There are human drives that we all have in common, but on a deep level, the most basic one is that we each want to be happy. And for most of us, the biggest obstacle we face is our own mind. For me, the reason I wanted to learn how to expand my inner awareness in the first place was because I believed it would improve my life and make me into a more fulfilled person.   

          As I began my growth process, one of the first things I realized was that my mind was a real double-edged sword. In one minute, it would make me my own best friend. Then it would stop on a dime and turn me into my own worst enemy. After observing this for quite a while, it made sense to me to get a better understanding of how my mind worked.

          So, I started by taking a look at my basic education and I quickly realized that we were never really taught how to think. Although our happiness, as well as our destiny, is a direct result of the clarity of our thought process, our educational system puts no premium on it at all, and just lets our mental chips fall where they may.    

          Like millions of other kids, I had a standard American education, spending about 14,000 hours sitting in a classroom. And in all that time, I can’t recall ever learning one single thing about the basic dynamics of thinking.

          Of course, I had tons of classes in math, English, French, science and social studies, among many others. And I’m sure that 90% of what I learned, I would never use or even remember. But there was nothing at all about how to think. Not even one minute of it.

          It feels like the Paul Simon song that starts, “When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.” But not only is it a wonder I can think at all, I wonder if what I’m actually doing with my mind really is thinking at all. Probably not. As William James, the father of American Psychology said, “A great many people think they are thinking, when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”

          Anyway, at one point, still pretty early in my growth, I got lucky and came across a simple approach to the way the mind thinks that was life-altering for me. It was very basic, but it laid down an accurate roadmap that really helped illuminate my mental territory and smoothed-out my proposed journey to the higher ground.

          After all these years, I find it to be more valuable than ever. and I think if you take it in and give it a chance, you may get a lot out of it as well.

          There are two parts to it. The first one is about the knowledge and belief. And the second presents the mind’s four categories of our ability to know.    

          So, the first part says that it’s critical to understand the difference between what we actually know and what we only believe. They are both very important, but very different.

          Knowledge is something you absolutely know to be true and it exists as a truth for you regardless of any discussion, beliefs, explanations or interpretations of it.

          As an example, let’s say that right now you are either famished with hunger, dying of thirst, so tired that you can hardly stay awake, or you really have to use the bathroom and it’s getting to be close to an emergency.

          We’ve all been there to one degree or another. And we know that it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks or says about it. They can try to explain the experience away for some reason, or tell us we shouldn’t be having it, but it’s an absolute truth for us. There are many other examples of this, but the point is that when you know something for sure, you really do know it. 

          Believing is a completely different story. Beliefs are critical to our lives and we can hold them for many different reasons…practical, psychological, societal, religious and personal, to name just a few. They can be very strong and clear, and you can have total faith in them and believe in them with all your heart.

          But the difference between knowing and believing is that we don’t really know for sure that our beliefs are actually true. We can’t. They’re just not in the realm of our knowledge. And because we don’t know them for sure, for many different reasons, they can be wrong in some way. And we don’t find out that our belief was flawed or wrong until we finally realize it.

          Here is a very, mundane example. When I was a kid, we were taught that the planet Saturn had three rings. You could clearly see telescopic pictures of the three rings and the fact was written in stone. Over the years, through our ability to magnify our telescopic vision, it was seen that there really are between seven and nine rings there. Then in 1980, Voyager I flew within 40,000 miles of the rings and sent back pictures invalidating all old beliefs and rendering them obsolete. We now know that in reality, there are thousands of intricate rings around Saturn. So, a solid belief system that had existed for over three hundred years was proven wrong by basic advances in modern instrumentation.

          Now, that’s just one simple, rather unimportant example of this significant aspect about beliefs: because we don’t really know them, they can be deceiving or just plain wrong. And blurring the line between knowledge and belief can lead to major suffering. After all, countless wars have been fought and millions have died due to people’s staunch allegiance to conflicting belief systems, many of which were flawed to begin with.

          So, understanding the difference between knowledge and belief is the first part of this approach to clarifying our thinking. The second part is a little more detailed. It’s about something called the Four Quadrants of Knowledge, which involves both our knowledge and our skillsets. Don’t worry, it’s much simpler than it sounds. But there’s still a lot to it.

          Quadrant One is “What we know that we know.” We all have a ton of these. Besides knowing how I feel in the present time, I also have a bunch of things that I know I know how to do. Like I know that I know how to drive my car. And I know that I know how to get to my local supermarket. So, when the time comes for me to do that, I don’t have to give it much thought. I know that I know. Again, we all have thousands of these.

          Quadrant Two is “What we know that we don’t know.” This means exactly what it says – we know that we don’t know. Here’s an absurd little example that clearly makes the point.

          I happen to have a friend who is a heart surgeon. We’re old buddies and we’ll do anything for each other. But if he called me and said that a sudden scheduling issue had just come up and he had a routine bypass that had to be done, but now he’s tied up for the day, and would I mind popping over to the hospital and do the bypass for him? Of course, I’d have to say no because I don’t know the first thing about doing heart surgery. And I clearly know that I don’t know.

          Again, we all have thousands of things that we know we don’t know.

          So that’s the first two quadrants and they’re very straight forward because they refer to what we know. The next two quadrants carry some mystery to them because they’re about what we don’t know.

          Quadrant Three is “What we don’t know that we do know.” In this case, we actually do know something, but we’re out of touch with it for some reason. A lot of the times, we’ve just forgotten it. The condition resolves itself successfully when we recover our knowledge and happily recognize that we already knew it.   

          Here’s another very mundane example. Let’s say that you have a sweater, that you really like.  One day, you put it in the bottom drawer of a dresser you rarely use. Soon, you forgot where you put it, and now you can’t find it. At first, you’re annoyed, but over time, maybe even a few years, you forget about it completely. Soon you don’t even remember that you ever had the sweater at all. Then one day, totally by chance, you open the bottom drawer and there it is. Now that you’ve regained the knowledge that you lost, you can start wearing the sweater again and you’re glad to have it back.  

          You can take this phenomenon one step deeper and look at taking things for granted, especially important things. This happens a lot because one of the survival-based tendencies of our mind is to focus on fear, threat, and potential danger, but not pay too much attention to things when they’re good.

          Take, for example, the simple act of breathing, which we take completely for granted. We each breathe about 22,000 times a day, so there’s no scarcity to it. And a breath doesn’t cost us anything and we don’t have to do a thing to get it, so there’s no effort involved. So, we barely pay any attention to it.

          But we can’t function without our breath at all, and we all know that. If we don’t breathe for just 300 seconds, we’re dead. So, even though we do know how precious it is, we’re out of touch with our knowledge because we’re taking our breath for granted.

          There are many things in our lives that fit this particular mold – our health, the health and well-being of our loved ones, the safety of our home, and on and on. We’re out of touch with them because we take them for granted. And we do that until something seems to really threaten them, which automatically brings gratitude back into our hearts. The situation is resolved because we recognize what we forgot.   

          Now we come to the last quadrant, Quadrant Four – “What we don’t know that we don’t know.” This is a very tricky category because we are dealing with the complete unknown. We just don’t know what we don’t know. And the truth is, we haven’t even got a clue.

          It’s beyond our imagination as well because we have no foundation on which to imagine it. What we don’t know that we don’t know seems like a big category. But how big is it? The answer is we don’t know. Because we know absolutely nothing about the unknown. And we never will, until we do know, at which point it will no longer be in the unknown.  

          For a simple example, the other day I tried to read a short article on nuclear physics, which is a field I know nothing about. Almost all of it was about things I didn’t know. But I didn’t know that I didn’t know them because before I started reading the article, I had never even heard of them before.

          And there’s one other huge part to this quadrant. It’s all the things we think are right, but are actually wrong for one reason or another. We think we’re right, but we’re actually wrong and we don’t know it. And we don’t know that we don’t know.   

          Like the rest of the quadrant, it remains in the unknown until we find it out, and of course, it can be the cause of an enormous number of problems. As humorist Will Rogers once said, “It isn’t what we know that gives us trouble. It’s what we know that ain’t so.”

          I’m sure there are millions upon millions of all these kinds of things. And the resolution to them all involves learning something new.

          So that’s the end of this short information I found about some basic components of thought. First, understand the difference between what you know and what you only believe. And second, be clear that there are four categories of knowing - things that you know you know, things that you know you don’t know, things that you don’t know that you do know, and things that you don’t know that you don’t know. 

          From the standpoint of the achievement of human potential, I find this whole thing fascinating, especially the part about knowing and believing and its relationship to what we don’t know that we don’t know.

          The wisdom of the ages, along with countless saints and sages say that we humans have been born with a potential destiny that is far greater than we can imagine.  I’ve read or heard countless descriptions about what it’s like to be fully connected to higher consciousness, and have a direct, living experience of God, heaven, the indwelling God presence, or whatever you want to call it. And living life with a heart filled with gratitude, inspiration, and compassion, and on and on.

          Now, over the years I’ve had a tremendously wonderful experience learning about all this kind of stuff. But to put it in perspective, it like we’re talking about quantum mechanics, advanced calculus and rocket science. And I’m only about halfway through memorizing my multiplication tables. And because I don’t know what I don’t know, I’m lucky if that analogy is anywhere near being right. For all I know, I haven’t even been born yet.

          I’m sure this holds true for many of us and who knows? Maybe some day we will know. And when it comes to fulfilling our remarkable human destiny, we’ll grow from not knowing what we don’t know to knowing what we do know.     Maybe it comes down to having the humility to open up to new information that is beyond our current knowledge. Maybe then we’ll see the thousand rings instead of just believing in the three. And our knowledge will be based on our direct experience.

          Revering personal experience is certainly nothing new. Over five hundred years ago, Leonardo da Vinci, who is still considered to be one of the greatest geniuses who ever lived, once signed his name - Leonardo da Vinci, Disciple of Experience.

          Well, that’s the end of this episode. As always, keep your eyes, mind and heart opened and let’s get together in the next one.