Information Wants to Be Sacred (Or Does It?)

by: Navneeth Krishna M | June 28, 2025

There was a time when information was sacred. Not just important — but set apart. It lived in breath, in rhythm, in memory. To know something wasn't just to store it — it was to become a vessel capable of receiving it.

A mantra wasn’t a string of syllables. It was a current, an energy. A story wasn’t just for entertainment. It encoded ethics, cosmology, lineage. Knowledge wasn’t passive. It was alive, and it asked something of you in return.

In Vedic culture, this sacred knowledge is called śruti — “that which is heard.” Not written. Not downloaded. Heard. The early ṛṣis, or seers, didn’t author the Vedas — they received them. The verses weren’t invented; they were unveiled. It is said that a ṛṣi’s inner clarity made them a channel through which cosmic order — ṛta — could speak.

So precious is this knowledge that it was passed down orally for centuries. Teachers recited. Students listened, again and again, until the words settled in the bones. Accuracy mattered — even a slight deviation in pitch or pronunciation was said to disrupt the effect. No printing press could match the precision of the human voice trained by discipline and devotion.

When Knowledge Enters the Wrong Hands

One Vedic story tells of Hayagrīva, an asura who took possession of the Vedas from Brahmā and hid them away. He was not their rightful steward, and his holding of them created imbalance.

It was Viṣṇu, in the form of Matsya, who slew Hayagrīva and restored the Vedas.

This story is a metaphor — a powerful one. It reminds us that when knowledge falls into the wrong hands, the consequences can be disastrous. Sacred knowledge without integrity, without discernment, can bring disorder instead of insight.

The Flood of Access

Today, the situation has changed.

No one needs to cross oceans or forests to find the Vedas. No ritual initiation is required to access ancient truths. We live in an age where everything is available, instantly. A sacred chant that once took years to internalize can now be found in seconds on YouTube. The Upaniṣads, once shared quietly between teacher and student, are freely downloadable as PDFs.

Knowledge, once hidden in the stillness of gurukulas, now lives in the endless scroll.

Is that progress?
Or dilution?
Or both?

The Myth of Free Knowledge

The American writer and techno-visionary Stewart Brand famously said:
“Information wants to be free.”

And in the digital world, that’s mostly true. Information spreads faster when it’s unbound. It reaches more people. It builds movements, communities, revolutions. Free information is how encyclopedias became wikis. How ivory towers fell. How science globalized.

But what if information doesn’t only want to be free?
What if information also wants to be held with care?

What Is Worthy Knowledge?

In Sanskrit, the word vidyā doesn’t mean “data” or “facts.” It means transformative knowledge — the kind that changes the one who knows. Vidyā is not free-floating. It is part of a relationship. A path, not a product. And it comes with something we rarely talk about today: adhikāra — readiness.

The listeners had to become ready.

When Everything Is Instant

Today, we confuse access with understanding. We assume that because something is online, we are entitled to it — and that seeing something once means we've absorbed it. But what happens when knowledge is stripped of its context, flattened into content, and served in algorithm-friendly slices?

We are surrounded by information — but how much of it do we truly receive?

You watch a 90-second Instagram Reel on “healing your inner child,” and suddenly you're telling your friend that her ex “was never emotionally available for her growth.” You watched one video. Now you're the breakup whisperer.

You see a quote from Carl Jung on your feed — something about “the shadow self” — and suddenly you're telling your roommate that their fear of confrontation stems from unresolved childhood archetypes. You Googled ‘archetype’ last night.

You scroll past a 15-second video titled “5 books that will change your life,” save it to your ‘💡Deep Stuff’ folder… and never read a single one. But you do buy a new bookshelf.

You search “how to fix your life” on YouTube and get five productivity hacks from a 19-year-old in Bali who wakes up at 4 a.m., drinks celery juice, journals with four pens, and somehow already owns a condo.

Even recipes aren’t safe. You used to call your mom. Now you ask ChatGPT, scroll past 43 pop-ups, skip the origin story of a paneer curry, and land on: “Add 1 tsp of your preferred spice.” You have no idea what that is. Dinner is... edible.

The Context of Our Context Machines

In the age of AI, we’re obsessed with giving machines “context.” We fine-tune, instruct, and prompt — as if feeding a sacred fire — hoping it will return insight. But AI is only as good as the context it learns from. And where does that come from? Us. The internet. The swirling soup of scraped content, hot takes, half-facts, and forgotten footnotes.

Is this clean? Is this reliable? Is it even coherent?

We expect understanding from models trained on a mirror of our own noise. But maybe the real question isn’t about how intelligent AI is. Maybe it’s whether we still approach information with enough reverence for the machine to learn something worth echoing.

Otherwise, your friendly neighborhood next-word generator will simply mimic the way we treat knowledge — casually, carelessly, and out of context.

Knowledge may be free, but that doesn't make it cheap. The way we approach it — with care or with convenience — is what makes it sacred.

Approaching the Sacred

Maybe the issue isn’t that information is free.
Maybe the issue is that we’ve forgotten how to approach it.

We skim instead of study.
We repost before we reflect.
We consume without consecration.

There is a middle path — between restriction and overload. Between secret and spectacle. Between reverence and recklessness.

The sacred doesn’t mean secret. It means set apart. Held. Honored. Approached with attention and trust.

So maybe the question isn’t whether information wants to be sacred.
Maybe the real question is:
Do we still know how to treat it that way?