Posted 11/3/2013
In our first book, The Game of God: Recovering Your True Identity, Katie and I assert "The source of all fear is the unknown...and the source of all hatred is fear." As we humans know no thing absolutely--with this lone exception: some kind of experience is occurring at our location--the unknowns in our lives are oceanic. Katie and I once did a series of video interviews asking people, "Do you know who, or what, you really are?" The deadly word in that question, of course, is "really." What we soon discovered was that no one knew who they really were. The fact that we go through life assuming otherwise is another symptom of universal human insanity. I recall the scene in Lawrence of Arabia when a motorcyclist on the far bank of the Suez Canal repeatedly shouts at Lawrence, "Who are you? Who are you?" Lawrence, a very intelligent and philosophical man, clearly doesn't know how to answer.
Ignorance-spawned fear and hate are not comfortable states. As Dean Wormer gently advises Kent Dorfman in Animal House, "Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son." This could be taken as a variation of Socrates' "The unexamined life is not worth living." Socrates, incidentally, was called the wisest man in Athens by the Oracle of Delphi--because he was the only man in Athens who knew he knew nothing.
Facing our ignorance opens us to the empowering no-nonsense experience of humility. It's another form of this great paradox: the more we accept the reality of our insanity the saner we are. She who knows doesn't know. But she who doesn't know knows she doesn't know...and thus actually knows something!
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