A student is here visiting me and in response to some of my ramblings he felt compelled to put what I was saying into a brief writing. He is a far better writer than I am, so I welcomed his efforts. The subject is ''Unknowing'' Your comments are always welcome and I thank him for his good work.
The amount you don’t know dwarfs the amount you do.
We like to think we know a lot. That’s certainly true, relative to how much we once knew. As children, our ignorance was so comprehensive. We knew little about how to orient to the confusing world around us. Our ability to function in that world was painfully limited. We’ve fought hard since then to acquire the knowledge we now possess. Compared to then, our know-how and our information stores are vast.
On the other hand, we look with amusement (or irritation) at the arrogance of adolescents. Having made such great leaps from infancy, many of them believe they’ve got it all figured out. It’s so apparent (from the perspective of a parent), that they don’t.
We, however, are no different than the teenagers we mock. The scale of our knowledge may have increased several-fold since then, but we are no closer than them to figuring it all out. We just think we are.
Before I try to demonstrate to you how little you still know, let me give you two reasons why this matters.
First, absolutely everything is more complex than we usually think it is. Complexity is hard for human brains to encompass. This means you’re probably dramatically oversimplifying even the things you think you know well. If you want to keep learning about the things that matter most to you, it helps to be aware how much you're oversimplifying now. Not just you of course - everyone.
Second, and more important, all the best stuff remains in the vast mysterious unknown. If you’re fixated on the little you already know (and who isn’t), you have little chance to discover all the untapped possibilities obscured by your current, limited knowledge. Now back to the scale of the problem.
Some years ago, the folks at Landmark Education came up with a nifty pie chart. The pie is the pie of all knowledge.
One small slice represents everything you know.
A considerably larger slice contains everything you know you don’t know: languages you know you can’t speak, skills you know you don’t have, people whose stories you know you’ve never learned, subject areas you know you remain (and may always remain) ignorant about. That’s already a whole lot of stuff you know you don’t know.
But most of the pie is taken up with the stuff you don’t even know that you don’t know about. All the areas of study you’ve never heard of, histories and cultures and art forms you’ve had no exposure to, all the wondrous and terrible places and events and people in all the parts of the world it never occurs to you to think about, profound ideas and whole paradigms of thinking no one has ever told you about, most of which you can’t even find out about on the internet!
To expand the scale even further, the reality is there can’t be a pie of all knowledge because knowledge is not finite or fixed. It’s an endless ocean. So much that was once known has since been lost: languages no one can speak anymore, cultures that left no record, the countless stories of people no one alive knows or remembers. And as wide as the sea of lost knowledge is, it could easily be swallowed in the vastness of what has not yet been discovered. People put old ideas together in new ways all the time, generate ideas never before thought of, make discoveries, innovate. That's how cultures develop and evolve, at an ever increasing rate. The sum of all that is known, by all the knowers who can know things, is rapidly expanding into the infinite territory of what could be known. Humongous doesn’t begin to describe it.
And there we are, knowing the little bit we’ve picked up in the few years we’ve been around, and totally fixated on it.
The little knowledge we have comprises everything we see and think. Behind all that is the great background of the unknown - mysterious, undefined, and unperceived. Contemplating the scope of it all can be sublime and inspiring, disorienting and intimidating, thrilling and terrifying.
This unknowing isn't really a problem. It can be beautiful to recognize how much there is to discover. The problem comes because we’re mesmerized by what we already know. It’s all we see. After all, how can you see something you don’t even know to look for? You can’t.
But what you can do, is remind yourself over and over that the marvelous and dizzying unknown is always hanging out just beyond the edges of your perception. When you remember there’s an unknown, you take what you already happen to know less seriously. You hold everything more loosely. Then, when you’re suffering, or have a problem you’re stuck on, the narrowness of your perspective might become apparent. You might even strive to widen it. You might sense how much you’re missing and look beyond the familiar, the well-tread, the habitual.
You probably think, for instance, that you’re a person living a life, having relationships, immersed in a family, in a world, trying to survive, searching for meaning. But none of those things is really true, because your concepts of self, life, relationship, family, world, survival, meaning - are all dramatically oversimplified. You know precious little about each of these concepts. The amount that you don’t know dwarfs the amount that you know. If you weren’t so fascinated with the dust bunny in the corner, you might turn around and find that you’re living in a castle.
What’s out there beyond what you know isn’t exactly more true. It simply is more. When you open to the always-ever-greater unknown in the background, instead of fixating on the countless details in the foreground, you become more you, a you that has little to do with what you thought you were up until now.
Amass more knowledge, and you’ll have a somewhat larger quantity, but it will still be dwarfed by how much you don’t know. No finite quantity of knowledge can help you make the leap from finite to infinite. To do that, you have to continually turn your attention to the infinite unknown. You have to loosen your hold on the little you’ve learned so far, on each of the basic concepts you’ve been using to make sense of your experiences. If everything becomes more confusing, you’re moving in the right direction. You’re starting to break loose from your moorings in the known, to disorient.
You’re becoming - unknowing.