Knowing Hindi Download

[Auriville Cha]

I am grateful to be joined by my wife, Jeannie, and a number of our children and grandchildren today. In two months Jeannie and I will celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary. She has been a wonderful companion. She and my family are the source of my greatest joys. They are also the source of some of my greatest humor.

During the years I have taught at BYU, I have enjoyed hearing from a wide range of speakers on a great variety of topics. One story shared by Elder Oaks when he was president of BYU has stuck with me. Given from this very pulpit, the story went something like this:

Many years ago the federal government placed county agents throughout the country to help farmers learn to be more productive. One county agent in the South went to visit an old farmer in his area, but he found that convincing the farmer to change proved rather difficult.

First, we must increase our level of knowledge, or what we know. In our search for truth, however, we have to be selective, because we have an overwhelming amount of information available to us. It seems to me that information can be classified into four categories.

We also need the Ensign and its messages of wisdom and inspiration to come into our homes and into our lives each month. Just as the early Saints looked to their prophet Brigham Young to guide them along a literal path from the Midwest to the Rocky Mountains, so must we look to our prophets to guide us along a spiritual path. I hope each student apartment receives the Ensign each month and is blessed by its influence.

In addition to learning from the temple and from the Ensign, we need daily scripture study. Just as helium slowly escapes from an inflated balloon, allowing it to shrink and fall after a few days, so do we slowly lose the power and memory of the scriptures without daily reading. President Gordon B. Hinckley has said:

I was flying back from a trip to the Far East. It was the middle of the night, and most of the passengers were asleep. I, however, had my reading light on and was reading the Book of Mormon so I could finish by the end of the year as the prophet had asked.

Although our lives are filled with countless demands and distractions, I think we all learned from our prophet that we can find the time to study the scriptures if we are determined enough, each in our own way and place and time. He has told us the what; individually we work out the how.

Why does our doing so often lag behind our knowing, whether with home teaching, family home evening, or a wide range of other areas? I suppose that busy schedules, distractions, wrong priorities, lack of commitment, and just poor time management contribute to the problem. In statements regarding attendance at the temple, President Heber J. Grant addressed the typical excuses we make:

I do not know of any one that is any busier than I am, and if I can do it they can, if they will only get the spirit in their hearts and souls of wanting to do it. [Power from on High: A Lesson Book for Fourth Year Junior Genealogical Classes (Salt Lake City: Genealogical Society of Utah, 1937), 26]

Please let your son know that while there are certainly difficulties, the joys are unimaginable. Emily brings a very strong spiritual presence to my life. [Robby Hammond, e-mail to author, June 2006]

I pray that the Lord will bless us throughout our lives as we strive to progress in all three areas of knowing, doing, and being. I pray that we will be diligent and do our very best, but I also pray that we will be patient as we improve line upon line, learning upon learning, repentance upon repentance, onward and upward, with the Lord trying us and proving us as we go.

YES! The BHMA standard defines a knowing act this way: Any conscious action with the expected result of opening a door. This includes but is not limited to: wall or jamb-mounted contact or non-contact switches such as push plates; the action of manual opening (pushing or pulling) a door; and controlled access devices such as keypads, card readers, wireless transmitters and keyswitches.

I spent almost a decade researching and writing my first book, The Uncertainty Mindset. This included many years watching teams of innovation chefs coming up with new ideas in food. The book looks at cutting-edge culinary research kitchens and uses them as a lens for explaining what it means to explicitly differentiate between risk and uncertainty, and how accepting uncertainty leads to organizations that can innovate and adapt.

Just a few examples in the Covid context may illustrate. How bad would Covid be for people who got it? How long would the effects of Covid last? Should we use a traditional killed virus vaccine or an mRNA vaccine? How effective would the mRNA vaccines be? What should we do to reduce vaccine hesitancy among high-risk groups? Is it worth it to shut down whole economies for months to reduce the number of people who got infected with Covid? How much would payroll support help businesses survive through lockdowns?

These different types of not-knowing push and pull on us in different ways. Treating them as all the same and acting on them as if they are all the same makes neither instinctive nor logical sense. The frankly haphazard (or nutty) reactions by many governments, businesses, and people to Covid highlighted how we have no coherent framework for thinking clearly about the different types of not-knowing and what we can do about them.

We live in a strange time and things seem to be getting stranger more quickly. The planet has been quite literally aflame in the last few years. Or frozen, flooded, plague-ridden, at war, in economic crisis, beset by locusts, in political crisis, massively defrauded, verging on nuclear disaster, and/or many other scourges of humanity both traditional and modern.

First, the world today is much more interconnected than even a decade ago, which means not-knowing spreads and re-seeds itself more widely. We have always experienced uncertainty and unknowability, but our new interconnectedness means that sources of not-knowing are almost never localised anymore.

Ideas now spread faster and in less predictable ways. Loss of confidence that causes one bank to collapse might, in the past, have largely affected the few thousand depositors of that bank. More recently, such loss of confidence might create a global financial crisis because of previously invisible connections between that bank and financial systems in other countries (as it did with Lehman Brothers and the Global Financial Crisis of 2008).

One example of this is the combination of the internet, social media, and ubiquitous recommendation algorithms. These have given us the ability to communicate with others and find and share our ideas much more easily than would have been possible even ten years ago.

This seems unambiguously good until we discover, for example, that recommendation algorithms may create filter bubbles and echo chambers that affect our collective ability to have democratic discourse, and that social networks have become very effective ways to coordinate domestic terror attacks or spread misinformation with serious consequences.

2: Our actions now have more power, so our actions have become more consequential than before. We now produce more unexpected consequences when we act, and these sources of not-knowing affect us and the world around us more.

3: There is a mismatch between a world increasingly filled with not-knowing and our mistaken belief that we know (or should know) everything. This mismatch leads us to manage not-knowing inappropriately and also makes us unnecessarily unhappy.

The stick is that we are increasingly forced to confront and cope with not-knowing. We have no choice but to learn how to manage it. The carrot is that not-knowing can be something that is productive and desirable.

Part 1: Motivation (the first two sessions). Here we set the stage for the rest of the series by considering why the world we inhabit is becoming more uncertain, how that forces us to think more clearly about not-knowing, and why doing so is a path to being happier and more successful.

We also have no choice. Every day we confront situations of not-knowing in which we must still do something. The most important human work is navigating not-knowing. This is why we reward leaders who lead through unpredictable situations, why we respect founders who choose to work with not-yet-understood technology and markets, and why we esteem researchers who push beyond the known.

The last few years (global pandemic, crazy weather, geopolitical insecurity, rapid technological change, economic upheaval, etc) show that these situations of not-knowing are growing in number, scope, and impact.

Even professionals are confused by not-knowing because there are many obstacles in the way of understanding. First, we rarely recognise that not-knowing of any kind is emotionally distressing, which prevents clear thinking about it. And even when we get over that emotional hurdle, there is a huge amount of confusion and muddled thinking still in the way.

This clarity reveals how relating well to not-knowing requires a mindset that recognises different types of not-knowing and has access to the appropriate tools for decision-making when faced with each type of not-knowing.

Buddhist practice involves an interplay between knowing and not-knowing. In Vipassana we often emphasize knowing and seeing deeply into our lived experience. However, just as our capacity to know can be developed, so can we cultivate a wise practice of not-knowing.

Often people are anxious to find the ultimate meaning of life or understand what happens in death because they are afraid of the unknown. They may look to religion for answers. Buddhism, at its heart, is not about answering these questions but about resolving the fear that motivates the questions. Rather than providing security through religious knowing, Buddhist practice calls on us to become free from attachment to security, free from the need to know.

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