I know, yet I am not.
I am not what I know, nor do I know what I am.
How come? How come I know, yet I am not? How come I know wisdom, yet I am not wise? How is it that I know love, but be not loving? Why do I know God, yet I am far from being Godly?
Knowing is not being — the two are light years apart. Knowing wisdom, love, God is just being cognizant of them while being wise, loving, Godly is exhibiting wisdom, love, Godliness in everything we do everyday. That is the difference between the Devil and an Angel: the former knows and the latter is — the Devil knows love while an Angel is love. What differentiates me from the Devil is that I want to be what I know, be wise, loving, and Godly. However, I am as far away from that as the Devil is.
Life is a reflection more of what we are than what what we know, isn’t it? If it were a reflection more of what we know, a man, for instance, would not divorce his third wife. Why would a smoker know smoking kills, yet that does not stop him from puffing a pack every day. Everything wrong in life is not because we knew no better, but because we were no better.
We are before we ever know. Knowing has its beginning in not being, in the awareness, the acute, discomforting awareness that we are not, perhaps we are not as happy or successful as a certain person in our life. This gives birth to the wish to become, be, what we want to be. More often than not, we take the phenomenon of becoming in our conscious hands, take the more convenient, lazier recourse to becoming, through knowing. We retreat from active existence to a quiet corner and strive to know, to know why we are not, say, as successful — what is it in our brought up that limits us to being less successful — and how we can become what we want to be. We go on the pursuit of knowledge. Because, conventional wisdom has it that “Knowledge is power”.
Yet, knowing is anything but power; the greater knowledge we have about what we want to be, the less we become. A truly happy person knows little what happiness is — (he is not of the breed that writes books on how to be happy — at least not when he is truly happy). Yet that is why he is truly happy — he is truly happy because he knows little. In the same token, if we were to interview Mozart at the height of his success about what true music is, we would find out that he knew so little that it would be embarrassing. Yet, that is exactly why he was genius, why his music is immortal — because he knew little. Similarly, a critic is a better teacher of literature than the greatest writer, yet the critic cannot produce literature of his own. (After all, those who can’t, teach). All the knowledge crammed in his head about what a true literature is inhibits him from ever venturing to write one. The more we know the more timid we get. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” W. B. Yeats remarks — only they are not the best, just knowledgeable, or even the worst. We see all around us persons who have embarrassingly little knowledge prance up to the centre stage of the world and express themselves freely and while most of us wonder how they do not feel naked with so skimpy knowledge. One such person with an IQ of three-year old baby was recently the leader of the free world.
We are not because we know. Knowing obstructs us from growing into our true being. The core tenet of our being is that we are creative. We are born with creativity, talent. It falls upon us to discover this talent, discover our creative self, and serve one another in our creativity. We are most productive and happiest when we are our creative self. However, we put aside the discovery of our true talent in the pursuit of knowledge. This is called ‘creative avoidance’. In so doing, we become the proverbial lazy servant who buries his talent. Consequently, without our talent, we become mediocre. Whatever we give unto others as a result is mediocrity.
The few persons who have discovered their creative self and have given so much and who has driven immense joy in the giving knew little. We refer to them as geniuses. Geniuses are the most unknowledgeable. They shunned knowledge too. In the words of the novelist and nonfiction author Pico Iyer, “The opposite of knowledge isn’t always ignorance. It can be wonder. Or mystery. Possibility”.
However, the world worships knowledge. It builds shrines for it. We call them schools. We devote the best part of our life in its worship, in stead of focusing upon ourselves, discovering our creative self. Hence, our education has become the breeding ground for mediocrity.
Contrary to my statements, “I know….”, we cannot really know reality. Reality is too complex for us to fully comprehend. We cannot wrap our minds around it. The whole attempt is foolhardy. The further we venture into the realm of reality, the more out of touch we become with it, and the more dysfunctional in our existence. It should come as no great surprise to know that psychiatrists, who are the most knowledgeable on the subject of the human conditions, have the highest suicide rate of any profession (58 to 65/100,000 compared with that of the general population, 11/100,000).
Donald Hoffman, a clinical psychiatrist, in his book titled, “The case against reality: Why evolution hid the truth from our eyes” confirms the destructiveness of the pursuit of knowledge. He conducted experiments where he groups organisms of equal complexity into two: the first group are trained to see the whole world exhaustively and truly while the second were trained to see only what is necessary. After the full trainings, the groups of organisms are brought together in the same world to compete for sustenance. Hoffman made the following observation from the experiment:
An organism that sees reality will go extinct almost surely anytime it competes against an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality and is tuned to fitness.
evolution by natural selection will drive a creature to extinction that sees truth if it competes another creature of equal complexity that sees none of the truth.
The reason is because truth or reality is too complex to understand; that exposing ourselves to it only leaves us overwhelmed and paralyzed, like a rabbit in a headlight. Consequently, we become too inhibited, dysfunction to live.
This brings to mind the truth behind the story of the Tree of Knowledge in the Bible. God forbids the first humans not to eat from the Tree not because He was afraid they would be like Him if they eat from it, as the Serpent led them to believe, but quite the opposite: in knowing, they cease to be, be like Him. Knowing is the curse. We cannot know without being diminished in some way. The most beautiful souls among us are those who know little.
Let no elaborate display of knowledge in articulate language bedazzle you, for knowledge betrays the lack of being. If there is one thing this article should communicate to you is to the degree of the wisdom contained in it, its author is unwise .The need to philosophize, to know and to write about a reality, a phenomenon, comes when the person is disconnected, disoriented. Knowledge is a sure sign that all is not well inside a person’s soul; that they are breaking and bleeding inside. The writing is its author’s attempt at coming to terms with his or her brokenness. Job is most philosophical, most knowledgeable when he is in agony, pain.
The history of humanity, all our anguish, fall from grace, our struggle, arrogance, is contained in the word ‘know’.
