Relating to the Unknown
Day by day, we like to know what will happen next. In fact our routine activities and thoughts are the very foundations of our health and well-being. Although we all have thousands of options, we don't want to invent each day from scratch. We don't ask ourselves when we wake up "Shall I go to Bali today? Or have goulash and vodka for breakfast? Or kill the neighbour's dog?" No, we have our usual breakfast and leave the house when we normally do.
I like the fact that in two hours time, I will be having my morning coffee at the local cafe, while skimming through the paper. The certainty of this insulates me quite well from any horrors I may read about. I know I'm not immune from the effects of global warming or the recession in the USA. However, the information that the Greenland ice sheet is melting produces just a tiny, transitory blip in my stomach. My coffee, my paper, my routine make me feel surprisingly safe. They reassure me that all is right with the world. (How does coffee do that!?)
We need to feel as secure as possible. The paradox is that we feel as safe as we do, given that nothing ever seems to go quite according to plan. Our brains and bodies need certainties, or the next best thing, to function well. Furthermore, we typically think about what we know, and we eventually come to know more and more about those matters. Only rarely do we think about what we don't know.
Yet whether we think much about it or not, we all have some attitude toward the unknown - towards what we don't know, or can't know, or what is beyond rational understanding anyway. Because we naturally focus on what we can understand, we don't even notice how large the Unknown actually is. So how do we relate to what is beyond understanding?
Our usual response is to assume that if we don't know, then someone else does. When I was young, my father seemed to know everything. But when I was ten, I asked him a question about the pronunciation of a foreign word and he didn't know. He wasn't even ashamed about it!
That shocked me, but at least I knew that if my father didn't know, then someone else did. There are experts out there. Scientists understand how the world works. Historians know what happened in the past. Politicians know how to govern. Priests and psychologists are experts on spirituality. As I got older, however, I began to suspect that no one really knew anywhere near as much as they pretended to. That was scary.
During the Renaissance, it was felt that a truly brilliant man, such as a Galileo or a Newton, would be able to know all there was to know. Nowadays, it is obvious than any one of us can only master a tiny fraction of total knowledge, and that imperfectly, no matter how brilliant we are. If we spent our entire life studying fuschias, for example, we would never exhaust the subject, and we would know precious little about anything else.
In fact, it seems impossible to be certain about anything at all. All science is based on provisional, rather than absolute, truths. Furthermore, as the philosopher Kant argued, we can never know the world "in-itself', because we see things through the limited, and highly subjective, capabilities of our human brains. We can only see and understand what we are engineered to see.
We vaguely realise that there is a vast Unknown beyond our comfort zone. Yet despite our ignorance, we still have our opinions and beliefs about it. We can't bear a total void. We prefer some kind of explanatory picture to none at all.
The important question is this: "Do we have a well-informed and intelligent picture of what we don't know, or a primitive, superstitious or childish one?' There are many things that we can't know for sure - the future, the secret of perfect health and happiness, life and death, transcendental states and so on - but this is no reason to go brain-dead about them. As Stevie Wonder, in his song "Superstition', said "If you believe in things that you don't understand then you suffer."
So a childish approach towards the future is to say "God has a plan', or "It will all work out in the end.' An adult approach is to learn about global warming, the population explosion etc. and combine that with what we know about human ingenuity and our ability to co-operate, and come up with our own picture.
We need answers, but it is good to give any explanatory theory a thorough reality check. We can ask "Is the theory consistent? Does it match what we know to be true? Can we predict anything from it? What are the consequences of the theory? Are there simpler explanations of the data?' By asking these questions, we can at least weed out the obvious fallacies, and edge closer to what is likely to be true.
So most religions, and their modern DIY alternatives, assume life after death, and even non-religious people find that a comforting idea. Religions generally say "Be good and think of others. If you do, you'll go to Heaven. If not, you go to Hell.' Buddhism and Hinduism present this reward and punishment theme a little differently. They say you will be reborn in better or worse conditions according to your behaviour in this life.
Although this theory is all about justice, it has some weird consequences. The first is that people born rich are obviously being rewarded for their spiritual nobility in past lives, and those born poor are being punished for their spiritual depravity. So it follows that we shouldn't really interfere with the karma of the poor in Africa, and we should trust that Americans really have a God-given right to exploit their power.
Secondly, where are all the extra human beings coming from - four billion of them in the last century? Are they being reincarnated from well-behaved, humanised labradors and altruistic dolphins perhaps? That's a lot of good dolphins. Or do cows and birds and flies and bacteria also get rewarded or punished for their behaviour? And if they all get reborn as humans eventually, how will we all fit on this Earth?
Finally, if you can't remember your past lives, and your body is obviously different when you are reborn, how can the idea of "you' being reincarnated have any meaning at all?
Irrational as it is, the idea of life after death is pleasing to the mind. It is still "real' in a mythical or imaginative sense, even it can't be literally true. It is not a piece of meaningless fluff. People run their lives and societies according to it. The fact that a belief is literally wrong doesn't stop it from having psychological and social value.
The world is vastly too complicated to rationally understand. Our reasoning always reaches its limits eventually. At that point, we have no choice but to ultimately grasp what is happening through our imagination and gut-feeling. So we have myths to help us function and to inspire us.
Here are some of them: Life after death. The wisdom of the past. The perfectibility of mankind. A just society. Progress. The power of thought. The spiritual world.
But we can still ask whether our myths - our working models of the unknowable - are healthy or not. A belief in life after death for example, may be consoling, but it may also conceal a much greater mystery: the astonishing fact that we are alive at all.
In many ways the "facts' are overwhelming. We live in this kind of miraculous Paradise, and yet our lives are vulnerable to instant annihilation. From this perspective, each moment of time is a valuable resource. If on the other hand, we assume that we will probably be reborn again and again, then there is no urgency about the matter. We can always spend a few more hours in front of the TV.
A uncritical belief in spirituality and transcendental phenomena may actually kill off any possibility of achievement. To read uplifting books, to seek out stories of miraculous events, and admire teachers from afar may seem like spiritual activities. They may also leave us stranded in a backwater of stagnant myths.
If, on the other hand, we look at these matters rationally, we can see there are often quite practical ways of achieving extraordinary states. In other words, if you do A + B + C, you eventually get to D. States of deep silence, inspiration, ecstasy, profound insight and power are all possible if you do the spadework.
Of course, they can't be explained in words, and they can't be proven. They are beyond rationality. Nonetheless, we are most likely to achieve them if we approach them with a intelligent, questioning mind. Childish beliefs may make us feel good, but they can be a ramshackle and unproductive way of approaching the Unknown.