Following is an excerpt from a work in progress, a book entitled Crazy Wisdom, which will be published next spring by Ten Speed Press.

WHAT DO YOU KNOW?

  Cocks crow

   Dogs bark

   This all men know.

   Even the wisest

   Cannot tell

   Whence these voices come

   Or explain

  Why dogs bark and cocks crow

  When they do.

Chuang Tzu

If crazy wisdom knows anything it is that we don’t know. We don’t know who we are, where we are, why we are, where we are going, or what this world and universe are all about. We do not know and probably never will.

The only thing that we can know is that we know nothing and that is the highest flight of human reason.

                  Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.

We may be able to describe the world as we see it, give names to things, and even tentatively understand how some processes work, but we don’t have a clue as to why things are the way they are. Or why they are at all.

What’s fire? You can tell me about oxidation, but that doesn’t tell me a thing.

Joseph Campbell

We may be able to explain the workings of the abdomen, but who can speak of the mystery of breath. Even if we think we can understand the evolution of the human species, we still don’t know where it’s going or why it came about in the first place. Is there a purpose to our existence? Is there something we are supposed to be doing here?

Life is too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.

Oscar Wilde

WHY ARE WE?

The contemporary street wisdom tells us, “Life is a bitch and then you die.” This aphorism implies a line that would finish the couplet, “And nobody knows the reason why.” What is the meaning of this life we are living? Of course, it is impossible to determine the exact nature of a box when you are inside of it. Furthermore . . .

How is it possible to find meaning in a finite world, given my waist and shirt size?

Woody Allen, Side Effects

Existential uncertainty is difficult for some people to live with, impossible for many. Knowledge is our survival mechanism, our evolutionary security blanket, and we have a nervous biological craving to know just what is going on here. We want certainty, especially about the meaning of our lives, and if we can’t find certainty in knowledge, then we must have belief . . .

What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come . . .

Vladimir in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot

We can’t imagine that there is nothing more to life than just the experience of the moments between birth and death. That would be too absurd! Our existence—our suffering—must have some greater meaning, and if the universe won’t tell us what it is, then we will have to make something up. Enter the multitude of gods and religions. (Choose one of the above.)

It is much more difficult than one thinks not to believe in God.

Andre Gide

The believer is happy, the doubter wise.

Greek proverb

Meanwhile, in this secular age, many of the gods have been replaced with ideologies, or “isms,” or nation states, or even lifestyles. If we can’t have one supreme reason, we will have to find some relative earth-bound purposes for our existence: a utopian future, or “freedom,” or “progress,” or “the children,” or “all the gusto.”

I don’t believe life has a purpose. Life is a lot of protoplasm with an urge to reproduce and continue in being.

Joseph Campbell

So maybe that’s all we are here to do—”go forth and multiply.” Just be and begat and be and begat and be and begat, until some cosmic catastrophe comes to end it. Or maybe there is one great truth or purpose for which we are all living, or should be living, and someday we will discover that we are here to grow the best possible basketball team for some intergalactic tournament, or to serve as homes for microbes who are truly the Creator’s chosen ones, or maybe we are just an experiment that has been devised to see if we can figure out why we are here, and like rats in a maze, our confusion is simply the object of someone else’s curiosity.

When you eventually see

through the veils to how things really are,

you will keep saying again

and again,

“This is certainly not like

we thought it was!”

Rumi, This Longing 

Perhaps someday the one true god or goddess might appear, and say, “Nobody got my name right.” Or maybe all gods do exist but none of them are “good,” and they don’t care whether we are good or not either. It could be that all these years we have only been good for goodness sake. Maybe all of our questions will be answered someday. “Until then,” crazy wisdom says, “your guess is as good as mine.”

There ain’t no answer.

There ain’t going to be any answer.

There never has been an answer.

That’s the answer.

Gertrude Stein

But there is another question here. If we aren’t meant to know, then why this “why?” There’s another damn “why!” Why why why??? What kind of joke is this? Why are we carriers of the “WHY” chromosome?

God made man because He loves stories.

Yiddish saying

Even though we may admit that we can never understand the ultimate meaning of things, we still often assume that we can at least know how things work—the laws of nature: physics, astronomy, geology, biology, and all the other “_ologies.” We assume that we can know in spite of a long, long history of mistakes . . .

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.

Lord Kelvin, mathematician, physicist and president of the British Royal Society, 1895.

Thou knowest no man can split the atom.

John Dalton, British chemist and physicist responsible for the modern conception of atomic theory, 1803.

We once knew that the world was flat, that the sun went around the earth, that space was fixed and absolute and that it was filled with something called “ether.” The list of mistakes could go on and on. Looking back on the history of “knowledge,” it now seems somewhat of a miracle that we have managed to survive our own ignorance.

For epilepsy in adults I recommend spirit of human brain or a powder, to be compounded only in May, June and July, from the livers of live green frogs.

Johann Hartmann, professor of Chemistry, University of Marburg, 1633

Meanwhile, in spite of being “wrong,” many ideas seem to have worked just fine for the people who knew them to be true. When the world was flat, nobody sailed out too far. When the sun rotated around the earth, people still harvested their crops in the same season. Belief doesn’t seem to have mattered too much either. When Zeus rather than Jehovah ruled the planet, life was about the same; a mixture of good and bad, joys and sorrows. What we know and believe may have very little to do with human happiness or success.

Knowledge is fashion.

Robert Hardin

Looking back on the history of “knowledge,” and how it changes in every century and civilization, it starts to become clear that what we know, or think we know, is a reality seen from behind a dense series of veils—of culture, language, biological development, and historical moment . . .

What the West has said and thought, hitherto, on the problems of space, time, motion, number, will, marriage, property, tragedy, science, has remained narrow and dubious, because men were always looking for the solution of the question. It was never seen that many questioners implies many answers, that any philosophical question is really a veiled desire to get an explicit affirmation of what is implicit in the question itself, that the great questions of any period are fluid beyond all conception . . .

Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West

Perhaps the quest for any kind of certain knowledge is doomed to failure. Our current science is now telling us that there is no fixed objective reality, at least not independent of our subjective observations of it. So, in the end, there may not even be any objective knowledge; there may only be “projective” knowledge. (At least until our current scientific view is overturned.) What we find seems always to depend on what we are looking for, and what we are looking for depends on who we are and what we think we need to know. The questions are part of the answer.

The seeker is that which is being sought.

Buddhist saying

There are those who would say that our desire to know has outlived its survival value and is now getting in the way. Some radical crazy wisdom doubters will even contend that our quest for knowledge has been a disaster. Sure, knowledge led to the combustion engine, but it did not enable us to see how those engines would destroy our atmosphere. Knowledge allowed us to increase our food supply, but failed to warn us of the overpopulation crisis. You might believe that knowledge has helped us to become more comfortable and happy in many different ways, but crazy wisdom would counter that we still know nothing, least of all how to live happy lives.

Adam and the Apple and the Atom

And the Eve of Destruction

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate.

Genesis

Curiosity killed the cat.

Folk saying

Knowledge has always been at best two-edged, both a blessing and a curse. It was the pursuit of knowledge, the urge to understand creation, that got us kicked out of the Garden of Eden in the first place. If we hadn’t wanted to know what was going on, we wouldn’t have eaten of the tree of knowledge and might still be blissfully wandering around paradise today, in naked innocence, passing time by giving things names and enjoying the fruits that gave no knowledge, but sure tasted good.

So great is the confusion of the world that comes from coveting knowledge!

Chuang Tzu

Humans are still searching for the elusive key that will unlock the fundamental mysteries: we want the final solution, the last word. In the twentieth century, our scientific materialism has led us to look for the great answers inside of matter itself, as if by taking apart the world—deconstructing it into the basic elementary thing—we would somehow find a clue to the meaning of creation, or at the very least, discover the possibility of some new technology to tinker with. So the scientists began splitting matter open. And they split it open again. And again. And when they finally got to the atom they split that open too. And inside of it they did find the essence of all matter . . . and, Lo and Behold, it was ENERGY! The tremendous and unspeakably pure power of the cosmos itself was hiding right there inside of the smallest of all things, holding forms together with intricate and unimaginable force! There was knowledge inside of the atom, just as there was inside of the apple, but by splitting it apart we have angered the gods again! We released the uncontrollable serpent power! The Kundalini of the Cosmos! The Furies! We opened the Pandora’s box! Yes, in our anxious desire to know, humans once again dared to steal fire, the hidden sacred knowledge that could drive us even further from the garden and perhaps banish us from the planet forever. Searching for knowledge, eating the apple, splitting the atom . . . What’s next?

The only thing worse than finding a worm in an apple . . . is finding half a worm.

Old joke

Every new understanding is the end or transformation of some other understanding. We aren’t getting anywhere. In discovering that matter and energy were interchangeable, the physicists destroyed both matter and energy. They can’t be separated. Now we are left with matter-energy, a reality held together by the dash. In the old days, people used that same dash to write the name of the almighty. G-D. Perhaps that dash in the middle is the key to everything. Crazy wisdom says, “Maybe it’s a minus sign.”

There are no facts, only interpretations.

Nietzsche

It may be that truth exists in the dash itself, in the joining together of all realities, in the understanding that the ten thousand things of this world are One. In the dash is the place where both dualities and logic end—the paradox. Our rational mind and our language cannot handle the paradox; we will not admit to both true and false, both the one and the many. This could be the disfigurement in our intelligence, the flaw in the evolution of consciousness, or perhaps an as yet undeveloped quality in everyone except mystics, schizophrenics, and crazy wisdom poets.

The pivot of Tao passes through the center where all affirmations and denials converge. He who grasps the pivot is at the still-point from which all movements and oppositions can be seen in their right relationship. Hence he sees the limitless possibilities of both “Yes” and “No.” Abandoning all thought of imposing a limit or taking sides, he rests in direct intuition. Therefore I say: “Better to abandon disputation and seek the true light.”

Chuang Tzu

Crazy wisdom understands that truth, like everything else, keeps changing. Our philosophical ideas are continually overturned; our scientific conclusions are reversed or else shown to be only partially true. Newton was absolutely right. Right for his time but not for ours. Now our technology allows us to see deep inside of atoms and measure far out into distant space—into the places where Newton’s laws don’t apply. Descartes thought he had reality figured out. Now we blame him for the mind-body split. Einstein’s theories are currently being revised. Crazy wisdom says that change may be the only constant in the universe. Truth is a verb. What is true is process.

All truths are only half truths.

Alfred North Whitehead

Finally, at the end of all our questioning and thinking we come to nothing certain; nothing stops changing long enough to become certain. We don’t know nothin’. Zero. When it comes to the really big questions, the only knowledge is belief, and belief is no knowledge at all. Some people may think they know the meaning of life but nobody can explain why cocks crow and dogs bark when they do. The poet, understanding nothing, states the case for crazy wisdom and for us all:

When did smoke learn how to fly?

 

When do roots talk with each other?

 

How do stars get their water?

Why is the scorpion venomous

and the elephant benign?

 

What are the tortoise’s thoughts?

To which point do the shadows withdraw?

What is the song of the rain’s repetitions?

Where do birds go to die?

And why are leaves green?

 

What we know comes to so little,

what we presume is so much,

what we learn, so laborious,

we can only ask questions and die.

Better save all our pride

for the city of the dead

and the day of the carrion:

there, when the wind shifts

through the hollows of your skull

it will show you all manner of

enigmatical things, whispering truths in the

void where your ears used to be.”

Pablo Neruda

from Flies Enter a Closed Mouth

∞

From the Summer 1989 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 6, No. 1)

Text © Wes Nisker 1989-2022