Embracing Reality: Relaxing into the “Not-Knowing”
Part one of a multi-part series on Becoming Not-Knowing
As natural as it is to want to control life, the fantasy that we can create a perfect life only creates stress and pain. Control is not real, so it becomes an unreachable goal. It’s antithetical to reality, which is that life is a process of evolution with constant challenges. And it creates shame, because we think we should conquer life and, if we don’t, there must be something wrong with us.
Our perceived need to dominate life feeds our determination to learn and know everything, because knowledge is power, and we think we can use that power to fix everything and get what we want. And so a major block to relaxing into the process of living is the belief that we already “know” what is and what is supposed to be.
Let’s be honest about a few points:
- We are afraid to sit with the unknown and unknowable, because it feels stressful.
- To relieve that stress, we pretend we know, but are often completely or at least partially misguided. Has that resolved our stress? No. Because we still feel the need to know, know that we don’t, and yet have to pretend to ourselves and others that we do, all the while realizing that our ignorance could cause disastrous mistakes. So actually we have compounded our stress, which we try to alleviate by pretending that we know.
- Plus we frequently think we know how things should be, which creates unrealistic expectations of ourselves and others, and then we struggle to make reality fit our preconceptions, which also creates needless stress.
How can we partner with life when we’ve already decided what life should be? How can we be available to a higher consciousness, when we think we already know what is and should be? How can we relax into the process of living, when we’re trying to dominate life itself?
An Introduction to Becoming Not-Knowing
Becoming Not-Knowing is the process of releasing ourselves from the need to know or pretend we do, becoming empty of agendas and limitations, and living moment by moment in the Not-Knowing and the discovery, guided by higher consciousness.
There’s a lot to this, but let’s start with what I mean by higher consciousness. Higher consciousness is the intelligence greater than ours that runs the universe. Some call it inspiration, higher wisdom, God, The Source, divine intelligence, the Great Spirit, a higher power; there are many names that refer to the same reality. Higher consciousness is not a religious concept, although it shows up in many religions; it is an acknowledgement of a level of awareness that is greater than our own.
It comes to us in the silence when our egos are quiet. It is the inner knowing that surprises us with its wisdom. It is that sudden inspiration; it’s what tells us that we left our keys in the dryer, or it pops into our heads as a brilliant solution, when we’ve been puzzled and see no way out.
Becoming not knowing, then, is making ourselves available to higher consciousness by releasing the need to know, releasing agendas and letting go of our identification with our ordinary stream of thoughts. There are several practices that support us in releasing barriers to accessing higher consciousness and to discern if we are accessing higher consciousness or not. We’ll share those in Part 2, our next installment. In the meantime, here are some questions to consider regarding higher consciousness:
- Have you ever experienced inspiration?
- Have you ever experienced an inner voice that seems to know more than you do?
- Have you ever experienced a lightness of being, where you felt different; happy, and calm?
- Have you ever experienced an energy penetrating you or a feeling that you were vibrating or tingling, when there was no physical explanation?
- Are these experiences worth working for?
This post is an excerpt from the book, Living with Reality: A Book of Wisdom, by Beth Green, and is taken from Platform 8, Becoming Not-Knowing.
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It seems like the more I live the less I know. I’m thinking about martial arts (or dance or any discipline). I’m currently the mentor for the orange belts at my school. Orange is the first official belt level after general white. Orange belts know everything; they’re super bad ass. They want to learn things super fast, get all the material and kick ass. I am a green belt – and I’ve been practicing martial arts for about 10ish years. Green belt is the first advanced level belt (before brown & black). As a green belt I ‘know nothing’. I know just enough to know how little I know. When I attend advanced class, I am in a sea of my own not knowing. Even if I witness the knowledge of my more advanced peers – I know that I don’t know enough to know it. It is forever humbling. And that has taught me the art of ‘showing up’.
So if I *know* that – then what’s so frightening about not-knowing. Here are some of my life-assumptions….
•If I don’t know, I will be shamed and/or publicly humiliated.
•If I don’t know, I will fail – I think of this predominantly in work. Therefore, I will not make enough money and won’t be able to provide for my family. We will lose everything, which leads to…
•If I don’t know I will die (or maybe more correctly – I will suffer)
•If I don’t know, people will think ill of me – think I am stupid, incompetent, value-less…. So…
•If I don’t know, I have no value.
BUT I’m also aware that one of the things I’m really good at in corporate settings is just approaching work with real & genuine curiosity. I usually just grit, bear down and ask the ‘stupid’ questions which often turn out to be on everyone’s mind. I stay in inquiry and continue to ask questions. This helps me be a good problem solver because I stay in inquiry long enough to get underneath what everyone ‘thinks’ the problem is and get down to the root. And sometimes that means uncovering the place where people are unwilling to change, where they heaped on layers of ‘pretending to know’ because ‘knowing’ would mean really dealing with the problem.
So like so much of life, I feel two opposing things 1) that I am terrified of not-knowing and 2) the ability to be with not-knowing and stay in inquiry has been successful in a certain way and leads to great problem solving.
As a mathematician, I am very comfortable in not-knowing. One of my profs said, “Once you realize we’re all idiots, only then can you do math.”
We can certainly take this to the next level. One you realize we are all idiots, only then can you live life.
I, like Dawn, will jump in an ask the questions no one else wants to say aloud.
Sometimes, though, it takes me a while to be comfortable in a situation. Like a new group of people. I have to remind myself that everyone there is scared like I am. Then I know that no matter what everyone looks like, we’re all in the same boat.
To answer the questions:
1) I experience inspiration all the time. I live in a state of inspiration. Not sure why, though. It just happens to me.
2) I have no inner voices. But I have lots of friends who know more than I do and tell me. Not snotty-like, but out of genuine sharing and helping me grow.
3) I experience lightness of being and feel different happy and calm all the time. When I drink beer. Or when I watch Daughter observe the world. Otherwise I pretty much ride a normal sine wave of stress.
4) I feel energy and tingling when I have a new idea. Or I’m in love. But the new ideas wear off pretty fast because I have no follow through. The love thing… well, that tingly wears off too. But I do have follow through with it.
5) I don’t work hard having inspiration or new ideas. The just happen. It is almost painful. Like the song “Isn’t it ironic,” I have great ideas and lots of inspiration and nothing to make them go. Like a big fancy car and no gas.
The experiences worth working for are the ones where I have someone helping me follow through. I have a coach for my website that’s helping with that. And I have Husband that helps with the follow through of marriage, parenting and life.
THOSE are the experiences worth working for.
Bon
Nearly all of the things you claim happens to be supprisingly precise and it makes me wonder why I hadn’t looked at this with this light previously. This particular piece truly did switch the light on for me as far as this subject matter goes. But there is one factor I am not necessarily too comfortable with and while I try to reconcile that with the actual main theme of the issue, allow me see just what all the rest of the readers have to point out.Well done.