Being Okay With Knowing Nothing

A key feature of what it has been to be an intelligent and informed human has been to understand and know things. One of the key features of this chaotic and crazy, but altogether blessed moment in time is questioning ALL we have known.

If you have relied on knowing to generate safety and certainty, this historical moment can feel destabilizing at best, and terrifying at worst - but there is an option. Mental knowing is one necessary type of knowing. It’s way of knowing that syncs well with the mode of operation society has been operating under. A cognitive dominant, materialist, literalism.

In the Buddhist sense, in fact all religious senses, this is the most surface level of reality that basically claims “what I see with my eyes is true.” This is necessary but insufficient way to experience the world. It is stripped of feeling, of energy and all too often, of meaning.

There is a very important process occurring here. The world, as it is, materialist and literal is untenable. We can’t continue on this same old path we’ve been on. That includes government, economics and society writ large. There must be creative destruction and heresy of what was consider the world “as it is.” This creates uncertainty because those who have not experienced upheaval when upheaval becomes a more common feature of our day-to-day, moment-to-moment experience.

Further, we have more access to see that upheaval due to social media. So, we have more chaos happening and we can see more chaos in wider swaths of the world than ever before. How does one deal with this? What is the path forward? How do we make sense of this?

One important step is to willfully segment our experience. We must make a differentiation between THE world out there, and MY world. The way we approach THE worlds needs to be different than how I approach MY world. The danger of these types of phases in history especially with amount of access we must see so much more via social media is the extend our sense of connection beyond our capacity to meaningfully effect, help or make change.

When we do this, we utilize the energy from my world to a stress in the world that we can’t meaningfully change. It could be that this is a stress to actually rise up and make a bigger impact, but if that’s not the case, it is purely an energy drain, emotional drain, and psychospiritual drain.

This is a moment for reflection, to assess the meaningful difference between what you can and choose to impact, and how much information you take in beyond that. We hope that in the next version of what society becomes there is a more meaningful strata in society that addresses this.

Right now, the social domain has been mostly deconstructed. Families are smaller, neighbors basically don’t interact, schools, churches are significantly smaller, kids sports, and play are highly structured and supervised. In a world where we meaningfully constructed the world around us with family we love, community we love, religious families that were well woven support networks and we let kids run and play in safe neighborhoods and wild nature is the meaningful solution we are looking for. This gives us the opportunity to have engagement in my world at levels we can actually affect.

There is a type of health that emerges from this. A health where the sphere of our impact is highly correlated with the people we love and want to help. This strips away one of the most insidious features of gathering news from social media - abstraction.

If it’s abstracted - it’s all “out there” but the chaos and terror is still all “in here”. This isn’t a suggestion to not pay attention to the news or what is happening in the world, but to recognize that your capacity to help must be built on your capacity to hold this type of health in an enduring manner.

The world needs us. But the world needs us most closest to home.