Things we'll never understand

Some things are not meant to be understood, and that's ok. Sometimes to find a way forward, we need to step outside the confines of the rational mind.

In my coaching conversations, I often notice that my clients are trying to figure out things that cannot be figured out. I do it myself all the time.¹ In fact, most of us have been trained all our life to use our minds to understand, analyse, deduce and rationally explain. This is often rewarded at school and at work.

However, there are many aspects of life which cannot be approached from a rational, problem-solving point of view. In my experience, these are some of the more interesting and meaningful aspects of life.²

Take, for example, the meaning of life. Most people at some point in their lives will start asking themselves: What is life about? What am I here for? Is my life meaningful? Why? How?

In a way, these questions have answers, but you won’t arrive at them by thinking carefully, as if you were solving a sudoku puzzle, eliminating various possibilities one after another.

Or, more than one client reflected in our coaching sessions on what they should do with their life. Sometimes, the trigger is a company exit. Sometimes, it’s some other significant life event that prompts a deep reflection of where the life is going. Usually, our conditioning kicks in: thinking it through. Pros and cons, choices and consequences, more rational arguments.

However, it’s not a question that can be answered analytically.

From QuoteFancy.com

The wrong tool for the job

In this and many other cases, the rational mind is simply a wrong tool for the job. This is a crucial point to understand and experience, so let’s walk through both.

First, we need to understand that our rational mind is only one of the aspects of our being. Many people are unaware of other aspects of our existence, equating themselves with their thoughts.

This is hard to realise before you realise it and completely obvious once you do. To put it simply, we are not who we think we are, and our sense of “I” is just an ephemeral though. “I am such and such person” and “The weather is great” are both just thoughts, but we tend to take the first one very, very seriously.

Many other people are aware of other aspects of our being, but completely dismiss them. Words like heart, awareness, intuition, oneness, spirit don’t mean much to them. This is as regrettable as seeing people who dismiss rational mind as a tool and never learn to think clearly. This is as much of a skill as listening to the intuition or the body is a skill.³

At least on an intellectual level, we need to understand that our rational thinking is just one aspect of who we are and it’s very well-suited to some situations, but not others.

But intellectual understanding isn’t enough. We also must experience it in order for it to sink in. This is one of the things that happens in meditation. After a certain amount of sitting still, our mind gets quiet enough for the rest of our being to notice that life doesn’t end when thoughts stop. We experience directly that whatever we are, we aren’t what we think we are, and we start directly experiencing other aspects of our being.⁴

Meditation isn’t the only way to get a glimpse of things beyond the confines of the rational mind. Psychedelics, fasting, prayer, yoga, martial arts and countless other practices can show us that the reality is infinitely more interesting and mysterious than we think.

Our choices shape us

There is another good reason why some questions are difficult to approach intellectually. This is because the choices we take affect our concept of self.

Consider a rational person thinking about whether to start a family. They look at the data and see a significant negative effect on everything they hold dear: sleep, freedom, personal finances, holiday options, relationship satisfaction etc. They may rationally conclude that starting a family is a bad idea.

Yet, there’s also data from parents that shows that yes, all of that is true: less sleep, more expenses, more trouble in life in general, but the experience of being a parent is so meaningful that they are very happy they are one.

So, who’s right? Our rational person who has a bucketful of reasons not to start a family or parents who say that it’s worth the trouble? The answer, paradoxically, is both.

The key to this paradox is that a person without children and a parent are two different beings with two different life experiences. From both perspectives, their choice makes sense to them as they are today: with and without children.

It’s hard for our rational mind to consider how our sense of self, our values, our worldviews are going to change based on our actions. Our mind looks at the situation from where it is today, not from where it might be tomorrow because it’s never been there.

The map is not the territory

Yet another reason why our rational minds sometimes struggle is that they inevitably operate using a map of the world they currently have. Yet, this map is pretty inaccurate regardless of what map you have because it’s a map. The map is not the territory.⁵

Google Maps is not the same as your actual street you can walk. An Earth globe is not the Earth itself. Likewise, what you think the world is is as far from the actual reality as Google Maps is from your street.

Google Maps will never offer the actual experience of being in a place it’s showing on a map. To go to that place, you need to look up from your smartphone and actually walk there. Likewise, to actually experience life, you need to stop having opinions about it and learn to experience it directly, without your mind as an intermediary.

So, what to do then?

If our rational mind is ill-suited for some questions, is operating on an imperfect map of reality and might struggle to account for how our choices might change us, what to do?

First, decide whether rational analysis is the best approach for the problem in front of you. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.

Second, develop an appreciation for a wider range of your abilities. Learn to think critically, yes, but also learn to meditate, be open to a wide range of life experiences and make friends from different backgrounds, learn to appreciate art and beauty, find your way towards spirituality, whatever it means to you. Each of those things will be a tiny step in the direction of acquiring wisdom.

Wisdom is what might offer answers to questions that baffle the rational mind. What am I here for? What matters in life? What do I need to do? Why things are as they are? What should I do in this impossible situation?

Above all, though, stay curious, never forgetting that whatever we know, we know very little about the mystery of this world.

1. Personally, I have a strong propensity to think first. For people like me the challenge is to learn to be open to non-rational aspects of experience — feelings, intuition, awareness — as easily as I can jump to thinking.

2. Not everyone shares this opinion. That’s just my opinion, not an absolute truth. For example, there are incredible intellectuals living their entire lives in their heads and making the world a better place this way.

3. I’m somewhat sceptical of attempts of the rational mind to reduce other modes of knowing reality to itself. For example, it can be said that intuition is rational is a sense that it’s a process shaped by our previous experience, but it’s more complex than our rational minds can comprehend. I think there’s some truth to it, but maybe there’s more to intuition than that. My sense is that the entire history of humanity and, possibly, life before that, is indirectly expressed in what we experience as intuition.

4. However, we communicate using language that is the tool of a rational mind that operates on a certain and very imperfect map of reality. This is why sometimes people try to communicate something very profound by saying something like “Everything is love” and to someone else this is just some new age gibberish because they cannot understand what’s being communicated.

5. Excellent deep dive into this idea on Farnam Street.