Dealing with That Which You Might Not Know

Some thoughts to ponder, especially for people newly awakening to the sham of consensus reality on this planet:

It’s very tempting to jump from one certainty to a complete rejection of that “certainty” and replacing it with another rigid, absolute “truth.” I see this happen all the time. It’s one reason ex-smokers tend to be most intolerant of smokers and why ex-fundamentalist Christians so often become fundamentalist New Agers … or why people who find some conspiracy theories turned out to be true often run through a phase in which they knee-jerk reject everything mainstream and swallow everything alternative. This dynamic gets people into trouble and makes them easy pickin’s for manipulation and psyops. Learning to face uncertainty brings challenges, but “Knowing that you know nothing is the beginning of wisdom.”

“I spent a lot of years trying to outrun or outsmart vulnerability by making things certain and definite, black and white, good and bad. My inability to lean into the discomfort of vulnerability limited the fullness of those important experiences that are wrought with uncertainty: Love, belonging, trust, joy and creativity to name a few.” ~ Brene Brown

“It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn’t get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.” ~Richard P. Feynman

I wrote to a friend this morning:

“It is incredible how certain and smug people are about their one little sliver of reality they just discovered. Multi-facets? Unknowns? Oh, no. They have the answers and they don’t even recognize how they’re all being played. Why is it so difficult for people to admit, “I don’t know all the answers to this. I realize there may be hidden factors off my radar, so I will prepare some contingency plans just in case I’m wrong in this moment of smug satisfaction”? Is it because if they admitted to themselves some things they don’t know they might get scared by the vastness of what they don’t know and fear (even healthy warnings) is against their new religion?”

As ironic as it is for me to quote Donald Rumsfeld’s much dismissed comment used to justify another bogus war, he was hiding the uncomfortable truth in plain view when he said: “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.”

“Unknown unknowns” can be used to shape all manner of public policies, wars, and protocols, because when individuals and/or entire cultures forget or dismiss that there may be unknown unknowns, they leave themselves vulnerable to blind spots and subject to the Hegelian Dialectic of problem, reaction, solution. When we befriend uncertainty, we discover that other options exist! Here’s Joanna Macy sharing the incredible freedom and rewards of uncertainty: