The darkness thickens when, after six months working as a labourer in London, he decides to leave for a foreign country in which he might "arrive newborn", devoid of knowledge or preconception.
It is also frightening and pandemonic: he maintains that the world as it is in itself (again, sometimes adding "for us") is an endless striving and blind impulse with no end in view, devoid of knowledge, lawless, absolutely free, entirely self-determining and almighty.
In retribution, Shiva casts a curse on the sages so that they, like Bhikshatana, will become beggars with matted hair and be devoid of knowledge.
However, the Varkari poet-saint Tukaram proposed a different etymology that Vitthala is composed of the words vittha (ignorance) and la (one who accepts), thus meaning 'one who accepts innocent people who are devoid of knowledge'.
My mother's assertion that Trump 'Tells it like it is,' (aka 'He's not politically-correct') reflects a narrow mind-set devoid of diverse knowledge and experience.
Sadly, there is a yawning chasm between that principle and the stream-of-consciousness, denigrating invective that erupts unfiltered from Mr. Trump on a regular basis, breathtakingly devoid of detailed knowledge or fully-formed ideas.
So, for all those years, I was being serenaded by my father's terrible voice, singing the perfect song for that part of the wedding where the bride dances with her dad and everyone absolutely loses their shit and cries their eyes out, including the band, and now me, laughing over the fact that I've lived a life devoid of this knowledge.
Tracing the ever-upward trajectory of this conscience-free, acquisitive, vain, incurious, and ambitious Midwestern beauty, "Custom," although published a hundred and one years ago, feels entirely appropriate to the present moment: an anatomy of the kind of blind greed and self-involvement (devoid of all self-knowledge) paraded every night on the more popular of TV's reality shows.
But it also means that some children grow up in a world of their own making, informed by adult knowledge but devoid of adult structure.
Perhaps Plato's attitude to visual representation claiming so often that the highest philosophical knowledge is devoid of it, and attacking poets and artists in general more than once inhibited and discouraged attempts to capture in painting, sculpture or prints, the mythical scenes Plato himself depicted so vividly in words.
At the heart of Śaṃkara's teaching lies the notion that the true knowledge of the ātman is knowledge that is devoid of any of the above-mentioned qualities.
