Introduction

There is no certainty, fixity or isolation in nature.

Iain McGilchrist

Certainty is a comfortable position. It's a place to retire to, a protective cloak against the vagaries of the world. We are all drawn to it, but for some it is more important than others. In the sphere of spirituality, those who seek certainty will be attracted to religions with a well-defined structure and clear creedal system rather than what they might regard as the "wishy-washy" more experientially based faiths.

Certainty, we learn, is a left-brain quality, associated with rigidity, and an inability to see the wider picture, understand, connect, or empathise with someone who holds a different opinion. The left hemisphere tends to see things in isolation, without the tempering quality that the right brain provides.

In people with a predominantly left-brain disposition, certainty will be not so much an attraction as a defining characteristic: a shield to repel all boarders. In the religious sphere, this applies equally to the religious fundamentalist and the hardened atheist. A path that cherishes uncertainty will not, of course, be attractive to either.

The concept of unknowing is best known from The Cloud of Unknowing, a little book by an anonymous fourteenth-century author, but it has its roots in the earlier and influential Dionysius the Areopagite, and in the austere spirituality of the fourth-century Desert Fathers and Mothers. It is at the heart of what is called the via negativa, an approach to God through emptiness, through a stripping away of concepts or images, through an acceptance of the fallibility of the ego-driven life.

This is not a book about theology or a particular religion. Its frame of reference is a faith-filled life that is available to all, a way that has endured for millennia, and is often referred to as "The Perennial Philosophy". Nor is it an in-depth book about mysticism but a little book about a particular way of being in the world.

The way we run our lives is dependent on what we know of the world, and we have expectations and make assumptions accordingly. But what if the facts on which we base our lives are shown to be unreliable? What if our expectations are confounded? Then, what if we let go of our familiar, habitual ways of thinking? What if we let go of those assumptions and expectations? What if we let go of the very need to know? The sense of release might surprise us. The opportunity is there.

In this book we will explore what we think we know, and what we don't know, what we can and can't know. We will look at the nature of our knowing, and how letting go of a limited kind of knowing will open us to a fuller, richer experience. We will consider how we can lead our lives with an understanding that there is much that we do not know; and how we might be able to experiment with spaciousness and leave room for the creative energy of the Spirit. We will see how by practice and attention we can move into an acceptance of unknowing, and deepen our experience of life, love and the Divine.

At the end of each chapter are given a couple of questions arising from the text. These may be useful for individual reflection, or for discussion in a group.

Maybe I should offer some possible definitions that relate to key terms used in the book.

Spirituality is simply a question of having an open enough mind to see that there are things in the world at large that transcend what we can know and fully comprehend, that are not fully accounted for in a reductionist, materialist account (Rowson and McGilchrist, 42).

The philosopher and psychologist William James describes the religious attitude in the soul thus:

Were one asked to characterise the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto (53).

And of mysticism Evelyn Underhill wrote:

Broadly speaking, I understand it to be the expression of the innate tendency of the human spirit towards complete harmony with the transcendent order: whatever the theological order be under which that order is understood (xiv).

But let us start with the processes of our everyday world.

The need to know

I took a test in existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100. Woody Allen

We have such a need to acquire knowledge, to find out, such a hungry need to know. All the emphasis of modern education and life in general is on the rational acquisition of factual knowledge. Ignorance, not knowing, is uncomfortable; we feel it puts us at a disadvantage.

The unreliability of facts

Facts are a mainstay of our understanding of the world. Historical, geographical, sociological and scientific – every part of our lives can be factually described: where we live, how old we are, how many legs a millipede has, when Julius Caesar conquered Britain. Where, when, how many – we seek for concrete absolutes.

The human capacity for learning, for retention of what we have learnt, is vast. Individually and as a species, we have created and are constantly expanding a vast store-house of knowledge in our brains, on paper, and in all media so far discovered. Trillions of volumes, files, and research papers. We have a phenomenal capacity for knowledge.

And it's something by which we rightly set great store. We test and examine each other; education and careers depend on it. Some subjects more than others are reliant on retention of facts, but the large audiences for quizzes on radio and television demonstrate how much we love testing our knowledge, both general and specialist. Given our dependence on and interest in facts, it's hard to accept that not all facts are reliable. Using the phrase "the half-life of facts", medical students are apparently told that half of what they learn will, in ten or twenty years' time, be found to be untrue. "Facts" are dependent on the current state of human knowledge: they are provisional, best guesses at any given moment. It has even been said that there is no such thing as a fact.

What to believe?

We are bombarded by research, the findings of which are often contradictory. In medicine, in economics, from all the "facts" so confidently asserted on the media and on our screens, how do we know which to believe? The awkward truth is that many findings heralded as breakthroughs have never been re-tested, and of those that have, many have been found to be false (see Wolff).

Even facts that we might accept as reliably proven aren't always helpful in isolation. In order to understand what we are being taught, we need context, and that's not generally part of the package.

We might also remember that many things confidently expressed as facts are determined by subjectivity. We cannot say what someone else sees as red, or what they hear when they listen to Mendelssohn's Elijah or the song of a thrush. In fact, as...