It’s a natural, human thing to assume:  You see what you see, hear what you hear (et cetera with smell, taste, touch) — What else is there TO know?  Aren’t you ‘receiving’ all available information about the physical world we live in

Um, no actually…

Humans see only a certain light spectrum.  There are lots of others we DON’T see.  We’re not anatomically equipped to see them.  We need tools.  Special telescopes.  But if we COULD see those light spectrums?  Wow!  Now, that’d be cool.

And we’d SEE a whole lot more — and KNOW more because we could see more.

Same goes for sound.  Most animals hear far better and more acutely than we do.  Want to have an unsettling moment?  Watch a dog react to an earthquake’s imminent arrival — a few moments before YOU hear it.  That’s dread.  Cold, soul-sucking dread.

The Universe makes all kinds of sounds we don’t hear — produces all kinds of waves and forces and pulls and tugs and plasmatic events that pass right by us as if (from our point of view) they never happened.  But they did.  And they are — all the time  We just don’t know it.  Even if those unseen things impact us — like a sun tan (or burn).

Not knowing what you don’t know is bad.  Not knowing that you DON’T KNOW — is far, far worse.  You’re always stumbling around in the dark, bumping into things.

How we account for the information not yet available to us — speaks volumes about who we are. Neil deGrasse Tyson (if I have any kind of a hero, that man is IT) did a phenomenal lecture during the Bush years about, among other things naming rights, ‘intelligent design’ and what even the smartest people among us do when THEY reach the end of their knowledge —

Not knowing the answers to Life’s Biggest Questions is okay.  Shrugging off the mystery as ‘unknowable’ is bullshit.  It’s Magical Thinking.  And Magical Thinking cannot ever end well for those doing the Magical Thinking…

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