The World Will Only Gift Us the Insights We Have Made Ourselves Ready to Receive

This suggestion can disrupt our world view more than we may at first realize. It can also change our life and our world for the better. 

Understanding that the world—that the great mystery itself—can only gift us insights we have made ourselves ready for illuminates the profundity of the Socratic standard for education. Socrates warned us that, when we go to any teacher—most especially a teacher who claims they can help us live well and become successful—we must ask: “What are they, and what will I become if I spend time with them?” This applies not only to teachers, but to friends, coaches, colleagues, and more. What we become will determine what mysteries the world will open up to us. 

Intellectually, we might endorse or embrace the suggestion that the world will only gift us insights we have made ourselves ready to receive. But our intellectual assent may in fact cover over the radical and revolutionary nature of this strange cosmic fact. Indeed, by deeply ingrained habit, we tend to operate on the basis of something like the exact opposite. 

Consult your intuitions: Does it make sense to say the world just is how it is, and we engage in our scientific, rational, and other evidence-based, logically consistent practices, which then gives us knowledge? In other words, it doesn’t matter what kind of person the CEO, venture capitalist, scientist, economist, or politician is. If they know what they’re doing, they know what they’re doing. 

Clearly that view has cogency. We follow along with it all the time. Thus we may elect a political candidate because we say we like their policy proclamations, but we have no serious consideration about how their character as a human being might impact whether or not they can make those policies happen, what else they might make happen in tandem and/or as a consequence, and what they might fail to see because of a lack of vitalizing philosophical or spiritual vision. 

Similarly, we think that if the scientist has knowledge, if an approach has an evidence base, if a pitch or claim seems logical and data-driven, the people in question must have knowledge—as if knowledge could function as a possession, as opposed to a relationship with the world that always depends on what we have become. And so, we find scandals and incredible unintended consequences in science and technology (e.g. data fudging, the hole in the ozone, the forever chemicals in our water and our bodies), we find evidence-based McMindfulness pervading our culture, and we find data driving the extinction of species. 

We can thus sense a tragic double irony in relation to the very roots of the dominant culture: Socrates got indicted for “corrupting the youth” because he insisted on asking what the educators, mentors, and role models of the youth actually were, and what the youth would become if they learned from those people; and, two-and-a-half millennia later, we find ourselves facing the same problems, despite all our pride in what we think we know, how much more we think we know than Socrates did. 

Our basic approach to education hasn’t addressed this issue, and it leaves us with a tragic misunderstanding of knowledge that goes together with a tragic misunderstanding of ourselves, each other, and the world we share. Hence the ecological catastrophe and the political-economic circus (a frighteningly deadly circus). 

And Socrates stands in good company. Wisdom traditions around the world propose that we must get beyond our limited and limiting views of knowledge and open up to better ways of knowing and being, living and loving. They teach that knowledge depends on our way of knowing, which means it depends on what we are. As we make ourselves into the kind of person who can know profound things, then increasingly profound and holistic insights can arise—and not before. 

In an ironic twist, the best science of the dominant culture has come to agree—though it makes many scientists uncomfortable, and has led to a, “shut up and calculate” attitude across a wide range of domains. Nevertheless, well-established science like quantum physics , cybernetics, and cognitive science shows us that what we can know depends on how we go about trying to know it. 

In the quantum realm this comes across in shocking ways. A “particle” has a totally different style of being than a “wave”. And yet, depending on how we try to know it, an electron can presence as one or the other. 

This already evokes a good measure of discomfort, such that many scientists try to waive it off. Yet we have no grounds for doing so, and brilliant scientists have tried to bring our attention to this (e.g., Wolfgang Pauli, David Bohm, Gregory Bateson, and many more). 

The discomfort can intensify if we look carefully enough to find ourselves implicated. The wisdom traditions tell us that knowledge depends on the knower, and not simply on some absolute state of the “external world”. Not only have cybernetic science, systems theory, and cognitive science validated this, but the most successful forms of psychotherapy depend upon it. When a client begins to change, they can arrive at insights into themselves and others which could not arise as long as they kept clinging—however subtly—to their reified identity. 

All leaders, all change-makers, all citizens seeking to help the world and fulfill their potential need to take care of this issue. We all depend on education and relationships. No matter our age, we need excellent teachers, colleagues, mentors, coaches, consultants, and friends. What are they, and what will we become if we spend time with them? 

Rob Kalwarowsky and I discussed some aspects of this as it relates to leaders and to life in general. Links in comments you want to listen in. 

Anyone have experience with this in their own life? How can we better handle the question: What will I become?

To check out the podcast episodes with Rob Kalwarowsky, you can start with part 1 of 2:

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8zNDkwNDdkMC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw/episode/ZTVlMDUwMDctNjU4NC00Nzg2LWE5MjAtYjdmMzMyZGZmYTFh?sa=X&ved=0CAUQkfYCahcKEwiwzq3F79n_AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAg