ANYTHING YOU KNOW RIGHT NOW IS AN ETERNAL MYSTERY

What you know and don’t know is much more mysterious than anyone supposes. Standing in the way of truth is our ingrained dependence on facts as if they bring knowledge. The modern world is built upon levels of facts, as if knowledge is the accumulation of data. Life isn’t blissful, and countless people have unfulfilled spiritual yearnings, but without a doubt, the sciences and technology we base our lives upon represent mountains of data, in a worldwide frenzy of number crunching.

It is baffling, then, to consider a famous remark attributed by Plato to his mentor Socrates: “All I know is that I know nothing.” Why did the greatest Greek philosopher claim that his teacher said this? It makes Socrates seem to be anti-knowledge. In fact, he was, because his philosophical antagonists, the Sophists, taught that knowledge was the exclusive validity of objective facts. What Socrates taught was intuitive inner knowing. That’s why it is possible to say in the same breath, “Know thyself” and “All I know is that I know nothing.”

More than two millennia later, we are the heirs to this dispute. Socrates wasn’t claiming that intuitive inner knowing was automatically superior to objective facts. As we all experience—and as scientists constantly remind us— the subjective world “in here” is capricious, changeable, unpredictable, and filled with imagination and therefore unreal things. A confused mind gazing at itself won’t attain clarity, only more confusion.

Yet, to be realistic, the Sophist position seems to have won out in the end. The bedrock of science is solid, objective data. But unfortunately for that position, all knowing occurs subjectively. You can know something that originates “in here,” like feeling sad or having a sore elbow, or you can know something that occurs from “out there,” like the score of a baseball game or the atomic weight of potassium. Either way, however, both kinds of knowing take place through the mind.

This basic fact is suppressed, not only because science dominates our lives but because no one has the slightest idea where knowing comes from, only that it is entirely necessary. Objective facts lead to a dead end. At bottom, all physical objects are invisible ripples in the quantum field, which itself springs from a vacuum or void. This is indisputable, but you don’t see a massive re-examination of science to find a better answer, because entrenched worldviews are incredibly hard to budge, much less overturn.

The only way forward is to begin with the most fundamental experience in human existence. Even though we don’t understand why, the mind knows. It also knows that it knows. The next step is where all the trouble begins. What is knowing? It is nearly impossible to define what knowing is, pure and simple. This is the mystery Socrates was referring to when he said, “All I know is that I know nothing.”

Like him, we are all immersed in knowing all kinds of things, both subjective and objective, yet lacking a grasp of what it means to know. This hole in the middle of human understanding turns out to have great value. If you investigate knowing, you are taken deeper and deeper into how the mind works. This is a unique journey, radically unlike any other.

Remember, if you are a physicist and delve deep into the physical world, at some point “something” vanishes back into “nothing”—you have reached the void or vacuum state from which the physical universe magically appears. If you delve into your own mental activity, at some point, thoughts also vanish into nothing (i.e., silence), which is a kind of void, from which the thinking mind mysteriously appears.

But if you delve into knowing, no matter how deeply you explore, it never vanishes. You will remain aware. To be conscious, it isn’t necessary to think, but it is necessary to know. Knowing is inseparable from consciousness. You aren’t conscious because you know a collection of facts about X, Y, or Z, but simply by being here, existing as a conscious being. At every moment in life, we exercise our knowingness by applying it to X, Y, and Z. This mental activity is the job that knowingness performs, you might say, and it’s one job you cannot be fired from.

Let’s accept that knowingness exists by itself, prior to any mental activity. The journey doesn’t stop there. Look deeper, and two things emerge: you can’t find out where knowing came from, and you can’t locate it in the human brain. The brain as a whole knows how to organize itself, each brain cell knows how to organize itself, and the same knowing pertains to molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, and the quantum field that creates a brain cell. Knowing isn’t content to have a home in the physical domain—it is everywhere in Nature. Without consciousness, there is no Nature.

It is the same, knowing wherever you look. A quark that knows how to organize itself isn’t inferior to an atom, molecule, cell, or brain. Every link in the chain must know not only how to organize itself, but also how to seamlessly produce the next link in the chain. Without the quark, there is no brain. When “nothing” created “something,” pure consciousness already knew what it was doing, not just in the visible universe but in the vacuum state before the visible universe emerged.

Therefore, every level of Nature is knowing, outfitted to guide cosmic creation. The most important thing that people don’t know, it turns out, is our debt to the one thing, consciousness, that can create universes, but itself was never created. When you say to someone, “Be here now,” you are stating the fundamental law of existence.

Deepak Chopra, The writer is MD, FACP, FRCP founder of the Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global