The Unknown

I was born in an age when calculations had to be done laboriously, with slide rules (which I enthusiastically hated); telephones had cords connected to them, and television was something special.

I will die in an age where calculations are almost all done by computers, and telephones and televisions fit into a wristwatch. Television is no longer special; now, it's utterly banal.

Yet everything in nature is essentially the same, except that there is less of it; more and more of the earth is paved over with cement and asphalt, and more and more species are disappearing. Nature does not know or care that this is happening; to nature, mankind's activity is the unknown, since the birds, plants, animals, and so on have little or no comprehension of what is being done to them, short of knowing that there are less meals, less mates, and less offspring.  What is known to one side is unknown to another; and even unknowable, because we are the only species on the planet capable of understanding what we do.

This has not ever prevented us, so far as I can see, from doing anything, when mankind is taken as a whole. If the definition of vanity is doing whatsoever one wishes, without regard for the consequences, then we are certainly vain.

 In an outward lust for conquest—of nature and each other—the inward search gets left behind; yet this is where the deepest unknown lies. Know thyself, the adage says, and yet one pays no heed. The art of dropping off assumptions and arrogance is, to the worldly, a conceit. Don't worry about such things, they say; simply acquire power, and exercise it.

This is how the world functions today. Not that we have any monopoly on it, mind you; a reading of Plato's Apology, for example, will underscore the fact that it's been this way for a very long time.

 But what is inside us? Our scientists want to re-create life in a laboratory, but life is not just a machine. Life is a process, a richness of experience, not just cellular mechanisms that can be reproduced by gluing strands of DNA together. The unknown emerges not within the context of the mechanical, but within the context of Being. And Being cannot be explained just by knowing how the machine works, or which switch to flip in order to turn it on or off.

 So, to me, Being is the unknown. Every philosophy and religion since ancient times has struggled with the effort to understand Being, because the existence of Being—the ability of consciousness to exist and comprehend anything—is the fundamental question of the universe. Why a universe should produce such a quality, a quality which seems, on the face of it, not only entirely unnecessary, but quite simply impossible—is unknown.

 Those deft with words can wrap us up in conundrums about the nature of Being—it's a bit of a sport for a certain class of inquisitive intellectuals, and I engage in it myself from time to time—but what really interests us, I think, is how to be. That is, how to be in this moment, how to be real. And that always involves an understanding about how to meet the unknown—because not only is our Being unknown, the moment itself, which encompasses Being and flows into it, is also unknown. As Stuart Kauffman pointed out in his excellent book, Reinventing the Sacred, it doesn't matter whether we call ourselves scientists, Christians, Muslims, or philosophers—we all live our lives forward into mystery. And the point of intersection between all of these concepts, lifestyles, and disciplines lies at this unknown point of Being.

 To begin to investigate what it means to Be, to enter the unknown which Being emerges from, I have to be willing to surrender what I have. It sounds pretty easy; maybe I can shrug my shoulders, throw it away in a carefree manner, and just move forward joyfully into the present moment without any baggage. Heigh ho, heigh ho.

But, hey, this baggage is very comforting... no one wants to trade a suitcase with warm slippers and an overcoat in it for the uncertainty of the elements! The bottom line is that I don't trust this idea of Being. The unknown is frightening; and to become intimate with it, which is what is necessary—that's even more frightening.

 It's odd, because the unknown embraces us as a lover in every moment, even if we reject its advances. We don't have a choice, really; we may not know the unknown, but it knows us intimately, and holds all of us—all of creation—in its hands.

 This isn't something to be figured out.

It's a question to be experienced.