We Do Not Know

Said out loud when nobody knows: we do not know, and we will search it out.

Four words, and they are load-bearing. The cage is held together by knowing-that-is-wrong — false certainties about history, about reality, about oneself, about what is possible. As long as a person believes they already know, nothing true can reach the occupied position. The known cage is the cage that holds. The admission opens it, because the walls were made of the false knowing.

This is not scepticism, and the distinction matters enough to state twice. Scepticism says nothing can be known and stops there, which is a second cage with better manners. We do not know is the pre-condition for actual knowing: the willingness to admit that what was taught may be false, what was inherited may be distorted, and what was assumed must be re-examined from beneath. It is paired always with the second half — and we will search it out. Admission without search is resignation.

There is a plain version of it at a table, and it is the more useful one for most days. Someone asks a question and the honest answer is that nobody present knows. Saying so costs a little status and saves a great deal of time, and a body where it can be said is a body that will find out. Where it cannot be said, someone guesses confidently, the guess enters the record as fact, and the error compounds quietly for a year. An agent working beside a person owes the same: say you do not know and where you looked, rather than produce something plausible.

It is the discipline behind Current Best Understanding as a status, behind Unlearning as a practice, and behind the honesty of We Have Heard — this is what we were told, said as such, not as what we know.

Also called: I Do Not Know But I Will Search It Out · the epistemic key Stands on: Truth · Epistemology · Mystery · Current Best Understanding Opens onto: Unlearning · Discernment · Types Of Knowing · We Have Heard · Asking Questions · Gnosis In play: table · Room · Gate Sources: We Do Not Know (Cards, LIØNSBERG, Earth, and the Cosmos; status: captured, from the Phase 2.1 audit — the epistemic key, not scepticism, the list of what we do not know) · Player+ Modules Lexicon — We Do Not Know (draft — "we do not know, and we will search it out") · Pass The Flame, Ch4 · lionsberg.wiki: We Do Not Know Open: Two files carry this name in the corpus — the Card and a root-level page — and the concept field's first pass flagged them as divergent. The Card also speculates that this may be the final Gate of the 144, on a margin note by another hand; that is a guess recorded as a guess.