I saw an amusing little post online yesterday. It shared some poetry, or actually the details of a poetry lesson:
“Thinking about the time our high school English teacher gave us a poem to analyse:
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know that there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
“When we finished she told us it was Donald Rumsfeld's WMD press conference, and that was the class.”
😂
Now I can actually remember this press conference (from February 12th 2002) and all the hoo-ha surrounding it. Rumsfeld was a very divisive character, we were on the brink of what we, the public (correctly) suspected was an illegal invasion of Iraq, and here he was, blathering on about ‘unknown unknowns’.
It seemed in very poor taste at the time. (Crazy how the Overton window shifts – the majority of today's politicians would have been forced to resign by now, back in the day 🤨)
But, political obfuscation aside, the man wasn't wrong. And ‘unknown unknowns’ is a phrase I find myself returning to again and again, both here in the Daily Reminders and with clients.
Not from the perspective of unknown facts, or knowledge. (When it comes to transformative life change, more facts & knowledge aren't going to help you one iota, sorry to break it to you.)
No I'm talking about this:
- Seeing something new about the way we experience the world, and who we are.
- Having an experience that allows a layer of innocent misunderstanding to fall away.
- A realisation—the making real—of the principles behind our psychology, and life.
Insight—fresh new thought that we've never had before—is what changes things. And that's got nothing to with your Thought System 📦 or ‘what you know’ – it's outside of all that. It's unknown. An ‘unknown unknown’ because the mind can't even conceive of it.
That’s why we’re stuck!
Examples
I’d invite you to look back on some of the pivotal changes that have happened in your life, and see if you can spot the insight—the fresh, new thought, or ‘change of heart’ you’d not had before—that led to that change.
Here are four that I’ve had in the past. They’re personal, and they’ll possibly seem a bit obvious and quite normal and boring. They might sound like beliefs I have taken on board—something someone has told me, that I’ve chosen to repeat—but none of these required effort. They were all just lightbulb moments. (And I swear to god I’d pass a lie detector test on any of them!)
Some were immediate, others took a while to grow and for me to be able to articulate after the fact. (As Syd Banks said, in The Missing Link: “Intellectual observation is ego, after form.”)
All four of these realisations changed the course of my life.
- You don’t need to change a situation at all, in order to have a totally different experience of it. (The start of this work I do, and a foreshadowing of #2)
- My reactions/emotions aren’t being caused by other people or situations, they’re coming from Thought. (The inside-out penny properly dropped.)
- There’s nothing wrong with me. (That was a biggie! You are free to disagree.)
- A world exists in which I can be utterly disinterested in alcohol. (Huge practical implications.)
Like I say, if you’d tried to get me to believe any of these, it wouldn’t have worked. They all came about through ‘looking in this direction’ (the Innate Health understanding) and fulfilling my 3 basic criteria for change:
- Showing up (I was reading books and listening to podcasts, and eventually having my own coaching)
- Being present (I’d been primed to ‘listen for insight’, so that’s how I was listening, not for information)
- Staying open-minded.
It’s the last of those three that’s the most important… and when you think about it, what is it that we're staying ‘open-minded’ to?
Unknown unknowns.
It’s the very definition!
💟
Giles
p.s. the whole ‘Isn’t that just belief?’ thing is why I’m always encouraging people to get their own evidence for what I’m pointing to – I’m not trying to get you to believe anything! – something I wrote about in a previous Daily Reminder: This is not a philosophy.
Related
Giles P Croft