The Secret to Wisdom and Knowledge: Know that You Don’t Know

Last Updated on September 14, 2023 by The Unbounded Thinker

‘The only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing.’ – Socrates

Most of us can’t become wiser because we think we know everything. We believe we are wise and knowledgeable because we’ve read many books and have many school certificates (degree, diploma, etc.).

For this reason, we never question our ideas, belief systems, and the things we learned in school. We are proud of our false sense of knowledge and wisdom, and we think we have answers to every question.

We are unaware that we only become knowledgeable and wise when we know that we know nothing.

For instance, although we think we know everything about the sun, no one really knows what the sun is. Everything you’ve been told about the sun is based on assumptions because we lack equipment that can enable us to know what the sun really is.

Also, although we think we know everything about human beings, we don’t know many things about ourselves. For instance, no one knows where human consciousness resides, why we feel hatred or love in our hearts, how we see things in our dreams, and how we hear the voices within us.

Besides this, we don’t know our true history. We don’t know all species of human beings that walked the earth and how ancient people built megalithic structures.

There are very many things we don’t know, and once we accept this, we’ll become more knowledgeable and wiser because we’ll be willing to study more and ponder life. Moreover, we’ll learn a lot when we accept that we don’t know anything because we’ll be eager to listen to ideas that contradict what we’ve learned or what we think we know. In other words, accepting that we don’t know will make us willing to accept new information, thus making us wiser and knowledgeable.

We’ll question everything when we accept that we know nothing. Questioning will enable us to gain more knowledge because we get better answers when we question. Furthermore, questioning everything will force us to think deeply and eventually realize insightful truths that will make us wiser.

For this reason, from today, we must accept the fact that we know nothing. We must stop labelling everything and assume that we are seeing things for the first time.

This attitude will breed a questioning attitude that will encourage us to gather information that will enable us to gain more knowledge and become wiser.

‘And if any man thinks that he knoweth anything, he knoweth nothing as yet as he ought to know.’ – 1^st Corinthians 8:2

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