Knowing the Unknown: Part 1 - The unknown

This blog is the first part of a six (or maybe seven) part series on a topic that I have been contemplating for a while now. I initially thought I could cover it in a single post, but as I started jotting down my thoughts, it became clear that it may exceed the standard length of a blog post and hence has been split. Hopefully you'll have the time and patience to read this, as I am curious to get your feedback.

Recently while on a trip in India with my dad, we were getting late to get back home and I wanted to skip a shrine that we had intended to stop at originally due to lack of time. Now the trip itself was back from another temple and hence my rationale was that it was probably not a big deal. My dad, the pious man that he is, thought otherwise. He was quite disappointed at the prospect of not making a stop and told me that I would be damned if I don't.

The comment threw me a bit off-guard. I've known him to be quite religious and spiritual, but never to a point of accusing someone of damnation. It got me into thinking what brought the change in him and more importantly, why he considered it to be so severe a crime, especially since we were just back from other temples.

I noticed that the statements he made were consistent with other utterances from many religious leaders over time on what would happen if we don't take time to stop and pray. This made me feel that there must be some pattern that governs this behavior. What I have written below is an analysis and identification of that pattern.

The unknown

I feel that the root of core most of our thought processes is an awareness of the unknown. Right from the moment we humans gained the ability to think, our thought has been devoted to try to know what we don't know yet and attempt to make it known.

Now, you can go about accepting the unknown in one of two ways - fear it or have a curiosity to understand it. In most cases, our instinct is by default to fear and then, potentially to understand. This behavior can be easily observed in children - when you bring a new object to them, they either fear it or take it apart to see what it is.

Typically, we tend to get over the fear over time and convert it into curiosity. The change could be brought over either by time (tired of being afraid) or by collective effort (enough people sharing the fear band together to overcome the common fear).

So, what do we do with either our fears or our curiosity? That's for the next post.