Why Aren't We Allowed to Know? - Letters From Readers
I get a lot of notes from people who read my posts here, and I'm always grateful. I've said it before, I know, but really I do appreciate every one of you who write to me. I don't post here every week - sometimes I go quite some time before another post appears here. It isn't because I don't like writing, but rather because I prefer spending lots of time mediating on what I want to say, and tossing it around in my head. Sometimes inspiration strikes, though, when I read the letters I get.
Today I want to share a note from a man named Kevin, who writes to me from the Pacific Northwest - Oregon, to be precise. He gave me permission to share these details, and part of his notes. He has asked: "My grief makes me feel hollow and more like a ghost than a living man. I don't understand why I can't go where she want - why I can see her, why I'm not allowed to know where she is and what she might be doing."
Kevin said farewell to his wife of 17 years due to a protracted illness, and is coming to terms with her departure late in 2023.
Kevin, I'm very sorry for your grief. I hope you heal soon; I hope something I have to offer here can bring you some measure of comfort.
Let me start by saying that knowledge - indeed, knowing anything - is a very varied and individualized concept. For instance, I know my father loves me. It is knowledge that is baked into the recipe that is me. It isn't a fact I had to memorize; no one had to tell me that my father's love is real. I have experienced it. However, understanding Ramanujan primes was not at all baked into my experience, and when I studied prime counting functions at university I had to work very hard to learn the concepts because they were foreign to my experience at that time. Am I allowed to understand Ramanujan primes? Of course I am. But understanding them took work for me, and I had to continue to work at it for quite a while. Because my experience with advanced mathematics had been limited up to that point. And my experience had to align with my cognition for me to be able to have a deeper understand of them.
Obviously Ramanujan primes and the love of my dad are two very separate concepts - but they are no less distant than are the concepts of grief and love, life and death. If you and I sit down today to discuss Ramanujan primes, I will recall some of my experience at unversity, but little else. If we sit down to discuss biomechanical death, I will also offer anecdotes of the experience of others, but will have little to provide in the way of organic insight.
Kevin, this means that our lack of understanding of what happens next - embodied here by your grief over your wife and her departure - isn't about our knowing being permissible. All things are permissble for us. But not all things are good.
At our current stage of development, it is likely that our lack of understanding stems from an experience gap in our cognition - we cannot know a thing until we know that we know it. For example, as I write this, I know - am fully aware, and fully acknowledge - that someday my physical body will expire. I admit it openly, and have embraced that it will happen. But my cognitive self has not experienced it, so I do not fully know it. This is primarly because we have existed in such a bicameral state for so long that we no longer see reality as it really is - instead we see it through a lens of fitness payoffs - Dr. Don Hoffman has provided a lengthy discourse on this here. My cognition may have no frame of reference for it - which is why I dont know what lies beyond, but my consciousness (which is distinct from my cognition) has a timeless relationship with all things - even biomechanical death.
So Kevin (and for anyone else who may be grieving) - we are allowed to know. We do know. But we cannot yet define our knowing, because we currently only understand with cognition. My hope is that someday - someday - we will know beyond cognition, and when this happens, we will eliminate the fear and grief that accompany our current limited understanding of this experience.
Stay well, Kevin. Your wife is not gone. Only relocalized.
