Читать книгу How to be - Tõnn Sarv - Страница 7

‘Not all people need to know all things,’ as one of my good friends and companions always loved to say, and this still comes to mind when someone speaks about honesty, frankness, pure spirit of the soul, absolute trust, and things of this nature.

Speaking the truth can cause much more suffering than not speaking. Silence about some things, or even gentle lies, may be much more appropriate and polite.

We know thousands of things that really aren’t our business. Someone’s birth secret, adoption, the personality of their past intimate partner, someone’s serious illness, etc. Sometimes somebody trusts you with secrets, and you have to promise that you won’t tell anyone about it. Same story.

But oh, how you would like to share such things. To discuss it with someone and, of course, get the promise that he or she won’t tell anyone about it in turn. It’s easy to see how secrets spread like that.

The media has, of course, greatly amplified this mentality. The private life of every single person is laid out for all to view and review. Pretty creepy. And the justification is still that people want to know...

Well, maybe that’s what they want, but there must be very few things that they necessarily need to know.

Better to live and let others be unaware than burden ourselves and others with unnecessary knowledge. Ripping off the curtain, getting the naked truth may well sell newspapers, but what does it give and where does it lead? We know where it leads: suspicion, distrust, uncertainty.

We need to use knowledge. Useless knowledge only burdens, stirs us up and hurts.

We don’t need to know all things, we can’t understand everything, and we can’t keep up with everything all the time. It’s not possible anyway. This is an illusion, a dream, temporary and transient.

Always, something remains unknown, concealed, and it all changes all the time. There is little benefit to such knowledge.

In fact, there are very few things that we really need to know, that need to be understood and considered. You don’t need to know how many crimps there are on a beer bottle cap or what is the capital of Burkina Faso or how many ångströms in the wavelength of a yellow line of cadmium. This is useless knowledge to most people.

Nor does it matter what you need to care about or worry about. It doesn’t matter what you need to have, what you want or achieve. You don’t have to find out who you really are, what your destiny is or who you might have been in a previous life, what your special qualities are or where you really belong. These are questions of faith, perceptions, wishes and desires; they all arise from self-importance, wanting to be somehow special, necessary and right. We can live, we don’t have to worry. There’s one life, to live.

This is all fine, but surely there are people who also need some secret knowledge, who believe that things are not all the way they seem, that in fact there are conspiracies and secret observers and that we are only being manipulated and lied to. That’s how you get really nervous.

‘What is truth?’ retorted Pilate. (John 18:38)

Yes, sometimes you’re lied to, but you’re going to listen to it, smile and maybe lie back. You both know that it’s not true, but it has yet to be reconciled and settled. That’s the way it is, it’s a courtesy that doesn’t cost anything. Whatever they say, whatever it looks like, just smile.

The truth may be somewhere, but it’s not being investigated; knowledge of it is no use, and it’s not possible to know everything, to understand everything.

Some talk about the arrival of a post-truth era. Why not? Maybe someday we will regard the seekers of final truths with the same kind of amusement as we now look at believers in fairy tales.

You don’t have to do anything; you don’t need anything. Not everything can be found out; it doesn’t all have to be understood. Rather, you may gradually get rid of excessive things, desires and thoughts. You can forget the useless knowledge and the old beliefs. You can let them go and be free.

You don’t have to have anything or anyone – you don’t have to be anyone at all.