What do you know?

What I have for you today isn't so much a lesson as it is food for thought.

Most people think that the universe is divided into two categories when it comes to knowledge. First there are the things that we are aware of, which we call the things that we know. And then there are the things that we realize the existence of but about which we have little or no information about, which we call the things that we do not know. 

There is a third much larger category though. It contains all of the things that we do not know that we do not know. In truth, the entirety of the first two categories would fit inside but a single drop of what is the ocean of things that we do not know that we do not know.

It is very common to look around at your surroundings and after once becoming comfortable with them to believe that you know what there is to know about them. But this simply is not true. The more we learn and study our natural environment the more things we learn about. Our horizons expand as we include new information into our knowledge base and new things become possible for us.


The truth is these "new" things were always possible, we just did not know it. Our understanding of all the facts at hand is what limits what we can and can not do. Often when we learn something new, old theories and beliefs automatically become invalidated. Things that we "knew" beyond a shadow of a doubt were true turn out to be false.

It used to be a "fact" that the world was flat. We know now that the world is round. It used to be a fact that if you wanted a message to travel thousands of miles it would take weeks. We can now have a message travel the globe in mere seconds. It used to be a fact that the sun the moon and the stars all rotated around the earth. We know now that the earth is but a small part of a solar system that travels through a much larger galaxy.

Man has been on this planet and recording history for but a few thousand years. During that time our knowledge base has multiplied itself many times over. This happened very slowly at first. But as ways of sharing knowledge have become more and more rapid the increase has been at near geometric rates.

Yet, scientists believe that more than 99 percent of everything that we believe to be true is false. We simply have not learned enough about the universe to know what really is and what is not.

How arrogant the average person is in his belief that what he knows is a large fragment of what there is to know. If you were to take any man from any era and show him the wonders of life five hundred years in his future you would likely blow his mind, with all of the "impossible" things that are just part of everyday living.

So, I challenge you. Set some time a side, a few minutes, maybe half an hour. Think about all the things you know. Think about all the things you don't know. Then do your very best to imagine looking into that ocean of things that you do not know you do not know. Think of all the things that might be if the first two categories of knowledge were expanded, if you knew more and were more aware of the things you know you do not know. In your mind's eye see if you can shift some of the things from that third category into the other two.