Fortune Cookie

“The more you know, the less you need to say.”

The intellectual experience is definitely one of the most awesome experiences of life thus far. The more we learn, the more we see with the metaphorical third eye, the intellect. I have come to a place currently where I can see things, the minute details and the multiple possibilities. It is an overwhelming experience. With the abnormally numerous acute and clear thoughts that occur in the mind every day, more channels of thought open up to the mind, more perspectives. The getting lost in thought has never been a more intense experience than what I am experiencing these days. At the end of one of these ‘intense thought sessions,’ I am left feeling as if I have just sprinted a marathon. It’s exhilarating. At the risk of sounding even more dramatic, it’s as if I can feel the contours of my psyche changing with these in-depth thoughts which have a powerful connection with the belief system that lives in the mind. It’s chaotic. In the midst of all this chaos, I have managed to hold on to only a few things in life which are genuinely, universally important.

Eventually, from all the learning and seeing stems an overall state of being which feels beyond the futile quarrels of the human mind. In other words, the small and unimportant things seem pettier than ever before, or the things that most of us make a big deal out of seem to be futile and backward. The fruit of education seems to be the intellectual glasses through which we are able to see the world and everything in it, both the real and unreal. When a semi-blind person does not have glasses on, they see close to nothing until they wear the glasses. When a fully sighted individual wears coloured glasses they see everything in that colour. In the same way, when we receive education, the result is the seeing of the world and life’s phenomena through the lens of intellect, through the glasses called intellect. A person seems to calm their egoistic attitude to things and avoids saying things which are futile or, colloquially put, ‘lame’.

However, there is a caveat — a condition, as always. The condition is as follows. Humility. In the same way that a knife is not inherently good nor bad, that solely depends on the intention of the user, so it is with intellect. Humility is the prerequisite for intellect being of some use for more than just one individual or family. That way it can be used for society at large rather than limiting its use for the benefit of one or a limited few.

At this point, it is appropriate to usher in the ideology and individual called Socrates, considered by many as the father of Western philosophy. “I know that I know nothing.” This paradoxical sentence is self-explanatory. What might not be self-explanatory at first reading/hearing is the humility in Socrates’ mind when he makes this statement. Something more to be drawn from this phrase is the subliminal message of the consequence of learning. The more we know, the more we realize how much we do NOT know. The more we learn, the more we realize how much more we need to learn. This is the beauty of the way nature has designed the human psyche. Those historical and very real characters who have mastered this state of being have accomplished immense work in their life, with most of those characters having a positive impact on the world long after their physical death.

To conclude, Plato’s allegory of the cave seems to be a befitting analogy to give to the consequence of learning and acquiring information about the way something in the world functions. A few men were born with arms and legs chained, and facing a stone wall in a cave. They all grow up believing that life is only that experience. Behind them is a bridge, behind which is a fire. The chained men can hear the sounds of people and animals walking over the bridge, but all they see are the shadows cast onto the stone wall in front of them. For them, that is the world. They grow up believing that to be the totality of life. One day, one man is released. He turns around to be astonished at the vastness of the cave and the things happening around them and wanders outside the cave. At first, he is blinded by the sun as his eyes take time to adjust. He is amazed at the variety of the world. He sees trees, rivers, animals and birds. He feels the wind. Out of excitement he returns to tell his friends back in the cave. They don’t believe him. In fact, they jeer him. The story does not end here but is an appropriate place to stop for the purpose of this text. In one version of the story, the man does not see the point in living free by himself without the people he grew up with, who are still chained up. As they do not believe him and refuse to follow him out of bondage, he gives up and chains himself up once again.

“The more you know, the less you need to say,” was the message I received from a fortune cookie several years ago. While I don’t believe in such superstitious things, I do believe in thinking. This sentence can be taken in several forms. But one connotation of it is that the more we learn and discover how the world and social dynamics work, the less we feel we must speak, because we realise eventually, it is time that will fix and tell.