On living with Curiosity and Surrendering Certainty: Because what we think we know is killing us

When will I be willing and able to invite and allow the wave, that will carry me forward? When my curiosity outweighs my fear; and my desire to evolve becomes greater than my need to be right.
- Louise LeBrun

The power of I don’t know

There is this pervasive and prevalent perversion of truth “out there” that power lives in having all the right answers.

I happen to believe that the illusion of knowing is what keeps us small and stagnant, locked permanently inside a loop of everything we already know, seeking not to free ourselves from the prison of knowledge.

That loop becomes an open ended loop the nanosecond we become willing enough to invite and allow our curiosity to lead as opposed to our conditioned certainty. Curiosity, as a state of being, demands we let go that which we think we know in order to discover what else is possible…

Children, until the age of 7 or so, are awesome at living from the innocence of curiosity—that’s what makes them so interesting: their willingness to discover what they don’t know they don’t know. So they question everything. They are curious about everything. The world is big, and their hunger to discover it is infinite.

Until, of course, we condition curiosity out of them and replace it with certainty and knowledge.

My God has all the answers.
Your God is all wrong.

Certainty, as a state of being, demands we are always in the know. Knowledge has a fixed quality to it; there’s room for some discovery, but it lays within the confines of what we already know. What I mean by that is that when we are introduced to new information we compare it to that which we believe (with conviction) we already know. If it fits, then we adopt it, but if it doesn’t, we don’t even entertain it. This, predictably, limits our access to innovative ideas that open up potential to discover.

Accumulation of knowledge depends on a rather linear trajectory that allows for the novel information to build on top of the other. It necessarily relies on history to determine the trajectory of the next step. In that, it is incremental. It is rather predictable. It is manageable. And it feeds the illusion that if we know and can predict all the factors, we can control the outcome. And if it didn’t work, it’s because we did something wrong.

In my world, it has always been a rather bizarre concept: that my God has all the answers but your God is wrong. Modern day god is evidently science, giving way to AI and algorithms.

But just take a pause, and think about this … as they say in NLP, all meaning is context dependent. Not all meaning some of the time, or some meaning all of the time, or some meaning some of the time, but all meaning all of the time.

In your eye’s mind, picture a typical woman in Canada. What do you see?

Now picture a typical Afghani woman. Do these two women share a reality of the world? Or does what they each call “reality” vary vastly from one woman to the other?

If each of those women if fixated on knowing the truth and being right about it, she leaves no room for curiosity about what’s real and meaningful in the life of another. And in the process of the closed loop of knowing, she dismisses the other as “wrong” and in that, each gets to keep the same old view they’ve always had with no chance of potential anywhere in the vicinity of her mind. Some people would rather die being right than ever question how do you know what you think you know?

“What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.” – Mark Twain

Curiosity, on the other hand, is an open ended state of being. “I don’t know” is a powerful, legitimate state of being that invites the unknown to become known. It is the state of creativity, of expansion, of evolution. It is a state of wonder. Of receptivity. Of willingness to receive. It It demands that we surrender that which we think we know in order to discover what it is that we yet don’t know. 

It is in the yet unknown that potential and possibility live.
It is in the yet unknown that resourcefulness emerges from.

As much as we have been conditioned (programmed through culture and the process of parenting) to believe power lives in having the right answers that stem from the right knowledge, in my life this has proven itself to be total bogus.

Think about it: if that were true, in the era of the most access to content (knowledge) we would all be living empowered lives. Yet 80% of our population is on drugs of one kind of another. That, dear reader, shows a profound lack of empowerment.

Then, of course, you’ve got the era of post-truth that we have already entered with deep fakes, VR, and augmented reality … soon to be our new “normal” where content presented from “out there” will not be distinguishable from fiction (isn’t it already the case?). So how is one to know truth from fiction? Will it even matter? Who knows …

All I know is that I don’t know. And in not knowing, I am free. I am free of the burden of having to know it all, when all is inherently unknowable…at least with the intellect.

Paradox is, all is knowable when I let go of having to know. And it is knowable because of our quantum nature. When we let go of what we think and relax into our experience enough to expand, we have access to everything there ever was, is or will be. In this space, time is an illusion. The socially constructed reality is an illusion. There is always a higher order context to be considered. From this space of surrender to what we are, we have access to everything, because we are infinite.

Curiosity leads to a life of joy, and isn’t that the point…

However, hard to access any of that from the conventional narrative that says consciousness lives in the brain, we die when we die, and life is a meaningless accident. If this is the paradigm we operate from, we most definitely want to have access to all the content we possibly can in order to try to feel in control of our creations. Not good, bad, right or wrong… simply not how I choose to live my life, because there’s no joy there.

I’m looking to create a magical life full of creativity … full of meaning … full of perpetual expansion … full of curiosity … full of discovery … full of questioning that which I believe so that I reclaim more of my Truth. I’m looking to live a life that is mine, directed and shaped by my internal cues that guide me toward that which is meaningful for me. Question is: do I know (and trust) how to listen?

It has been a long, incredible journey to live from an internally referenced space. Meaning what I trust most in the universe are my own internal cues to guide me toward my chosen destiny.

I do not rely on experts, authority figures, storytellers, sacred sisterhoods, rules, regulations, cultural norms, gurus, mercury retrograde …or anything external of me to guide me.

Instead, I invite the Truth that I AM to descend to the base of my spine, breathe a nice deep water breath (even flow of inhales and exhales), connect with my body, stay in what’s presenting with curiosity, and allow myself to discover what I don’t yet know that I don’t know … trusting that when discovered, it will transform not only the topography of my body and nervous system, but it will also reveal to me the higher order Truth that I seek to live my chosen destiny.

Questions to ponder

How curious are you about your own sense of self? About how you came to be who you are? How curious are you about who you are capable of becoming? What’s meaningful to you about being alive? Are you curious about what you don’t know you don’t know about yourself that could transform the quality of your life? Have you ever allowed yourself to explore the bigger questions, or are you hiding because you’re afraid of what you’ll discover?