Hi friends,
I’ve missed you. I left LA this past weekend and went a few hundred miles north and a few thousand feet up. Different stuff grows up there. Different growing conditions. It felt really good. Different isn’t better, but it always offers perspective and sometimes that is the best thing you could ask for. You get to look at the things you know in new light.
I’ve been working on a piece about how we can know too much these days — or at least think that we do, and it has diminishing returns. It’s a reverence for the unknown, and the not knowing, in a way.
This has been illuminating for me, because I was raised, conditioned, and have always believed that the more you know the better — the better a person you are, the better you can perform, the better your life will be.
And I have acted accordingly.
And now I’m not as sure.
The other day I was in a class and the teacher reminded us, “there’s what you know; what you don’t know; and what you don’t know you don’t know.”
Or known and unknown unknowns, as it were.
I thought about where I, or any of us, is located in this rubric of knowledge and awareness of that knowledge. Where we think we are in it. Where we spend our time, what we value.
What to you think?
What we know.
This is stuff we’ve felt or experienced in our bodies and minds; no one can take that away from us or convince us otherwise. This is faith. This is core memory. This is expertise. There’s a lot of stuff we know that we probably wish we didn’t. This is also stuff we’ve worked hard and focused to learn and understand. Mastered. Remembered. Eavesdropped. We’re proud of what we know; we’re ashamed of what we know; we might continually question what we think we know (this is right). But this lot will continue expanding — at various rates depending on our curiosity and openness — until we die.
What we don’t know.
This stuff is infinite. The world keeps unfolding and there is endless stuff to know currently, let alone new stuff to know that hasn’t even materialized yet. The stuff we don’t know can invoke a kind of ‘hungry ghost’ grabbiness in us. A FOMO. Trigger us into somehow believing that if only we knew more we would be better, feel better, do better. This is maybe sometimes true but I’ve tried this many times and it’s backfired. Turning things we don’t know into things we know is not a simple equation of straw becoming gold. Be careful. While what is known is ever-expanding, the unknown is even more vast and expanding at a faster rate. We focus often on what we know, and find value there. What if we revered and reveled in what we didn’t know?
What we know we don’t know.
This is the unknown that’s in our sights, our crosshairs. It’s stuff we’re aware of, even if we haven’t mastered it. And awareness is mastery on some initial level. This might be stuff that we don’t care or are actively trying to learn. For example, we don’t know how or when we’ll die, but we do know that we will. This is stuff that 3am Google searches or Kajabi courses or a few thoughtful questions of a friend or simple lived experience (time! wisdom!) can change— from the unknown to the known. This can also be the stuff of ignorance and willful ignorance. If we act against others or make decisions for others from places of known unknown, that’s tenuous at best and violent at worst. It’s our control gateway. It gives us the sense, not falsely but probably overblown, that we are a little bit in control. That which we know we don’t know is the stuff on deck heading into our conveyer belt sorter, which will either become polished and packaged into a known or discarded into an I don’t care or this isn’t knowable pile. What happens to those piles? Who knows.
What we don’t know we don’t know.
Does this scare you? These are true blind spots. This is also faith, depending on who you ask. This is trust in the universe because there is not other choice. These are aspects of our vulnerability, soft places on our underbelly where we are at the mercy of our loved ones who see us more fully than we realize. This is our inherent vulnerability to the mercy of fate and the random, wild ways that life unfolds — often savagely. This is also the space of awe. You can cultivate an awareness of this (and I hope you do) and it can buoy you. Keep you in line. Remind you that you’re a speck that could be gone in a second: isn’t that terrifying but also isn’t that fucking incredible. Breathe a little deeper now.
Of all the knowledge to amass, pursue, accept, or realize, knowledge of self is perhaps the most crucial. While knowing yourself is not fully, fundamentally possible for a few important reasons, the focused pursuit may be the greatest thing we can offer others in this lifetime.
In Buddhism, we talk about no self, which is the idea that there is no fundamental essence of the self. Your self is a conglomeration of thoughts, feelings, and experiences arising from the conditions around you. The pursuit of understanding self is the process of peeling back the layers of the onion to reveal no core but the whole universe. Understanding this allows us to release grasping of ego and truly know the deep interconnectedness of all things. What a relief!
This is part of the eightfold path which, of course, we are exploring. Right Speech, the third step, is coming to you in the next week. Catch up on the steps we’ve already explored here. See you on the path (if you know you know).
