THE WISDOM OF NOT-KNOWING

“I have arrived. I am home. My destination is in each step.” Thich Nhat Hanh

“As soon as you concern yourself with the “good” and “bad” of your fellows, you create an opening in your heart for maliciousness to enter. Testing, competing with, and criticizing others weakens and defeats you.”
― Morihei Ueshiba, Founder Of Aikido

Not-knowing is not a platform we would first choose to subsist on. That is, to base ourselves solidly on. It has a precarious quality. It is something we have been taught to resist throughout our life. We, society in general, have prescribed the seeking of knowledge and the tracking down of unknowns so they can be known. It is scientific and educational to seek hard answers. It is our idea of excellence.

It is as if there is a real negative and no positive to not-knowing. Wikipedia this and Google that so that we have an answer instantly. Or Tweet about and hashtag it to get some input that someone somewhere has an opinion on the issue. There appears to be nowhere for the unknown to remain unknown. Is nothing sacred?!

When we rush to a conclusion and close down the opportunity to use a more long-term process to assess our limited knowing, we foster hasty cerebral conclusions. Not everything can be funneled into a taxonomic two-dimensional inflexible idea. We assume that everything we encounter is reducible to some category. For those things that do not comply, we say, we will get there eventually.

So sad to be so limiting.

Case-in-point was expressed by a relative, who was beset by the emerging difficulties and the increasing emergency nature of his current job. To leave the job, with an economy that has suffered job loss and restructuring to the extent that it has, would mean a real crap shoot for a viable alternative. The current situation and the more obvious alternative were analogous to being between a rock and a hard place.

This situation is typical of ‘not-knowing’ being a traditional problem. But is it?

Not-knowing and sitting peacefully on that slippery slope, is filled with ’not trying’. Not-knowing and not-trying is filled with an opening that was not there before. It is not doing nothing. It is seeing more and more without the pushing we ’think’ we need to do. When we push, both consciously and unconsciously, we alienate ourselves from infinite possibilities. We ’think’ we have all the solutions and do not allow the Universe to enter in to give it’s perennial wisdom.

The letting and allowing of non-ego based possibilities, fills the room with spaciousness allowing ‘all’ to come in, given our non-interference. The ego/mind controls, limits, and reduces experience/life into little pieces called ideas and then declares to be vigorously right. What a contrast.

In order to ‘not-know’ successfully, we need to see that our idea or image of our self is just that. Who we ‘think’ we are is an idea or image that needs elimination not replacement. Replacement would only repeat the problem in a different way. Elimination would immediately provide no security to whom we think we are. Being that also opens up our inner space to accept the vastness of possibility. There would be no security in not having a stable image nor would there be the security of having a hard and fast opinion.

Welcome to Being and non-clinging. The Song of the Jeweled Mirror Samadhi invokes “…above there is not a tile to cover his head; below, there is not an inch of ground…”. This is the freedom of not-knowing or clinging to anything but the Moment we are always embedded in. The solutions to our daily problems can be found in the deep listening to whom we really are, always.

There are conversations we are having with others and there are dialogues we are having with ourself. Listening better to our inner dialogue may prove to yield valuable insights into our own behavior and conclusions.

Julian Treasure, researcher and TED re-visitor, finds a vocation in the exploration of “listening.”
He suggests that listening is truly a gift to others as well as self. It creates understanding and allows us to live consciously. He throws us a couple of cautions to process in our seeking to be better listeners.

Our auditory bandwidth can only sustain 1.6 conversations at a time. In a noisy environment how many channels are we listening to at once? He clearly spells out the need for a minimum of 3 minutes per day of silence. We need to see the limitations of reductive listening (men) and expansive listening (women). The former being problem-solving for and the latter being flowing with and going on a conversational journey.

Listening better to the auditory ‘outside’ has its distinct advantages. However, when we are too engaged in the inner drama, we cannot process much from the ‘outside’. Having said the above, deeper listening on the inside has its advantages as well.

When we open up the space for processing the life, internally, we change the dynamics of our operating system. We lose the noise of the ego/mind. The constant interference of our signal from the deep Self is occluded when we sustain the idea and image of who we think we are, on a constant basis. When we start to ‘see’ the vapid and limiting mind-based knowledge, we shift out of the foreground into the backdrop of everything. Listening to the self-talk reveals the status of our connection to Self. The mind chatter becomes the backdrop of insignificance while the foreground now resounds with the deep resonance of Self revealed.

Not-knowing (cerebrally) and deep listening to the Silence, accesses the same space and time of infinite potential. The beauty of “wonder” cannot be quantified. IT Is. Be that, effortlessly.

See the Silence. Be the Moment. This Iz Daddy’O