Many of us are really scared to say: I do not know, I am not sure of this or that, let me find the right answer. They will try to respond to every question. Parading their knowledge becomes a part of life. When I reflect on this kind of behaviour, I realise that I too have been a victim of it. For many years I believed that I knew a lot, that with the kind of knowledge and kind of universities and colleges that I attended, I knew a lot. In that time “I knew a lot” because by then I had all the answers, well, most of them. I was the expert, the guru, particularly in my field of philosophy.
But later, say about 40 years ago, as I studied for a Ph. D. degree in my field, I began to question my “know everything status.” As my research deepened and widened, as my knowledge in this field increased, it dawned on me that I had a very long way to go to know everything in this field. Every little bit of knowledge that I discovered showed me one more thing that I did not know. It showed me, to my happy surprise, that every new discovery showed me that I will never know everything there is to know in philosophy, not in one lifetime, not in many lifetimes.
It was then that I began to realise that what I know and what each of us knows, is a tiny dot in the realm of universal knowledge. And that is in my field or in your field of expertise. Nobody is talking here of those thousands of areas of expertise that we do not have. If we include those areas, where we know next to nothing, then our pool of knowledge becomes infinitely less than what is there to be known. What we know becomes an invisible dot in the entire sea of knowledge. When I began to see things this way, I realised that I was beginning to get a glimpse of the wisdom of acknowledging that I do not know this or that. To sum up, it is wisdom to realise that we do not know everything, that knowledge is infinitely deep and wide. It is then that we know that it is wise to acknowledge our ignorance in the myriad situations in life.
