The More You Know, The More You No

I’m not interested in knowing anything. To know something is to negate it. What I seek is understanding. I can understand something, and feel it deeply to be true, but allow for that truth to grow and change. Knowing something is akin to our misplaced desire for fulfillment through owning the physical. If you own a book, you feel that you ‘own’ the knowledge within - the object becomes analogous to the knowledge. But if you try to understand the book, really empathize with where the author was coming from, what led her to write this book, the knowledge that you gain from it will live within you. It will become personally relatable and incorporate itself into your world view. The physical object doesn’t matter because the knowledge is inside you.

Regardless of field - science, mathematics, art - when one has become an expert in their domain, they much more readily point to holes in their understanding of what they are purportedly an expert. As you reach the antipodes of your understanding of something, the mysteries of the world present themselves. But few people challenge their own thinking enough to reach the antipodes. Personal blocks prevent you from probing into your own contradictions, from diving deeper into your own understanding. Knowing something allows you to negate the possibility of knowing anything further. Why spend more time with something you already know?

But if instead you admit you know nothing and seek understanding, saying yes to information that butts up against your bias and makes you uncomfortable, plowing towards that discomfort, your understanding will build and grow. The book will live within you rather than exist on the shelf. The truly miraculous part is that the book already lives within you, you just need to choose to receive it.

Knowledge is not physical, you cannot own it. It is something that is felt deeply, below the level of thought. In fact, metaphors for expressing you understand what a person is telling you include “I see you”, “I hear you”, and even explicitly “I feel you”. It would be absurd to say “I think you” in that situation, and it is just as absurd to believe that thought is the only path towards understanding. Information transferred between brains is received as a feeling. Thought is secondary to that experience of receiving: it’s your conclusion about what you’ve received. Thought is certainly a helpful tool in getting there, but it is not the exclusive arbiter of knowledge.

Thought is a sense. Our eyes help us understand our environment through sight. Our ears are perceiving what’s around us in the world of sound. Our hands touch and feel the physical environment. And thoughts are our conclusions about this information, predicting and expecting what may happen. But our own thoughts are riddled with biases that tend to be invisible to the thinker. It is very easy to pinpoint contradictions and biases in others, yet we stumble applying that same criticism to ourselves. Personal blocks prevent us from seeing what can sometimes be a comically distorted view of reality. Essentially, saying 'no' serves as a way to cut out all that doesn't line up with our biased view of the world. Say you live in a world where rabbits don’t exist, but one day you come across a rabbit. You feel this to be true, deep within yourself you trust and know this is a rabbit, and yet your thought brain, with the keys to the kingdom, says 'no, rabbits don’t exist'. So you rationalize a reason - through thought - to explain what you’ve seen. This is like a crooked boss choosing his own moral oversight committee.

Understanding, on the other hand, is felt. Like laughter rolls through your body, building and building, infectious and good, knowledge rolls through the brain in waves of understanding. It feels like your brain laughing. And just like your deepest self wants to express joy through laughing, your brain wants to receive this stuff because it feels good like laughing does.

When you stop thinking you know how the world works, you will begin to understand a bit how the world actually works and more clearly see your place in that world. All you must do is prepare the soil and be open to receiving.