How Wonderful to Know Nothing

Transcript

I want to talk about how wonderful it is to know nothing.

So, about a year ago I got this tattoo. It was my very first tattoo on my left upper arm and it’s of the tarot card, the unnumbered card, the fools card.

Some of you might know the very famous depiction of the fools card from the Rider-Waite deck where you see this fool or this dandy fancily dressed with a swag over his arm, his little dog with him.

And it looks like he’s just about to walk straight over a cliff.

This is indicative of what it takes to embark on a journey.

It’s about taking a little leap of faith.

I’ve referred before to George Leonard’s Mastery and he talks a lot about, especially about two people who come from other disciplines and come into the aikido dogo in order to train.

One knows a lot about karate and the other knows a lot about Kung fu or whatever it is.

One of them is calm and patient and doesn’t even indicate that he knows anything about any martial arts.

He just listens, takes it in and follows the instructions of the master.

But the other one is combative at every stage an he says “How am I going to do this movement when it’s going to leave me open? I won’t be able to block.”

The master said “Well let’s take it one step at a time and we can learn the defensive bits later and at the end of the session, everybody is amazed about the first guy because the master asks “Do you want to show something from your discipline?”

And he pulls out these crazy moves and everyone is just wowed. They didn’t even know that this novice was actually a master in another art.

This is what it takes when we embark on a new skill but perhaps in every aspect of life.

Perhaps in the paths where we are masters, we don’t have to but I like to try to keep that awareness that I actually know very little, even about things I’ve studied for years.

It’s not easy to do. By my nature I’m kind of an egotistical person and you know that’s why I got the tattoo.

Every time I look at it and think “Be humble, you don’t know everything.”

And maybe I don’t know much at all.

Similar thing happened to me in an auyasuasca ceremony in Chile.

The first night of the ceremony one of the guys in the integration talked to me about being auto-exigent or self demanding.

It’s kind of funny because when you’re hard on yourself it can be hard to see that you are hard on yourself.

All these auto-exigent thoughts have occurred to me and I’m saying things like “If I’m that auto-exigent, why am I not more successful?”

Which is a really self-exigent thing to say because well for several reasons. One thing is it’s a little dilluted. Just because you’re hard on yourself doesn’t mean you are successful.

The other aspect of it is, in many ways I am successful. So why would I think that?

I was very much resistant to those thoughts and going into the second night of the ceremony the guides said to everyone, but it seemed like a message for me.

I’m sitting there in the half lotus position and she says “It doesn’t matter what’s come before, it doesn’t matter if you’re an expert in yoga or something else, doesn’t matter if you have those things or not because tonight we begin again.”

Fortunately I was able to take her words to heart and say “Yes, she’s right” and actually it was kind of funny because I had this perception she was somehow attacking me all along, she had my best interests at hurt.

I thought I knew something, turns out I did not know something.

How wonderful it is to know nothing because in our lives maybe we think that we have all the answers.

I’ve seen tragically people who are very intelligent unable to face the fact that they might not know something. Unable to face the fact that they might not know something about happiness or something which seems woo-woo or hippy dippy. Unable to set their prejudices aside in order to explore and experiment.

And that’s why it is wonderful to be aware of the limits of our knowledge because if we don’t know much at all that means there’s this huge potential that life can be so much better.

Of course two sides of the same coin. Uncertainty can be very scary, but uncertainty must mean potential. It must.

And that’s why it’s wonderful to know nothing.

Thank you for listening and have a wonderful day.