The Most Important Thing In the World To Know Right Now Is ______?

Eight Feed Your Head contributors answer a big question

Lewis Coyne

The most important thing in the world to know right now is... that the chaos and turmoil that play such an intense role in modern life are not inescapable, but can be dealt with on the personal level.

The first thing to be aware of is that chaos and turmoil have been features of much of human history. War may not have been a constant in the lives of ancient and medieval peoples, but it was pretty frequent. Even when peace prevailed, there were famines, floods, and plagues to contend with, all of which had devastating effects on societies with limited medicine and environmental security. What's changed in recent times is not so much the fact of chaos and turmoil, but the speed at which it unfolds. This is a consequence of changes in human society: an interconnected global economy and media mean that events in the Middle East or South China Sea are felt nearly immediately in Europe and North America, and vice versa.

The sense of turmoil we feel can then be overwhelming, because dramatic events seem to happen constantly and from all corners of the globe. There's a danger here, however, because in the face of such relentless news, there's a risk that we either become insensitive to its gravity or tune out altogether. Instead, we should all try to distill the signal from the noise; the genuinely significant events from the chatter and inessential updates.

One way of doing this that I've found immensely useful is removing all news and social media apps from my phone, and switching off notifications for WhatsApp and email. Now, when I want to find out what's going on in the world or with my online social circles, I have to actually go to the websites themselves. This has reduced the quantity of time I've spent on such sites and simultaneously increased their quality, as I can better stay updated with global events while remaining grounded. This is, I think, an important life lesson for a fast-changing world.

Steven Gimbel and Stephen Stern

The most important thing to know today is that innate cognitive biases lead us to embrace fallacies. We are not the purely rational beings we think we are. Social psychologists have demonstrated that there are errant ways of thinking that are naturally wired into our brains. When something feels right, we accept it as truth without critical scrutiny, despite the fact that the conclusion we feel certain about is unsupported or wrong. As such, malicious players can seduce us with falsehoods that lead us to beliefs and actions that harm rather than heal the world. We must know that our perspectival nature leaves our view of reality at best incomplete and at worst simply wrong.

However, we can compensate for this through (1) careful critical analysis and (2) the synthesis of perspectives other than our own through open-minded discourse. We must embrace Emmanuel Levinas’ dictum that “discussion shall never cease in this world or the next.” Critical thinking mixed with an openness to other perspectives and intellectual humility must be the hallmarks of that conversation.

Eve Grubin

The most important thing in the world to know right now is knowing that we can’t know.

John Keats wrote, “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination.” Keats seems to suggest that he can’t be certain of anything but the purely subjective: feelings of the heart and our imaginative life. The very concept of certainty evaporates – all we can know is that our affections for the people and things of this world have a sacred quality and that a truth resides somewhere in our creative vision.

It seems that Keats was allergic to certainty. He wrote in another letter that a great thinker is “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” For Keats, uncertainty was a fertile and rich place from which the imagination grows.

However, while Keats says that he is “certain of nothing,” a paradox is built into this sentence because he could both mean that there isn’t anything he is certain of or it could mean that he is certain of something: “nothing.” Acknowledging nothingness involves a humble knowledge. In addition, Keats is, in fact, certain of two things: the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination.

I’d like to suggest that it is crucial to accept that we can’t know, we can’t understand everything. The ability of human beings to be certain of anything is so limited and based on insufficient information. Accepting this leads to a humility. However, once not knowing is accepted, ironically, knowledge, creativity, and truth can grow and develop. Our affections and imaginations can lead us towards truths we would never have been certain of if we hadn’t accepted that we cannot know. In other words, accepting that we cannot know leads to knowing.

Peter Himmelman

The most important thing right now is to know that we must all do our part—we must all be active participants in the purveying of goodness. At the same time, we must recognize that there is a Creative Force—call it God if you prefer—that runs the world, not politicians, not world leaders, not human beings of any sort.

Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes

The most important thing in the world to know right now is that …

We still know very little. A human trying to fathom the vast complexities of the outer cosmos and the inner consciousness is akin to a bee flying through a game of chess. The bee will see and navigate around the board and pieces, but it will have no comprehension that it is in the arena of a ‘game’ with two players, developed by the human species over vast stretches of time with developed methods, gambits, histories, tournaments, masters, and suchlike. The bee is blind to these things.

We are, in turn, blind to what a bee can see: ultraviolet and polarized light, swifter time flows, etc. We do, though, at least know these things about bees, yet we still have no idea as to what a bee may feel, or even what types of experience they may use for such ultraviolet radiation. As we extend the horizon, we have very little idea about the nature of experience generally in relation to the universe. We neither know what such ignorance implies ethically, if it implies anything. Realized ignorance, however, need not be a depressant – it can act as a stimulant to learn more, to advance our knowledge further. We do not even know what the potential limitations of the human are, and this ignorance flies us forward into the blooming, buzzing confusion of the great unknown, the cosmic game.

Laleh Quinn

Knowledge of death is the greatest gift of all

If I accept death, then my tree greens, since dying increases life. If I plunge into the death encompassing the world, then my buds break open. How much our life needs death!

– Carl Jung, The Red Book

The most important thing in the world to know right now is that we are all going to die. And to realize that, as the only animal on the planet having that knowledge, we are privileged, as that knowledge provides us with an amazing invitation into something extremely sacred. Most people walk through life terrified of facing their own mortality.

This results in many types of destructive behavior. We resort to numbing and distracting ourselves, grasping for permanence in multiple ways that are ultimately harmful to ourselves and to society as a whole. Looking for success which can lead to competitiveness, trying to attain material things which results in great discrepancies of wealth and is devastating the planet, and even trying to cheat death by achieving the “singularity”, denying that we may be something much more than our physical

bodies But what we need to know is that the fact that we die is not the problem. Denying it out of fear is. To truly know that you are going to die is to step out of a veil of illusion and into the beautiful present that so often goes unnoticed. Dr. Philip Cozzolino, a researcher at the Department of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, has studied the effect of losing our fear of death on our lives. He has found that when we integrate the reality of our death into our everyday consciousness, we don’t shrink from life, we expand into it. We become more honest, more compassionate, less afraid to love fully or speak the truth. We become more authentic. Importantly, research has shown that losing fear of death results in less tribalism, less religious fundamentalism, and less violence towards each other.

I feel lucky to have had a few tragedies in my life that have made me face death head-on. These experiences led me to spend years investigating death, not to ultimately escape it, but to draw closer to what it reveals. What I’ve found is that there is an enduring mystery at the core of each one of us. I’ve read hundreds of near-death experience accounts, heard extraordinary evidence of an afterlife from mediums, followed signs, and felt the closeness of my loved ones who have passed.

But perhaps the most powerful discovery has come from simply turning inward, sitting with grief, with loss, with the beauty of impermanence, and with the glimpses of something eternal deep within. It has changed me. I don’t live in fear of death anymore. Directly facing the knowledge that we are going to die has the opposite effect of what we might think. It’s not dark. It’s not despairing. It’s the opposite. Life takes on a sheen, a preciousness, that can’t be found any other way. This can be seen in some people who are terminally ill. Not all, but some of them gain the type of appreciation of life that we should all strive for on a daily basis.

What's really interesting to consider and dive deeply into is that the people who have actually died and come back to talk about it, not only do not fear death any longer, but they come back with renewed understanding that life has meaning, that they are here for a reason, and that every day is precious. Really facing the truth that we will die can lead to an ever-widening understanding of who we really are as we begin to discover that there is that eternal spark within each one of us. The good news is that we don't have to nearly die. We don’t need to have a terminal diagnosis. We can have the benefit now of the gifts knowing we die brings.

Vernon W. Cisney

The core myth of modernity is that we are, each of us, an independent, self-contained atom of individuality. René Descartes in the seventeenth century established the foundation that grounds us still: “I think; therefore I am.” All that I am and all that I know about the world are grounded in my own private frame of reference. To quote the famous “This is Water” Kenyon address by David Foster Wallace, “everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.” This has translated into a compelling social framework as well: I am an individual entrepreneur of my own success, entitled to consume to my heart’s content, responsible to no one and limited only by the resources that I alone have amassed solely through my own initiatives.

There is much to value in this social framework, not the least of which is the fact that it encourages a robust sense of self-reliance. But pushed to its limit, it can occlude the fact that the world we inhabit is a world we share. Our production practices, our consumption choices, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the land we use—all occupy dynamic and intensive intersections within immense and intricately interwoven and interdependent webs. As such, each of the choices we make, from the jobs we take to the clothes we wear to the foods we eat to the way we vote, ripples throughout those webs, with potentially enormous implications. At the heart of all of the world’s great religions is the injunction to recognize this fact in everything we do, and to live accordingly.