There is much talk about how the pleasure of snuggling into a “comfort zone” actually deters learning. Pico Iyer in his talk, which has the texture of mystery and the taste of reality says, “The opposite of knowledge isn't always ignorance. It can be wonder. Or mystery. Possibility. And in my life, I've found it's the things I don't know that have lifted me up and pushed me forwards much more than the things I do know. It's also the things I don't know that have often brought me closer to everybody around me.”
The magic comes when he recounts his experience with the Dalai Lama, "For eight straight Novembers, recently, I travelled every year across Japan with the Dalai Lama. And the one thing he said every day that seemed to give people reassurance and confidence was, 'I don't know'."
"What's going to happen to Tibet?" "When are we ever going to get world peace?" "What's the best way to raise children?" "Frankly," says this very wise man, "I don't know."
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman has spent more than 60 years now researching human behaviour, and his conclusion is that we are always much more confident of what we think we know than we should be. We have, as he memorably puts it, an "unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance...Most of the time, we're in the dark. And that's where real intimacy lies…Do you know what your lover is going to do tomorrow? Do you want to know?... Thinking that you know your lover or your enemy can be more treacherous than acknowledging you'll never know them.”
Living, as we are, in what is called the age of knowledge, the desire to claim full possession of it is almost natural, if stylish and Iyer says, “The parents of us all, as some people call them, Adam and Eve, could never die, so long as they were eating from the tree of life. But the minute they began nibbling from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they fell from their innocence. They grew embarrassed, fretful and self-conscious. And they learned, a little too late, perhaps, that there are certainly some things that we need to know, but there are many, many more that are better left unexplored… Knowledge is a priceless gift. But the illusion of knowledge can be more dangerous than ignorance.”
Iyer tells us, “I've been a full-time writer now for 34 years. And the one thing that I have learned is that transformation comes when I'm not in charge, when I don't know what's coming next, when I can't assume I am bigger than everything around me. And the same is true in love or in moments of crisis.”
Iyer’s moment of reckoning, so to say, comes when he found himself riding into the dark alleys of Mandalaya in Burma in a trishaw taking up the promise of a young man to show him around the city. “…we turned off the wide, crowded streets, and we began bumping down rough, wild alleyways. There were broken shacks all around. I really lost the sense of where I was, and I realised that anything could happen to me now. I could get mugged or drugged or something worse. Nobody would know…when we said goodbye that night, I realised he had also shown me the secret point of travel, which is to take a plunge, to go inwardly as well as outwardly to places you would never go otherwise, to venture into uncertainty, ambiguity, even fear.
At home, it's dangerously easy to assume we're on top of things. Out in the world, you are reminded every moment that you're not, and you can't get to the bottom of things, either. Everywhere, 'People wish to be settled', Ralph Waldo Emerson reminded us, but only insofar as we are unsettled is there any hope for us."
So says Iyer, “…the first law of travel and, therefore, of life: you're only as strong as your readiness to surrender. In the end, perhaps, being human is much more important than being fully in the know.”
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