EP 117 - The Culprit of the Unknown

As I mentioned in the previous episode, we are going to be looking into the foundations of the NeuroHarmonic Method, which we are continuing to prepare for its upcoming release. Again, a lot of personal growth insights are going to be presented to you, practical and uplifting ideas that you may find to be deeply valuable.

In that light, let me take you back to something I came across many years ago, a powerful framework that continues to guide me to this day. It’s called the Four Quadrants of Knowledge. On the surface, it’s simple and easy to grasp, but its importance runs deep, especially when you get to the last quadrant. And while we all intuitively know these categories, we often take them for granted.

Quadrant One

Quadrant One is what you know that you know. If you own a car, you know what make and color it is, what the keys look like, how to start it and so on. You know where you live, if you have kids, and thousands of things like this. These are all part of the first category: what you know that you know. Easy enough.

Quadrant Two

Quadrant Two is what you know that you don’t know. If someone asked me to assist in a heart transplant surgery, I’d refuse because I know nothing about it and I know that I don’t know. Same thing with rebuilding a carburetor and countless other skills. This category is huge for all of us, and we’re all pretty clear about it.

Of course, these two can be a little tricky because we have a tendency to trick ourselves, but that’s a different story.

Quadrant Three

Quadrant Three is what we know, but don’t realize that we know. This often shows up in the form of forgetting. You stumble across an old sweater in a drawer, one that used to be your favorite but you’d completely forgotten about. The knowledge was there, but buried. Sometimes this happens with skills we once practiced but let fall away, and so forth.

Quadrant Four

Quadrant Four is the most critical to understand, yet also the hardest to fully grasp. It is the realm of what we don’t know that we don’t know. This quadrant presents a major challenge, because it always remains in the domain of mystery — filled with both unseen opportunities and hidden dangers. We don’t need to dive too deeply into Quadrant Four just yet, because the rest of this episode will make its significance abundantly clear.

So let’s begin. Every society, in its own time, has believed it was the most advanced ever. And in a way, that makes sense — we can look back and clearly see the history behind us, and we can measure how far we’ve come. But the future? That always remains in the unknown, and all we can do is speculate.

And how big is Quadrant Four? How vast is the realm of what we don’t know that we don’t know? Well, the answer is obvious: we don’t know.

A Glimpse Back in Time

So, with all this in mind, let’s take a little trip back in time and see what appears to us. Imagine walking into the White House in the early 1830s. The floors are creaky and the rooms are still dimly lit with candles. It’s far from the glittering palace that exists in our collective imagination. But, for its time, it was astonishingly modern. In fact, it boasted something most Americans of that era could hardly dream of. It had running water. And not only that – hot running water.

That’s right. The White House, in Andrew Jackson’s presidency, became one of the very first buildings in the world to enjoy plumbing on such a scale. By 1833, a spring at Franklin Square fed water through iron pipes, supplying reservoirs in the mansion. There was even a bathing room fitted with a cold bath, a shower, and—this was the marvel—a hot bath, heated by great copper boilers stoked with coal.

The Astonishing Contrast

Now it’s hard for us to grasp what a marvel this level of luxury truly was, but in the early 1830’s it was nothing less than astonishing. At the time, most Americans drew their water by hand—from wells, outdoor pumps, or streams—and lugged it in heavy buckets to their kitchens or washrooms. Heating that water meant chopping wood, tending a fire, and waiting as iron kettles slowly came to a boil. Even in wealthy homes, servants trudged up and down stairs with sloshing pails, and a single bath could take hours to prepare.

Against this backdrop of labor and inconvenience, the sight of water flowing instantly through pipes—already heated and ready for use—seemed almost magical. It was not just a convenience but a symbol of modern progress, decades ahead of what ordinary families would experience in their daily lives.

The Hidden Tragedy

But with this, something strangely tragic unfolded in the White House over the next thirty years. A black shroud of grief descended upon it, as three unlikely deaths darkened its halls. And those deaths came about for one simple reason: the people of the time didn’t know what they didn’t know.

You see, the spring that fed the White House pipes stood just a few blocks away from what was called a “night-soil dump” — a polite 19th-century phrase for a sewage pit. That’s right: a large amount of human waste was regularly dumped into a pool not far from the very spring that carried water into the White House.

Before Germ Theory

You may or may not realize that this time period was a good fifty years before the significant understanding of germ theory began to dawn on the world. In those days, people believed that bad odors — so-called “miasmas” — caused disease. The idea that invisible microbes in water could make someone sick wasn’t even remotely conceived of.

So yes, the development of a running water system was real progress — but wisdom had not yet caught up with it. They simply didn’t know what they didn’t know. And the result began to take its toll, with three famous examples that stand out in history.

Case One: William Henry Harrison

At his inauguration in March of 1841, William Henry Harrison delivered the longest inaugural address in U.S. history — nearly two hours long in the raw March wind. For generations, history books told us that he caught pneumonia that day and died a month later.

But recent medical historians see it differently. They point to clear signs of enteric fever — a typhoid-like illness consistent with sewage-contaminated water. In other words, Harrison was likely undone not by the cold weather, but by the White House plumbing itself.

Case Two: Zachary Taylor

Fast forward to July of 1850. President Zachary Taylor had just attended Fourth of July celebrations, where he enjoyed a bowl of cherries and a glass of iced milk. Within days, he fell violently ill. Newspapers of the time reported “cholera morbus” — a catch-all term for gastroenteritis. Taylor died within the week.

While it’s impossible to prove with certainty, medical historians now believe his death also fits the pattern of a waterborne illness, consistent with the contaminated spring that supplied the White House.

Case Three: Willie Lincoln

Perhaps the most heartbreaking related event was the death of Willie Lincoln, the beloved 11-year-old son of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln. In February 1862, while the Civil War raged, Willie fell ill with typhoid fever. He lingered for weeks, weakening day by day, while his parents tended to him engulfed in agony and fear.

He died in the White House on February 20. Doctors and historians agree: the likeliest culprit was the contaminated water. Once again, the very pipes that delivered incredible modern convenience carried the seeds of immense tragedy.

Abraham Lincoln, wrestling with the fate of a nation, now had to wrestle with the loss of his beloved child as unthinkable grief was delivered by a seemingly advanced invention.

The Lesson of Quadrant Four

So, what does all this mean for us? Well, this brings us back to knowledge — especially the fourth quadrant: what you don’t know that you don’t know. The White House water story of the 1830s makes it painfully clear that technology without wisdom isn’t progress at all — it’s peril.

And tragically, this is just one of countless examples throughout history where what people didn’t know cost them dearly.

The Modern Parallel

To take this to the next level, let’s draw a parallel to our modern world today. And let’s put a focus on our awareness, on the inner life of the human mind, which is truly a double-edged sword. Because while our mind has been the source of all the developments that have come into being to help elevate humanity, it has also been responsible for creating much of the misery that we suffer today.

With all this in mind, here’s a key question: might we also be drinking contaminated water? From an environmental perspective, of course, that’s an urgent issue in its own right. But in this scenario, I’m not talking about what flows from our faucets.

Contaminated Thought Water

What I mean is the streams of thoughts and feelings that flow into our consciousness every single day. The rushing current of fear, anger, worry, resentment, self-doubt, and negativity — a polluted current we so often drink from without ever realizing its toxicity.

Just as the 19th-century White House residents poured crystal-clear water into their cups, unaware of the microbes within, we pour “thought water” into ourselves every moment. It looks clear — it feels like simply “my mood,” or “just the way I am.” But this inner negativity carries powerful pathogens of a very different kind.

The Physiological Cost

Modern brain science reveals that every thought and feeling we experience sets off reactions within us. Neuropeptides and hormones are released, stirring inner uneasiness. The body absorbs them. The nervous system reacts. The immune system bends under the strain. And the brain itself rewires according to the repeated currents of negativity.

Not a healthy scenario. And all the while, society around us treats these inner toxins as normal — and we accept them. Why? Because we don’t know what we don’t know.

The New Germ Theory

But modern neuroscience is beginning to catch up, just as medicine once did with germ theory. We now know that chronic negative thought patterns release cascades of stress hormones: cortisol, adrenaline. We know they rewire the amygdala toward hypervigilance, reshape the hippocampus toward fear-based memory, and even shorten telomeres, the protective caps on our DNA.

We know that unrelieved emotional stress contributes to heart disease, metabolic disorders, weakened immunity, and depression. We know that rumination — the habit of chewing endlessly on worries — can be as corrosive to the brain as cholera was to the gut.

But here’s the rub: just like the White House in 1833, our society is rife with technology, but not yet with wisdom. We drink contaminated thought water every time we scroll through doom-laden headlines, replay grudges, or compare ourselves to seductive illusions curated online. We immerse ourselves in hot and cold running negativity, unaware of the pathogens at work.

Toward Mental Hygiene

So what if we proposed a new “germ theory” — not of the body, but of the mind? What if we said: thoughts are not just harmless, invisible puffs of energy. They are agents. They shape physiology. They carry consequences.

The lesson of history is that once people understood germs, they learned sanitation, filtration, hygiene. And humanity’s life expectancy soared. The lesson for us is the same: once we understand the pathogens of thought and feeling, we can develop practices of mental hygiene. Practices that enhance our awareness of Breath. Gratitude. Presence. Practices that filter the mind’s water before we drink. And the positive upsides for us are enormous.

NeuroHarmonics and the Authentic Self

This is where NeuroHarmonics comes in. At its core, we speak of the Authentic Self — the indwelling presence that remains uncontaminated, untouched by the masks and playacting of daily life. And from this Authentic Self flows a constant, steady stream of truly pure water.

The first goal of the method is simply to help us notice the difference — to tune our attention toward the infinite source, the wellspring of clean water, instead of the sewage-tainted supply that reckless habits and unconscious living keep delivering to us.

Closing Reflection

The poisoned water saga of the 1800s was a true tragedy. But today, we face a new kind of germ theory — one that speaks to the makeup of our inner awareness. And with it comes a profound realization: we have a choice about what we consume within. And the pure, clean water of the Authentic Self is always available — if only we choose to turn to it. This is great news, because on the deepest level, what we need isn’t just clean running water. What we need is living water.

Well, that’s a lot of information, so let’s bring this episode to a close. As always, keep  your eyes, mind and heart open, and let’s get together in the next one.