To the atheist and scientific communities, there is an ever-slimming margin of the observable universe within which God can exist.

It’s the job of the “knowers” to know things, and when they base their identity on how much they know, they bind themselves to the material world. No room for mystery—only what we can measure, prove, and replicate. Which is ironic, given that their jobs are based on the acquisition of knowledge that was once shrouded in mystery.

There is so much more—IF we learn to open up to the possibility that the path to fulfillment does not require us to “know” everything.

I remember in my college years I had the agnostic/scientist’s mindset. Fed up with religious doctrine, I set out to live an efficient, objective life free from the contradictions and boundaries of the Catholic Church.

The knowledge phase

For years, I immersed myself in knowledge. I was fascinated, as I still am to this day, by what the scientific community has discovered over the past few hundred years. From gravity and black holes to the nature of light, the origin of DNA, photosynthesis, and quantum mechanics, I was utterly fascinated by the beauty and complexity of our world.

God had no part in it, according to me.

It was simply the combination of energy particles forming mass that rearranged itself over a long period of time. Humanity was a happy accident, angels aren’t real, chakras are woo-woo, and so on and so forth.

As famed investor Peter Drucker once said. “what gets measured gets managed.” I heard this quote time and time again in my first few years of being an entrepreneur.

And while Peter is right on the money, there exists a deeper and more insidious form of his wisdom:

What doesn’t get measured doesn’t get managed.

What doesn’t get managed can do things that surprise you.

Sometimes, when you’re surprised, you get hurt or your safety/sense of control is threatened.

So, to avoid losing control, make sure you do everything in your power to minimize the existence of things you can’t measure.

While Peter Drucker never said these words or anything close to them, they nonetheless capture the materialistic, control-oriented mindset that dominates the modern world, particularly in business.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m an entrepreneur and a supporter of capitalism. I’ve built businesses before and benefited from it. It’s a tool of freedom, BUT it’s not freedom itself.

There are inherent risks to a system built around control: it stifles any form of intuition or creative input. Ever tried to come up with a bright idea on the spot? It’s kind of hard.

The same kind of creative blockage is happening at a large scale around the entire world because we’ve prioritized what we SEE and what we KNOW over what we FEEL.

Lessons from Chernobyl

In the HBO series Chernobyl, after the explosion at the nuclear facility, the physicist in charge of the facility was in denial about what had just happened. The truth was too much for him to handle, as were the personal consequences for him in Soviet state.

So, when the physicist’s underlings brought him a report that the radiation level was at 3.6 Roentgen (a unit of measuring radiation), which was “not great but not terrible,” he rested on the information he had SEEN—and determined that things were going to be okay.

He ignored his colleagues’ further pleas that the level of 3.6 happened to be the max level that the radiation meter went, and that the real radiation level could be a lot higher.

Turns out it was.

Do you think our eyes, ears, and other senses are any different from that radiation meter? Do you think that our scientific instruments have somehow figured out how to detect every possible way in which the universe works?

Of course not. We are discovering new things every day: things that we didn’t know existed before, from physical phenomena to new creatures that are walking, swimming, and crawling around on our own planet.

Let me show you by a quick example.

Lessons from a spoon

When you stare into a spoon, what do you see?

Odds are, if your spoon is shiny enough, you’ll see a misshapen blob of light (your head) either right side up or upside down, depending on which side of the spoon you’re looking at.

Your reflection would barely be recognizable as a human being, much less you. All of your features are squeezed into a tight space while your background is blown way out of proportion (or vice versa).

To the spoon, THAT is the real world.

There are no humans, only misshapen blobs and blurred lines. Spoons aren’t aware of the world as we know it because it “takes in” light in a completely different way.

Now, here’s the kicker:

We, too, are spoons.

Humans have imperfect senses that can only detect certain portions of the external world. Imagine what it would be like if you could see the full spectrum of light. You’d be distracted by cell towers blasting super-high frequency light, you would see ultraviolet rays and gamma rays and infrared light, not being able to differentiate it from the “normal” light that helps you move throughout the world.

The same thing goes for sound and other senses, even smell. Imagine having a dog’s sense of smell and walking through an airport (or worse, a subway). It would be overwhelming.

Our sense limitations are a gift. They help us enjoy the world without being overwhelmed by it. But they can lead us into a delusional state of believing that what we see is all there is when the mere fact that you’re probably reading this on a wifi connection is a testament to the opposite being true.

Are there tiny little people running from your router to your computer with little notes? No. There’s a light inside your router that blinks really quickly, and those blinks are caught by a special camera inside your computer which decodes it.

That is, quite literally, how wifi works. Same with your phone, your radio, and your tv remote.

There’s a lot more going on than we can detect with our bodies, and there’s also a lot more going on than we can detect with our machines—we just haven’t been able to build sensitive-enough machines yet. New discoveries are being made every day in the scientific community—discoveries that completely confuse the smartest people in the world.

Case in point: a few days ago, Popular Mechanics released an article summarizing a recent experiment in which an “extremely technical experiment produced photons, or particles of light, that existed in 37 dimensions.”

It’s got them confused, to say the least. And those people—the really smart people making 37-dimensional experiments with light—at least most of them will tell you that God’s corner of the universe gets smaller every time they make a correct prediction or harness another mechanism of nature.

And hey, I get it. I shared an obsession over knowledge and control with these scientists many years ago. But, by slowly letting go of my obsessive need to be in control of absolutely everything, I began to see exactly how out of control I always was.

It’s like watching a kid in one of those amusement park rides that has them sitting in a car, but it’s not a car, it’s a car-shaped seat bolted to an I-beam that lifts and moves the car around—yet the kid is still moving the steering wheel left and right, thinking they’re doing a great job.

When I realized I was that kid (right around the age of 29), I learned to accept my complete lack of control over the world, and I started to flow with it. I began to sense when the tide was rising and falling. To understand the cycles that our natural world follows: cycles that are so subtle that only one machine is capable of detecting them: our body.

I began stopped getting upset over every little thing that didn’t go my way. I became more patient. I was more understanding towards others. I was more empathetic. I listened more.

And when I started to listen more, I also began to notice that a deep and tranquil silence began to pervade my consciousness. Thoughts no longer ran through my head like an avalanche. And in that silence, I could start to hear my intuition, which began to tell me things that I had only ever felt before—but now, in clear, unambiguous terms.

Things like:

Shut down your business, you’re done with this.
Make the hard choice. You’ll be glad later.
You’re screwing up. This isn’t you.

The more I listened to that voice, the happier I became. The more silent things became, the more interested I was in slowing down and appreciating the world around me.

I sought out mind-expanding experiences that gave me new perspectives and helped me see myself as part of this world, not separate from it.

And it was in that perspective—the understanding of my unity with all things—that I began to see not just God in everything around me, but also myself. It was all one and the same: the same source, the same inner light within us all that we reflect back towards each other, as my wife Melanie says, less like mirrors and more like disco balls.

With each of our reflective facets facing in a slightly different way, glinting our strengths, weaknesses, fears, triumphs, traumas, and love back at each other with, almost always, a form of blind blasé: an ignorant and arrogant claim that we are, in fact, separate beings with separate emotions and separate everything and the only things that are real are the things we can touch.

Really? Can you touch grace?
Is love rough or smooth to the touch?
If I mailed you a pound of loathing, would it fit in a small box?

And yet, loathing is real. Love is real. Grace is real.

So if these things are real, and we can’t measure them (or, much less, manage them), then what else could be real?

What’s the source of love?
Or, for that matter, mystical experiences?
Who am I talking to when I talk to God? Is it myself, or is it actually a divine creator?

I’ve found the only way to answer these questions is to release my claim to materialism: to the belief that what I see is what I get and nothing more. Because to make the jump from “I’m just talking to myself” to “I’m speaking with God” requires faith. And faith requires uncertainty, which I have finally learned to embrace.

I hope you find the strength to embrace your own uncertainty. It may be difficult at first, but we can only draw the map to a higher form of happiness after we travel beyond the boundaries of what we already know.

Happy travels.