I Don't Know: The Arising of Intelligence

Don't try to understand life. Experience it.

Everything happens for a reason.

Wait, no it doesn’t! Everything just happens.

We want life to make sense, and so we invent reasons why things happen. We pretend to know what we don’t know to avoid living with uncertainty.

But by not admitting to our lack of understanding we miss an opportunity to tap into a far greater intelligence. We walk right past an unlocked door to freedom – freedom from the limited sphere of thought.

Evaluating life with thought is like evaluating a Rodin with a tape measure. Life is not to be understood. It is to be experienced.

To evaluate life is to stand apart from it, to size it up as if it were some strange beast. Thought creates this gap, this illusory “me and it” environment. Thought manufactures a reasoner searching for reasons, one concept chasing after another.

But when thought is still, the gap disappears. We are the life we had been pondering. We are one with it the way our skin is one with a gentle breeze.

Put away your measuring tools. Admit your ignorance. Say “I don’t know” and experience life without the need to understand it. Lay down your thoughts and with them will lie your uncertainties. 

One with life, reasons become unnecessary because there is no one left to ask questions.


John Ptacek