Do you recall that speech Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once gave when he tried to justify our intelligence (or lack thereof) backing the decision to go into Iraq to get all those elusive weapons of mass destruction? It was that "what we know we know and what we don't know that we don't know" speech.
I had once published "Knowledge Management" books so I thought I knew what he was talking about. At a knowledge conference I had learned we might divide knowledge into "information" and "know how." The knowledge you get from reading memos and books versus what you pick up at the water cooler or over a beer. Explicit and tacit.
Think of all knowledge as falling into this four-part grid:
|
What we know we know. |
What we know we don't know. |
|
What we don’t know we know. |
What we don’t know that we don’t know. |
It's that last quadrant: "What we don't know that we don't know" that's apt to get us into trouble.
A friend from Baton Rouge recently sent me an article by a local named J. Bruce Evans. I found myself reading several essays on his website--and will return for more. The one called "Cancer School" caught my eye for obvious reasons.
I remember one chemo infusion with a woman sitting next to me informing all within earshot that this was like "drinking Draino." It probably was, but I was off somewhere else at the time. I was thinking about what incarnation means. God coming to earth in human form. I remember thinking, "Jesus couldn't just sit up there observing. He had to actually be 'hooked up' to 'get' being attached to Draino going right into your veins." That's true human knowing. And you don't get that from reading a manual.
When my husband and I visited Delphi, I had already read a lot about what went on there back when people came to visit the female "seers." Then Apollo took it over. His temple became the pilgrimage site of choice. But Apollo's priests kept the priestesses around to access their "dark wisdom."
Bruce Evans' essays deal with "knowledge and "wisdom" along with gender differences. He calls Sophia's Wisdom "Woman's Dark Knowing"..."What Little Girls Are Born Knowing"..."What Women Know Without Knowing They Do"..."What Women Know and Men Need to Find Out."
I especially like a poem he wrote (which I am going to assume he won't mind my sharing with you--you can go to his site directly and find it.) It's called
Seeing Sophia's wisdom
won't change or diminish its power
but until her knowledge is recognized
reason remains unavailable
for coping with its blind forces
and being done in by her dark urges
remains more predictable
than being spirited
in her presence.
The Evans' article my friend sent me is called "Sophia's Wisdom Versus Apollo's Knowledge." It's brilliant. He calls it "Dark Versus Lighted." In it, he explores "what women know but may not know that they do" and "what men think we know but find to be limited in power and lacking in finality whenever we confront Sophia's 'dark wisdom.'"
He's coined a new word: nonconsciousness. Unlike "unconscious" which means "pushed out of the mind," nonconsciousness is a dark knowing that needs nothing from the outside world to validate it. (Think religion and science.) It's already known. It needs no proof. No words, even. Or numbers.
I believe Sophia's earthy dark wisdom is leading us to think of our planet in a different way. I just finished reading Daniel Goleman's new book, Ecological Intelligence which underscores what most of us already know but are living what Henrik Ibsen called "the vital lie": the story we tell ourselves because the truth is too painful. Climate change is bad and there are no band-aids. Everything is all too linked for us to find easy fixes. I love how Goleman ends it. "We don't have to fix our planet, but rather our relationship to it...the earth doesn't need healing. We do."
Sophia's dark wisdom implores us to gather up all four quadrants of our knowledge and remember Eden.
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