Controversially, mystics assert that there are two kinds or knowledge, relative knowledge and absolute knowledge (and I offer no apologies for redefining the terms if that is the case).  So what is the difference?

Relative knowledge is our best shot at defining Reality given all our abilities, learning and the constraints of our intelligence.  It is not possible to be right.  It is only possible to hold an opinion as to what might be so or not so.  Relative knowledge in this sense is a lottery.  And more often than not it is what we choose to exclude that convinces us of which model to defend or which view to hold.  Knowledge of this nature is not rooted in any reality and has the tendency to be ephemeral.  It is gleaned from what things look like or appear to be and as history has proved time and again those assumptions can often be wrong or misguided. In a world dominated by empirical science it is very difficult to hold to concepts that include the existence of God or Angels or Past Lives or that imply any ascendant dimension.

Each of us views the world through the veil of our own understanding and to a greater or lesser degree, will justify that model, and to the best of our ability, intelligently defend it.  

All models that define an existence divorced from an underlying Spiritual Reality are relative and ungrounded.  They float like feathers in the void that is material existence.  They exist as a kind of delusion.  Such is the nature of worldly knowledge.  When through some act of Grace, we touch Enlightened Wisdom all our hard won, intelligent but false speculative models, collapse as being irrelevant.

And models that cannot encompass even the notion of Enlightened Wisdom or Insightfully Doubtless Knowledge are, though seemingly plausible, the most deluded of all.  We can hold a perfectly reasoned idea that holds true within its own frame work but which is absurd when set in the context of the whole.   Absolute knowledge has no such contradictions. 

The transition from the one to the other, from a materialistic model to one that accommodates Spirituality as the orchestrating principle, is the Paradigm shift we must make if we are to move on as a species.