Knowledge and Capacity

While watching an old indian horror movie, there came a point when the the priest had exorcised the evil out of the girl and was sitting at the kitchen table while the mother of the girl served him tea. The father of the girl brought a psychologist was who tried his best but could not succeed (for obvious reasons), then her mother called the priest. Her father resisted it but let it happen for her mother's satisfaction. The girl became better now and the parents were happy. The psychologist saw the girl and she looked and behaved normal. He was content that whatever abnormal psychological condition she was going through had subsided. While leaving the house he saw the priest sitting at the table and gave the priest a look of disbelief and condescension. The mother of the girl, who was serving him tea saw it and looked back at the priest who said something wonderful. He said, "Human knowledge is like a lamp in pitch dark. There is light in a certain radius but beyond that there is infinite darkness and we don't know what lies in it."

I really liked that analogy and realized that there is one more aspect to this. If you light a lamp in a pitch dark room there is a immediate circle of darkness around the lamp (where its own shadow lies), then the light is intense and fades slowly into darkness as we move out. The first dark circle is the lamp's own self, which is not illuminated, which is unknown. The next circle of intense light is the immediate surrondings of the lamp which are most familiar and known. As we move out, the knowledge and confidence in that knowledge decreases till things enter the unknown. This is what I believe is the state of human knowledge. Paradoxically, the self despite being the closest is the least understood. The immediate surrondings with which we deal with every day is something we are most certain about. As we try to look at things distant from us, they become fuzzy, dim and uncertain. That is why we call them frontiers of knowledge because about them we can only guess and conjecture but cannot say anything with certainty.

As I see it our capacity to do something also follows a similar pattern. Let me give you an example. Lets say I drive a car. When I run it around the city at normal speeds I am pretty confident about my driving skills. But, if I am in a car chase (imagine any high-speed chase from a movie). What would happen? My driving skills have been stretched to their limit. I am now unsure if I can make the next turn. My driving could become so erratic that I could lose control and run off the road completely. These two situations represent the most familiar and the frontiers but what about the first dark circle? Have you noticed that whenever we are learning to do something we are most actively involved but as we grow familiar we think less and less until it becomes second nature. That familiarity is what creates the dark circle around it. The lack of introspection and thought makes us ignorant of how else it could have been done, what could be done to make it better. Until someone else comes up and says "Why don't you try it this way?" and we suddenly realize its obviousness and ask ourselves "Why didn't I see that before?". We didn't see that before because we weren't really looking.

What I learn from this is that we should not be too sure that we know ourselves because doing a lot of familiar stuff does not mean that the inner circle has become illuminated. Instead, it may have grown darker. Also, this confidence of knowledge and skill when taken to the frontier would not produce the same results and we may be making a lot of mistakes. Unless we keep our eyes open towards these two possibilities our confidence could well be delusion.