Little children reach a stage where they can become infuriatingly inquisitive. They are constantly asking, "Why". While we are fascinated by their questions, and grateful that they are maturing, fielding the questions is often exhausting.

Little children aren't the only ones asking questions. We need to know the reasons for things no less than children do. Communities, as well as individuals, probe for reasons. The spate of school massacres in the United States spurred local communities into seeking reasons for teen violence. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, Americans have begun asking themselves why they are so hated by many in the Arab world.

Meteorologists want to know what weather patterns are looming. We want to know what causes global warming, and how we can reverse the process. Geneticists are concerned to uncover the secrets of the human genome. Historians, anthropologists, sociologists, educators, medical researchers, engineers, artists, tradespeople, therapists, theologians, philosophers, IT technicians and software developers are all driven by issues that challenge the limits of their expertise.

A desire to understand why things are as they are is premised on the assumption that there is a reason for everything. [83]

Why this insatiable curiosity?

Our inquisitiveness, our insatiable curiosity, our need to know why things are as they are, is a developmental given. It is the engine of this development.

Spirituality

Our curiosity is also an aspect of our spirituality.

Our spirituality, the lived essence of our human personhood, expresses itself in meaning-making and communication. As we mature, both activities find expression at higher levels of self-awareness.

Meaning-Making

Meaning making, when driven largely by insecurity, will reveal underlying pathologies. On the other hand, where our attempts at making sense of the world result from the desire to map our burgeoning awareness of the complexities of life, it is more likely to represent the level of our psychological development.

The more we are able to make sense of the world, the better able we are to orient ourselves to it. Our maps of reality give purpose to our existence.

Many despair of finding meaning in life, but quarantine their despair. Others, who are ready to admit that they find life meaningless, are able to structure their lives around this sense of meaninglessness. [84]

Ambivalence

Faith and doubt, trust and distrust, hope and despair, as pairs of opposites, do not follow each other sequentially. We do not believe and then doubt and then believe again, as if belief and doubt were hermetically sealed entities. We believe and doubt, trust and distrust, hope and despair, not sequentially, but in parallel. We do both together. We cannot believe, except against a background of doubt. We cannot doubt, unless we espouse a belief, which we now question. We believe and doubt concurrently. What makes the difference, at any one time, is the predominance of faith or doubt, trust or distrust, hope or despair.

Similarly, while our attempts at meaning-making may convince us that life is meaningful, this meaningfulness only makes sense against a background of meaninglessness. Meaninglessness is dependent upon a background of meaningfulness. At any one time, we give more weight to one proposition than the other.

A Personal Confession

I am constantly wrestling with the threat of meaninglessness. On balance, however, I would argue for the meaningfulness of existence. This may be a case of special pleading, driven by the fear of being sucked into the darkness of despair. This is always a possibility.

Nevertheless, I am not alone. Many others, including contemplatives, who have explored the upper reaches of human consciousness, as well as eminent scientists who have argued that intentionality, or intelligence, is built into the universe, feel as I do.

Whether life is ultimately meaningful or meaningless, our inquisitiveness, our drivenness to discover meaning, [85] promotes psychological and spiritual strength. It enables us to flourish and contribute to the well-being of others.

Suffering

Another of the issues with which we wrestle is the problem of suffering.

If we conclude that life is meaningful, we have to address the problem of suffering. The fact of suffering taunts all theories of life's meaningfulness. The overwhelming weight of human suffering demands a response.

Insecurity

I have suggested that our inquisitiveness, our quest for explanations, is driven by insecurity, by fear of what we cannot understand.

Fear is endemic, and fear of the unknown is at the heart of our insecurity.

Fear is a natural emotion. If we didn't experience fear, our lives would be in jeopardy. Fear ensures our survival. Fear, fear of the unknown, by causing us to seek answers, has fueled human evolution.

Neurologists may well discover that our inquisitiveness, our need to make sense of life, is hard-wired, a genetic, evolutionary given.

Inquisitiveness does not diminish with age, though we are less compulsed by it, more ready to allow life to reveal itself to us. [86]

The aged have discovered that there is an irresistible intentionality in life that is best surrendered to, not in capitulation, or defeat, but by yielding to it. This surrender brings us into touch with an energy that draws us onward; attracting us towards what many assume will be a culminating, revelatory moment.

Means of Knowing

How do we know what we know?

Usual Means

Most argue that there are two ways of knowing.

Our senses--seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling--give us access to an overwhelming array of data. Empirical philosophers have argued that experience, involving the senses, is our principal means of finding out about the world.

Rationalists, on the other hand, have contended that it is reason, our ability to think things through, that is our most effective means of knowing. Scientists exploring quantum mechanics, black holes, parallel universes and negative numbers, concepts that are counter-intuitive, would agree.

In spite of the importance of sense data, and logico-mathematical analysis, the co-operative alliance between these two ways of knowing the fundamental issues of life continue to call for clarification. As the philosopher, Wittgenstein, commented, even if all possible scientific questions could be answered, we would still feel that the problems of life had hardly been touched at all.³¹ [87]

Other Means

While most assume that the senses, and reason, are the principal, if not the only means of our knowing what there is to be known, some would argue that there are other ways of knowing that are equally important, and that give us access to factors not accessible to our senses, or to reason.

Our capacity for feeling, for evaluating situations on the basis of feeling responses, rather than cognitive processing, is a valuable tool. Women are more aware of feeling responses than men are.

There are those who contend that intuition allows us access to elements of reality that are not accessible to our senses, or to reason. Jung argued that the two principal means of accessing data are sensation and intuition. He contended that, while our senses attend to surface appearances, our intuition, penetrating surface appearances, picks up on subterranean energies.

Eastern philosophy argues that intuition is a higher and more sophisticated means of knowing than that associated with our senses. Intuition enables us to grasp what we are appraising as a whole, rather than as bits and pieces, which are later put together. It is a participatory knowing. We participate in that which we seek to know. We are grasped by the object of our search. We experience ourselves as one with it.

There is also a gut knowing, associated with neuropeptide receptors in the intestinal tract.

Our ability to imagine, to visualize situations, is also a potent means of knowing. When allied with intuition, it can out-distance lumbering cognitive processes. Imagination enables [88] us to position ourselves in theoretical situations, and to envisage what life is like for others. The sort of creativity, whether artistic or scientific, that results from gratuitous intuitions and insights, confirms the value of imagination.

One of the most effective ways of knowing is embodied knowing, an in-touchness with our bodies that enables us to access many dimensions of reality, all at the same time. Our senses, our reason, our feelings, our intuition, our gut, and our imagination operate in a coordinated way. We grasp the situation as a whole.

Extraordinary Means

It is important to say something about extraordinary means of knowing, means that are not highly valued.

We can discover much about ourselves through our dreams, through the symbols thrown up by our unconscious. This material, frequently dismissed as scrambled rubbish, is illuminating. It can tell us much about our fears, our hopes, and the multitude of sub-personalities that inhabit the unconscious. In extraordinary circumstances, our dreams can pick up material from others.

Developing a contemplative lifestyle, an attitude of relaxed contemplation, also helps. However, as G. Spencer Brown commented, to arrive at the deepest, simplest truths, through contemplation, requires years of familiarity with this discipline, a discipline disparaged in the West.³²

William James concurred, contending that our most significant intuitions come from the deepest level of our natures, certainly deeper than that associated with the verbal, rational mind.³³ [89]

Krishnamurti focused on the process involved in placing oneself in the zone where these intuitions arise. He contended that, because we are imprisoned in conceptual thinking, we are not able to see things as they are. We are the victims of cognitive conditioning. His point was that we are not free enough from our interpretations to attend to the realities that lie beneath them. The "choiceless awareness" he advocated was a form of knowing free from desire, even the desire to know. It was a state of awareness, associated with a capacity to live the present moment free from drivenness, conditioning or expectation. It was an experience of intense awareness. It is this awareness, he contended, that gifts us with some of our deepest insights.

Meditation can give us access to higher levels of consciousness, and to insights into our thinking processes. Access can be gained to subtle and causal levels of reality through forms of spiritual discernment nurtured through meditation. This process is sometimes referred to as "The third Eye", particularly in kundalini yoga. It is through meditation that we encounter the Spirit Presence that pervades and sustains the universe.

One can go one stage further and argue, as Eckhart did, that our seeing is part of God's seeing. We participate, however fragmentarily, in the divine omniscience. Sri Aurobindo captured the essence of this insight, when he argued that the deepest knowledge is denied to our reason, which is a transitional instrument that deals with appearances and their phenomenal processes. It is through experiential awareness, not through reason groping among external data, that we penetrate to the heart of reality. In the end, our knowing, becomes a conscious part of the Divine revealing itself in the world through an evolutionary self-manifestation.³⁴

This does not exhaust extraordinary means of knowing. [90]

After-death experiences, which bear a remarkable consistency, reveal facts about ourselves, and our circumstances that would otherwise be unavailable to us. While some dismiss these experiences as the final spluttering of our neurons, such experiences have often revealed data about places and people, unknown to the person concerned, that have been subsequently corroborated. Furthermore, future scenarios have been prefigured, scenarios that could not be explained on the basis of their being self-fulfilling prophesies.³⁵

How Much Can We Know?

How much can we know?

One answer is that it depends on the means employed. Some have access to a limited number of human capacities. If we are not in touch with our bodies, feelings, intuition or imagination, the means of knowing are severely reduced.

The most appropriate answer to this question is that we will never know how much we can know. There are two reasons for this. First, we could well be heir to capacities that have yet to develop, or that have atrophied through lack of use. Second, the number of things that are potentially knowable is infinite Therefore, it is impossible for us to determine how much we can know of what we could know were it possible for us to know everything.

It is impossible for any individual, or for the species, to know all that there is to know. Even if we were in possession of capacities adequate to the task, there is no way that we would have the time, or the computational ability, to ingest, analyze, and understand the whole. Furthermore, it would be impossible for us to know when we have encompassed all [91] there is to know, because there would always be the likelihood that there would be some things of which we remained unaware. Proving that there is nothing more to know, like establishing any negative statement, is impossible, because we cannot rule out the likelihood that a factor may emerge that would contradict this assumption.

The fact that we cannot know everything about everything, and that we cannot bring together all that we do know, does not mean that there is no value continuing the quest to know more. Nor should we conclude that there is no purpose in seeking to orient ourselves to what we already know, no value in seeking to sort it into piles and to relate those piles to each other. There is enormous value in such an exercise, in employing what Ken Wilber describes as "vision logic".³⁶

The Benefits of Knowing

What are the benefits of knowing?

It is important to ask this question because we spend much of our time, and considerable energy, attempting to understand ourselves and makes sense of our world. It is important to ask whether the effort is worthwhile?

The quest for knowledge yields a range of benefits.

First, it satisfies our curiosity, a curiosity that is inseparable from who we are. There is benefit in knowing for the sheer gratification of knowing.

Knowing, in the deepest sense, is engaged in for the sake of an external, or higher purpose. We may seek to know in order to be enlightened, to achieve salvation, or to be healed. [92]

At a more fundamental level, our thirst for knowledge satisfies an insatiable need for psychological security. The quest for knowledge is a means of keeping the gnawing rats of anxiety at bay. We want to know because we need to believe that life is meaningful. We seek to accumulate explanations in the hope that they can be pasted together to convince us of the meaningfulness of life. Nevertheless, most people, lacking a developed capacity for self-awareness, are unconscious of the insecurity fuelling their desire to understand themselves and their circumstances.

The Benefits of Not Knowing

It is important to recognise that there are benefits in not knowing.

The fact that we know that we understand so little fuels discovery. Our lack of knowledge, together with our native curiosity, and the insecurity that underlies our quest, is the engine that drives the human search for answers.

A further benefit of not knowing relates to the fact that there are some things that are difficult for us to accommodate. Were we to know some things, we could find this knowledge unbearable.

There are some things, at certain stages in our lives that it is better for us not to know. The dawning awareness that death is inevitable is age-specific. It is not appropriate for young people to be burdened with insights about death and dying that have taken older people a lifetime to come to terms with. [93]

Accurate knowledge of the future is a burden too great for most people to bear. While it is important for us to read the signals, so that we can prepare ourselves for crises, or seek to reverse destructive trends, precise knowledge of future events is disempowering.

This does not mean that people do not want to know. They both do and don't want to know. While many are fascinated by fortune-tellers, and the prophecies of Nostrodamus, most people want to keep the door on the future slightly closed. Absolute knowledge of the future would filch their courage and immobilize them.

Another benefit of not knowing has to do with the fact that knowledge brings responsibility. The more we know, the more we are responsible for what we know. If we were to know everything, the burden of responsibility would crush us. The extent of our knowledge needs to match our capacity for assuming responsibility for what we know. It is likely that this capacity governs the limits of what we know.

A Stage

There comes a stage in our quest for knowledge when we reach a sort of terminus. We arrive at this stage when we realise that the more we know, the more we know that we don't know.

In earlier stages in the journey, we thought we knew more than we really did. We later came to realise that reality was far more complex than we imagined. Eventually, we became lost in this complexity. Not only were there an infinite number of things that we did not have the capacity to understand, even those things that we were able to grasp were beyond our capacity to synthesize. Furthermore, many things to which we were introduced were beyond our [94] understanding because they were counter-intuitive. We could find no appropriate analogies that would give us access to the inner dimensions of this knowledge.

Once we begin travelling into this territory, our conclusions become increasingly tentative and our attitude reflects a deepening humility. When we reach the stage where we become aware of how little we know, we also find ourselves confronting the fact that it is impossible for us ever to know everything.

Because everything is connected to everything else, we are soon aware that it is impossible for us to trace every connection. In fact, the more we attempt to do this, the more we are overwhelmed. We do not have the capacity to process such complexity. However, this need not lead us to despair.

What Are We To Do?

What should we do when we reach the limit of our ability?

Some give up the quest and fall back on the illusions and mythologies that had sustained them through the years. However, giving up is not the only response. We can accept the challenge and celebrate the scope for unending discovery that life presents to us. If we take the latter course, we need to accept the fact that some things just happen. There may be reasons for them occurring, but we may never be able to identify them.

This response is not a justification for passivity, for avoiding issues, particularly issues of injustice and suffering. It is recognition of the fact that will never know everything about [95] everything. It also involves admitting to the fact that we can't control everything.

Reaching the limits of our knowledge, and admitting this, benefits us by relaxing us and encouraging us to flow with the rhythms of life.

In surrendering to the flow of life, we are doing what the rest of nature does--the physical universe, trees, rivers, animals, birds, insects, bacteria, etc. We have a tendency to consider ourselves superior to the rest of creation, and imagine that our ability to control nature makes us important. Our capacity for control places us in a position of responsibility, rather than importance.

One of the disadvantages of enjoying a limited capacity to manipulate the elements of the ecosystem is that it leads to the assumption that nature needs to be controlled, and that we should do the controlling. Unfortunately, our attempts at control, at organizing nature for our benefit, threaten us with extinction. Our knowledge, which allows us some measure of control, has become a curse.

That knowledge implies control, and that the human species was destined to exercise such control, is reflected in the Judaeo-Christian myth of beginnings, which informs Western culture. As Western culture is the pre-eminent influence in the contemporary world, its ethos is pervasive.

In naming the animals, Adam was seen to be exercising control over them. This magical conception, while crude, reveals a deep psychological reality. When we can give a name to something--a person, a race, a disease--we are reassured, often falsely, that we control what we name. There is a sense in which we need to surrender this penchant for naming, and accept the "what-isness", the "suchness" of [96] life. If we are not able to do this, and we impose conceptual definitions on what we observe, we will never really see what is there to be seen.

The recognition that we have come to the limit of our ability, and the capacity to accept the "suchness" of life, helps facilitate the sort of humility that allows us to flow non-judgmentally, and non-destructively, with life.

Resting

We need to surrender to life, to blend, rather than seeking to control. When we do this, we will be nourished, just as a tree is nourished when its roots draw moisture from the earth. This is not a conscious process. It is merely our being what we were intended to be, in the scheme of things.

Of course, part of what we were intended to be involves our exercising our not-inconsiderable faculties to achieve a measure of competence and control, but this control needs to be constrained within parameters, parameters that acknowledge the interdependence of all things.

When we are able to sheerly be, to be, at the deepest level, what we were intended to be, we will be alert, aware, and fully alive.[97]

[ROI 83-97]