That’s Not the Choice

Reflections on The Friend

In Sigrid Nunez’ superb novel The Friend, the narrator is thinking back on a friend who has just died, and mentions that he was a committed atheist.  “Between religion and knowledge, he said, a person must choose knowledge.”  I almost jumped out of my chair as I read that.  That’s not the choice! I thought.  But it was too late.  He had already died.

The idea that there’s a kind of battle between knowledge and religion, that they essentially contradict each other, and once we have enough knowledge we won’t need religion, creates a false distinction.  There is a realm of knowledge, which is perfectly legitimate.  We can’t have too much of it.  And then there’s a realm of not knowing, of things we’ll never be able to know, because by their very nature they’re unknowable.

Such as why anything exists at all.

That is the realm of religion.

These two realms correspond to two types of people, two sides of every person, two parts of the brain.  To deny either one is to be less than fully human.

Human beings want to know.  We went to know what’s going to happen today, what’s going to happen this week, who’s going to win the election, what’s going to happen then.  We also want to know larger things, like why we’re here in the first place, and what will happen after we die.    There is endless speculation about these larger things, and some people claim to know the answers.  But nobody actually does.  They’re not in the realm of knowledge.

When we sit in meditation, we clearly see the part of the mind that wants to know.  It wants to know how to meditate, what will happen when we do meditate; it wants to control the situation (perhaps with techniques) so that we will have a “good” meditation, whatever that is.  But there’s another side that is completely opposed to that, that doesn’t have a clue how to meditate or what’s going to happen, that doesn’t know anything.  The instruction in meditation is to let go of discursive thought, the knowing side (you can’t stop it, but you can see that it’s happening, and not buy into it), and rest in that large space of not knowing.  A couple of times this summer I’ve been so bewildered by the weirdness of the pandemic and of self-isolating that I have gone into my meditation room thinking, I have no idea why I’m doing this.  I have no idea how the hell to do it.  Those were some of the most interesting days of sitting, and the most genuine.  There wasn’t any What’s Supposed to Happen.  There was just What Was Happening.

Larry Rosenberg told a story about a monk he met when he was studying in Korea.  The man lived in a mountain monastery and was illiterate, but he nevertheless had realized something, you could just tell.  “He was a turned-on light bulb,” Larry said.  The Americans were sitting around talking to him one day, and somehow stumbled across the fact that he thought the earth was flat.  They couldn’t believe it.  How was this possible in the twentieth century?  They made the usual arguments—how can anybody go around the world?  how come a ship doesn’t just fall off the edge?—and finally the monk gave up.

“Okay, okay,” he said.  “Maybe you’re right.  I’m an ignorant old monk, and maybe my idea is wrong.  You have this knowledge.  But has knowledge made you happier?”

There is that question.  Does knowledge make you happier?  (If it did, wouldn’t academics be happy?)

That doesn’t mean knowledge isn’t important.  If it weren’t for knowledge, I wouldn’t be typing on this computer, and you wouldn’t be reading it.  But it isn’t the only important thing.  And it’s not opposed to not knowing.  The world of not knowing will never be known.  They’re two different realms.

You don’t choose between them.