When a room full of people looks to you for an answer you don't have, the instinct is to fill the gap — with words, with momentum, with the performance of knowing. The 11th-century Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta had a different model. In his Tantraloka, he argued that full awareness isn't the accumulation of more input but a kind of luminous 'resting in itself' — what he called vimarsha, the self-recognizing quality of consciousness that doesn't need to grasp outward to feel whole. That resonates strangely well with what modern psychologists call 'epistemic humility' — not the weakness of saying 'I don't know,' but the structural confidence of a mind that isn't threatened by open questions. The leader who can sit inside not-knowing without fidgeting transmits something that borrowed certainty never can: a settled quality that makes others feel the ground is firm even before the answer arrives.

What would someone observing your last difficult meeting say your body language communicated about your relationship with not knowing?

Drawing from Kashmir Shaivism (Abhinavagupta) combined with Epistemic Humility research (cognitive psychology) — Abhinavagupta (Tantraloka, ~1000 CE)