ABSTRACT
Knowledge involves a knowing agent, and so does any effort to bracket knowledge or suspend belief. Someone stands somewhere, both in regard to knowing and unknowing. Yet once the value of the stance of unknowing is recognized, one can embrace it only by suspending the usual compulsions. One must bracket received wisdom, familiar categories and answers, common sense, and self-evident truths. The stance of unknowing is a willing suspension of belief in the known, for the sake of opening to whatever else there is. This is so even in the realm of science. Science is the successor to magic. The problem with magic was not that it was unrealistic, for it is realistic in the terms of the magical thinker! The problem is rather the attitude of mastery, shared by science, technology, and even religion, which renders them alike developments of magical thinking.
