The Admission That Changes the Game

Giovanni Kerkhof · 2026-09-28 · from chapter 1, The Nature of Awareness

If I am honest about where all of this began, it did not begin with an insight. It began with a defeat. It began the day I could no longer pretend to myself that I knew how to think. That sounds like a small thing to say, almost a rhetorical flourish, but I mean it literally: I had to acknowledge that the activity I had performed all my life, the thing I most identified with, was something I did not understand and could not control. "And admitting that you are ignorant changed the whole game, changed the whole learning process because now you are humble. Because now you know what you think is reality" — and knowing that, you can never again mistake the two so innocently.

I compare it to flying. "Before you learn to be able to fly that plane, you have to acknowledge that you don't know how to fly the plane and you have to decide you're going to learn it." Nobody finds this controversial when the skill is aviation. But say the same thing about thinking — that you must first admit you cannot do it before you can learn it — and people look at you as if you have insulted them. Yet the structure is identical. There is always something standing between you and the skill: "Dan zul je die mentale constructie onder ogen moeten zien, voordat je die vaardigheid kunt leren. Want er zit namelijk iets in de weg" — you will have to face that mental construction before you can learn the skill, because something is quite literally in the way.

How do you know whether you have a skill or whether the skill has you? My test is simple: can you stop? "So for knowing to drive a car, you have to know what it is and you don't know what it is if you can't stop doing it. Otherwise, it just happens and it's a black box." Most people cannot stop thinking, not even for a second, which tells me their thinking is not something they do — it is something that happens to them, a black box running unobserved. And a process you cannot voluntarily cease is a process you cannot claim to know.

This admission costs something. It is not a clever intellectual move you make and then continue as before. "If you cannot bear the burden, if you do not have the courage to bear the burden, you cannot undergo total learning effects." There is a burden here — the burden of letting go of the person who supposedly already knew — and courage is not optional equipment. But the alternative is worse, because the alternative is unfairness toward yourself: "And you have to admit that, otherwise you're not being fair or learning." The trap is closed on both sides, since the very ignorance you refuse to admit is what hides itself: "if you were, you would know that you don't know what you don't know." And there is mercy in this admission too. A mistake made before the learning is no crime — "het is acceptabel," as I once put it, that you did it wrong, because you didn't learn that yet. What is not acceptable is refusing the learning while insisting on the credit.