Episode 57. Embrace the Darkness

What in life deserves our time and attention and what things don't. I hope that as we consider that question along with other topics on this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones - “Embrace the Darkness.”

Humanity likes to fool itself into thinking it knows the world it lives in, but we don't. We are surrounded by darkness so thick that even the light we shine doesn't go very far. But there's a kind of comfort that we can take from living in the darkness because that same darkness gives us permission to stop thinking so hard about what is.

And what isn't. There's this fixation we have on knowing things with certainty. We want to know everything. We want to know the future. We want to know how things work. We want to know why we exist. We want to know if there is a purpose to our lives. We're insatiable for knowledge, partly because we're inherently curious creatures, but also because we're afraid of the dark.

There's not an answer for everything, and if there is, that answer is not always available to us. Not knowing things is a universal pain point endured by all of humanity. That pain is compounded when you have the ability like we do to learn so much. To some extent. We can even predict what the future may hold, good or bad.

And this gift comes from our capacity to imagine. But unfortunately, that same gift increases our capacity for distress, as we can imagine, negatives as well as positives. When left without answers to things that are important to us, the negative tends to win out. And our imagination feeds our discomfort.

But why are we so drawn to knowing? Knowing things is almost like a drug to us. And I'm not talking about the pursuit of knowledge, but rather the fixation on becoming so convinced of a thing that we can treat it as fact. The only real facts in life are things we observe. And even then, if having observed a thing is the litmus test for fact, then a crazy person's hallucinations are in fact.

In fact, so maybe the only thing we can truly say we know is that which we've experienced. So, all that being said, we truly live in darkness. It is our imagination and our best guesses that fill the world around us. In order to move through the world, we have to imagine how that world functions. Or another way of putting it is that we need to develop a paradigm that effectively offers us a map to help guide our actions.

Over time. We get so comfortable with the map that we've created that when some new information does not validate the map. We often choose to throw it out because we would otherwise have to figure out how to rewrite our internal paradigm or map all over again. Every time we have to reorganize our whole way of thinking about the world, it makes us confront the fact that we do not actually know the world, and that in truth, we sit in darkness. 

Once we have a new paradigm or map, it helps fill us with confidence again, by making us feel like we know how things work, because most of the time the map we have will take us to the right place. The problem we run into is that no one has created the perfect map, and the more rigidly they stick to the map that they have built for themselves, the more painful it is for them to have it shattered by new information.

I think most of us have been moving through life using really crappy maps. We think the world operates one way, but in truth it operates very differently. If we want to move through life in a way that makes the most of it. Learning to revise our map constantly is absolutely necessary. What usually happens in life is when we are little, our map is extremely basic.

Mom is good and everyone else is not so good. Staying with Mom is our earliest paradigm. When we get a little older, our paradigm or map shifts a little more and maybe a little more complex. Now, maybe now our map tells us that mom and dad are good, and when I do certain things, I will get in trouble. By the time we're teenagers, we've typically adopted the map that our peers use and it's significantly more complex.

Maybe our map says. People that don't like punk rock or losers, or maybe it says that people that play sports are stuck up jerks. It's more complex, but it tends to be oversimplified. Some people keep that kind of map the rest of their lives. Sometimes we get to college, and we become convinced that everything our parents taught us about the world is stupid because we saw some inconsistencies in the map that they use.

And then we choose to create our own map that's more or less the opposite of theirs. And of course, it is likely to have its own inconsistencies. Back when I was in college, I had to read a book for a science class called Scientific Paradigms. The gist of this book was to point out that every time there was a scientific understanding of the world that was different than what most people believed at the time.

It faced stiff resistance. Galileo had to face an inquisition for advocating that the earth was not the center of the universe.  A simpler view of the night sky would suggest that the universe does revolve around us, but those little inconsistencies in the way the planet's moved were simply not easily explained under that paradigm.

Einstein faced intense resistance to his theory of relativity at first, and we all know Charles Darwin still faces resistance. What became clear to me in that book is that none of our maps are likely to be the full truth, just like none of the current scientific paradigms are likely to be the whole truth.

They are just the best methods we currently have of understanding our world, but they will probably never be perfect. Maybe the real reason Gravity actually exists is because there are little invisible fairies that are always working to push everything into the same place and the denser something is.

The more fairies choose to jump in and push it down, my fairy theory probably isn't gonna hold up under scrutiny. But the point is that whether we like it or not, we are living in darkness, and the best we can do is to keep revising the map. The more we learn when we're confronted with inconsistencies of our worldview, it knocks us a little off balance, so much that we try to grasp for any possible reason to explain those inconsistencies.

When those inconsistencies pile up, it becomes really uncomfortable. Because we are once again thrown into the darkness, but we don't have to be afraid of the dark. It's not the darkness that causes pain, but rather our resistance to it. When a person has become comfortable in the darkness and has found a way to embrace it, they no longer have to be afraid when their paradigm or their map no longer holds up.

A person that has embraced the darkness can keep their understanding of the world in constant flux. They're no longer threatened to have their ideas challenged. To be  comfortable in the darkness gives you the superpower of being able to recognize when someone that has challenged your beliefs is doing it out of a place of fear.

Or from a place of collaboration, we have to keep on making guesses to get closer to the truth, and that means we have to accept our understanding of the truth, or that parts of it may be wrong sometimes, but if we can embrace the darkness, there is no longer any fear associated with modifying those  understandings of the world.

This may seem like an obvious thing, but there's a comfort people take in having quote discovered what they think to be true. The idea that this world is truly noble in its entirety is uncomfortable. I often think of the similarities between the ultra-religious and the ultra-atheist. They both are so determined that they are 100% correct that it wreaks of fear.

Embracing the darkness may take you someplace different than other people, but if you're willing to embrace it, you'll find that there are lessons to be learned from unexpected places. Learning to embrace the darkness is a little like what many children go through when they're old enough to comprehend that there are bad things in the world.

Those dark corners become very scary, but as they grow and mature, most of them come to find that the darkness is what allows them to take their mind off the world. And rest for a little while. This is Skipping Stones - “Embrace the Darkness.” You can find this podcast anywhere you choose to listen to podcasts. For more information about me, feel free to visit skippingstonessr.com. 

And if you enjoyed the show, please like or subscribe. If there is a topic you would like me to speak on, please feel free to email me:  info@skippingstonessr.com.  New episodes will be released weekly every Monday.