We Don't Know What We Don't Know We Don't Know
But We Know More than We Know ...
When I was twenty-one, I confessed to a friend that I wanted to become wise in my life. (Ah, sweet, says the realist, the idealism of the young …) I thought it would be about acquiring knowledge. And it was. But I didn’t realise then that every new acquisition of knowledge brings into focus ten new unknowns, so that you now know comparatively less than you knew before because your vision of what is out there still to know has grown ten-fold. Or, as Tim Gallwey said with pride, I used to be 8 out of 10 in knowledge about coaching, but now I’m 2 out of 10 – there’s so much more to learn!
Wisdom, huh? The Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz wrote: "You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions."
It’s never too early for that. My 3-year-old grandchild is, as we say, at the “Why stage”.
Why do I have to eat lettuce?
Because it’s good for you.
Why is it good for me?
Because it helps your bones to grow strong.
Why does it?
Because it’s full of lovely vitamins that help you to be healthy.
Why is it?
Because – oh never mind - shall we play with your train set?
What is more beautiful than this awakening of curiosity, and not only about things but also about people? What is it like to be you? Why do you react in that way? Why did you say what you said? Why are you different from me? Bit by bit you work it out.
Then one day, when you are 5 or 50, you realise that it’s not just about working things out – it’s more subtle than that. Yesterday, I spotted a book of poetry by Mary Oliver in a charity shop window and on the way home, I popped in and bought it. It’s called Devotions. I opened it as soon as I got home. The third poem is called, “The World I Live In”:
I have refused to live
locked in the orderly house of
reasons and proofs.
The world I live in and believe in
is wider than that. And anyway,
what’s wrong with Maybe?
You wouldn’t believe what once
or twice I have seen. I’ll just
tell you this:
only if there are angels in your head will you
ever, possibly, see one.
Only if there are angels in your head will you ever, possibly, see one! How about that? You can’t even glimpse the subtlety of things if you don’t already have a sense of it. You don’t appreciate other people’s pain until you know what pain is. You don’t know that you are worthy until other people have seen you as worthy. You don’t see what there is to see until your eyes are opened. And that’s about imagination.
This was a favourite theme of William Blake.?He said it again and again:
?A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
Every body does not see alike. To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun.
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way.
As a man is So he Sees.
The eye altering alters all.
Last autumn, I was unwell on a walking holiday. My walking companion, who explores alternative medicine, homeopathy, herbal Chinese medicine and more, chose various herbs from the wayside to make teas and inhalations for me. She told me the remedies work best when you believe that they will. (That little story will really annoy you if you already know that you know what you know!)
The world is more than you and I can understand, and that more reveals itself only to those who are open to it.
Several NLP processes work with change by ‘living’ or imagining a desired result. E.g. If I want to feel confident on a future occasion, the thought of which currently fills me with fear, I turn my mind (and with it body and being) to times and places from any time of my life when I have been happily confident, and I get to know what it feels like, what thoughts pop up in that state, and how it is to be in that confident state. Then I learn how to enter into the state of confidence whenever I want. When an important occasion arrives, elements of that resourceful state come back to me at the time they are needed. I know hundreds of people who have proved for themselves the usefulness of that process!
‘Reality’, on the other hand, would look at the statistics of my past experiences of being confident and report that I had been shaking with nerves on the past 49 occasions, that I had been sick with fear on 21 of them, and that my voice had cracked on 42 occasions. Given this concrete evidence, I ‘prove’ to myself that my chances of success are low.
It’s dangerous to think we know what’s going on. Two and a half thousand years earlier, Socrates wrote:
The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing. I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.
Please note that this is not a feeble stance to take. On the contrary, being certain is to remain ignorant; being uncertain is the wise position – it doesn’t mean prevarication, procrastination or the avoidance of decision making.?Scientists know that it’s always about the best we know so far.
The author Yaa Gyasi (in Transcendent Kingdom – hey, that’s a good book!) remembers something his biology teacher said:
“The truth is we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears. We spend decades, centuries, millennia, trying to answer that one question, so that another dim light will come on. That’s science, but it’s also everything else, isn’t it?” (P 28)
Yes, it is everything. And it will get you where you want to go.
Go well!
Judy