Knowing is Not Knowing

It is by not knowing that you know the most. It is further not knowing what you know which brings you to know you do not know. But then are you not back to knowing?

You see that by seeking to explain the deepest truths in life, you find you cannot because it leads only to contradiction. In this sense, the rational mind can never truly explain the true nature of existing and living your highest truth. But what it can do is point out the contradictions which in turn lead to the truth — a finger to the moon. This is why scientific theory focuses on disproving your null hypothesis (the opposite of what you expect). This is also why scientific thinking isn’t our “common sense” approach. Humans are designed to look for what corroborates their mental theory of the world and very little is dedicated to doing its converse. The very structure of the brain via the thalamus and visual cortex is a great example in point. The eyes bring in a certain amount of sensory information every moment, yet your brain does not process this enormous magnitude of information every second — indeed that would make it very difficult for it to do much of anything else. Instead the visual cortex has already developed a mental model of the world and how it should look. The thalamus, which acts as a sensory processing center of the brain mediating between eyesight and the frontal cortex, only sends 1/6 the amount of the information it receives from the eyes to the visual cortex. This means our mental model of the world is sending 6 times the amount of information about our perception of the world around us to the thalamus than it is receiving. Our eyes only serve to send any discrepant information to our visual cortex to then reshape our mental model, yet at a much smaller level of information transfer. We see then that our mental models of the world serves as the dominating factor. So it is again by not really knowing every detail of the world we see every moment, that we CAN see.

This idea of not knowing to know, perhaps implicit or unconscious knowing it may be called, gains more prominence in examining a few more examples. Take for example Nikola Tesla’s original model of the A/C motor. Tesla’s amazing ability to visualize components, schematas, and equations mentally before transferring their perfect rendition to paper arguably made him the genius he was. Tesla had visualized every component of the A/C motor to perfection minus one. Upon a walk down a beach with a friend, Tesla was reciting a poem by Faust. As he finished the last verse, the sun glinted off the water, its sparkle hitting his mind. Tesla drew a stick from the ground and inscribed in the sand the exact blueprint for the completed A/C motor. Years later this exact blueprint was used to build the motor. It was a moment of letting go of rationally looking to know which allowed him to finally DISCOVER.

It was a moment of letting go of rationally looking to know which allowed him to finally DISCOVER

Another case looks at Japanese chicken sexers, charged with determining the sex of a chicken egg and classifying them as male or female for increased farming production. Japanese chicken sexers are the best in the world at what they do, but when asked to describe how they know what they know, they cannot explain in words. When trainees learn the craft, the training process simply involves picking up an egg, proclaiming male or female, then handing git back to the expert sexer who determines the trainee right or wrong. Pure trial and error. Yet it is through this method which trainees gain that unconscious knowledge to become an expert sexer. If you ask them though how they do it, all they can do to explain is to ask you to hand them an egg!

The idea of not knowing is knowing comes across in ever more examples. The Sanskrut Dream for example, when you finally experience a dream in which the spoken language is Sanskrut meant to indicatethe moment when a student has reached a level of mastery of the language. Ser Isaac Newton under an apple tree, struck by an apple then completes his theory of gravity. Ustad Ali Akbar Khan composes the beautiful Indian raaga (a melodic scale/mode of sorts) out of a frustration with a sound engineer and an unwillingness to play anything but sheer noise. The age old image of an archer hitting a target only after the archer ceases to aim and simply feel the bow, string, arrow, wind, all of it in the archer’s very bones. Ray Charles coming up with the classic hit “What’d I Say” after he’s prompted to simply improvise on the spot in a club.

This is not new insight. In fact it’s been around since we have come into existence as a human race. Take this ancient Sanskrut mantra:

ॐ पूर्णमदः पूर्णमिदं पूर्णात्पुर्णमुदच्यते
पूर्णस्य पूर्णमादाय पूर्णमेवावशिष्यते ॥

Om, pUrNamadaH pUrNamidam pUrNAtpUrNamudachyate

pUrNasya pUrnamAdAya pUrNamevAvashishyate

It roughly translates to:

1. Om, that (outer world) is pUrNa (fullness; or full with Divine Consciousness); this (inner world) is also pUrNa (full with Divine Consciousness); from pUrNa comes pUrNa (from the fullness of Divine Consciousness the world is manifested)
2. Taking pUrNa from pUrNa, pUrNa remains

I want to however warn against letting go of knowing entirely for the rational mind is invaluable in setting goals which can then reshape your mental models. If implicit racial biases have anything to say on this matter, it is not enough to simply leave inherent racial bias as something you “know” and never examine it. But it is only in seeking to discover, love, and accept that we can truly not know and in this way know. In that way become full of the fullness in our world and minds. The pUrNa which pervades.