you and the environment are participating in the same patterns, the same processes, the same principles.

For example, you could walk around your room right now because both you and the room are participating in gravity.

And you don't have to know that you know this.
Participatory knowing can be largely unconscious.

So you can be either coupled to the environment or not.

When this coupling is attuned, the world makes sense to you.
It becomes an arena for your agency.
Its signature of realness is connectedness rather than mere conviction.

And participatory knowing affords a peculiar kind of memory:
It's your sense of self.

It involves (for example) the knowing that has happened through the roles you take up.

You are a friend, a lover, a parent…and I assume (like most people) you don't want to be suffering massive cognitive dissonance in which all these roles are undermining each other.

You want them to be coherent and make sense together.

So you try to draw a through-line between all the roles, all the patterns you participate in.
That's your self. That's what your sense of self is.

Now you might ask:
What’s the importance in knowing all of this?

Well, what's the sense of realness for the participatory knowing?
It’s the sense of being connected to reality and having a genuine, authentic agency in that arena.

The sense of realness is meaning in life.

It is the lived “fittedness” in which your actions and the world’s affordances (actionable possibilities the environment offers to an agent) mutually make sense.
Its “sense of realness” is the background conviction that you are genuinely connected and can act authentically within this situation.

Thus participatory knowing is where a lot of the meaning in life is being held.
And then above that it's held in the perspectives you take (what you notice in the world, what’s salient to you) and then that gives you your skills for actually navigating and making your way.

Only after all of that is running do you get the propositional claims that give you your beliefs.

But if you focus solely on facts, statements, and beliefs you are cutting yourself off from the procedural, perspectival, and participatory that actually generate meaning.

To fix this you need an ecology of practice:
Because no single exercise can cultivate all these kinds of knowing.

We need a living, interlocking system of disciplines and communities that restores participatory attunement, refines perspectival presence, builds procedural competence, and tests propositions to deepen our contact with reality.