ANYTHING YOU KNOW RIGHT NOW IS AN ETERNAL MYSTERY

What you know and don't know is much more mysterious than anyone supposes. Standing in the way of truth is our ingrained dependence on facts as if they bring knowledge.

- Deepak Chopra

The modern world is built upon levels of facts, as if knowledge is the accumulation of data. Life isn’t blissful, and countless people have unfulfilled spiritual yearnings, but without a doubt, the sciences and technology we base our lives upon represent mountains of data, in a worldwide frenzy of number crunching.

It is baffling, then, to consider a famous remark attributed by Plato to his mentor Socrates: “All I know is that I know nothing.” Why did the greatest Greek philosopher claim that his teacher said this? It makes Socrates seem to be anti-knowledge. In fact, he was, because his philosophical antagonists, the Sophists, taught that knowledge was the exclusive validity of objective facts. What Socrates taught was intuitive inner knowing. That’s why it is possible to say in the same breath, “Know thyself” and “All I know is that I know nothing.”

More than two millennia later, we are the heirs to this dispute. Socrates wasn’t claiming that intuitive inner knowing was automatically superior to objective facts. As we all experience—and as scientists constantly remind us—the subjective world “in here” is capricious, changeable, unpredictable, and filled with imagination and therefore unreal things. A confused mind gazing at itself won’t attain clarity, only more confusion.