CHAPTER NINE
KNOW AND NOT-KNOW
It is a mechanism of thinkingness, whether one is postulating or receiving information, that one retain one's ability to know. It is equally important that one retain one's ability to not-know. Thought consists entirely of knowing and not-knowing and the shades of gray between.
You will discover that most people are trying not to remember. In other words, they are trying to not-know. Education can only become burdensome when one is unable to not-know it. It is necessary that one be able to create, to receive, to know, and to not-know information, data and thoughts. Lacking any one of these skills, for they are skills, no matter how native they are to the individual, one is apt to get into a chaos of thinkingness or creatingness or livingness.
You can look at any eccentric or aberrated person and discover rapidly, by an inspection of him, which one of these four factors he is violating. He either is unable to know or not-know his own created thoughts, or he is unable to know or not-know the thoughts of others. Somewhere, for some reason best known to him, in his anxiety to be part of the game, he has shelved or lost one of these abilities.
Time is a process of knowing in the present and not-knowing in the future or the past. Remembering is the process of knowing the past; prediction is the process of knowing the future. Forgetting is the process of notknowing the past, and living "only for today" is the process of not-knowing the future.
Exercises in these various items rehabilitate not only the sanity or ability of the individual, but his general capability in living and playing the game.