Curricular Clouds of (Un)Knowing: Learning About Mystery From the Mystic Traditions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Curricula have traditionally been concerned with proposing intentions and expectations for the teaching and learning of knowledge. What if curriculum conversed not only with the known, but the unknowable—with mystery? In this work, I investigate mystic traditions to learn about mystery. I come to a characterization of mystery as the dialectical condition of knowing while at the same time not knowing. Mystery is also an epithet of ultimate reality—a wholeness, which, all the while not completely knowable, nonetheless, attracts the utmost attention in its possibility for wisdom and meaningful transformation. The mystic traditions remind that mystery is an ineluctable feature of any metaphysical theory that aims to explicate ultimate reality, and because of this, belief is an inherent aspect of any metaphysical understanding. Furthermore, because metaphysical belief underpins our understanding of knowledge, a curriculum that invites mystery invites exploring, discerning and acting on existential beliefs. The mystic traditions proffer a way to approach mystery, namely the contemplative pathway, which can be engaged as both epistemological model and method. Mystic traditions also demonstrate how to deal with paradox, one of which is engaging reason to prepare for revelation. Thus, I conclude my essay with a poetic inquiry.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".