by Steve Tanham
Last Sunday evening, we held our monthly Silent Eye Explorations on Zoom; hosting an international audience for an informal and informative discussion on the subject of the ‘Ways of Knowing’.
These are open to all – see the base of this post for details.
The content of that 90 minutes was a thorough investigation of what it mean to know, and how we take for granted something that goes as deeply into our core as we care to travel… Towards the end of the talk we touched on the fascinating idea that ‘not-knowing’ has its own power and dynamism – a dynamism of surprising potency.
Our ordinary view of knowing might be summarised as this: we take in information via our senses, then organise it into useful structures known as knowledge. Using logic we can enrich this so that, over time, we come to transform it into wisdom; a process that often reverses our gut-reactions to the sensory stimulus.
Someone skilled in martial arts might have learned that the blow aimed at their body by an opponent has its own momentum which can be stopped or stepped aside from. If the latter, the foe is now disadvantaged because the target has moved but their momentum, now invested with all their energy, has not.
Wisdom is often the creation of a non-panicked ‘thinking space’ in which the goal is not to react; instead considering the options from an unhurried and more mature vantage point. Reactive people are seldom the most powerful.
But all this is centred on what we might call ‘ordinary knowing’ – the intake of experience and its transformation into reliable knowledge: something the brain excels at. We have proposed in previous posts that the ‘organ of experience’ is the Soul; and that the processing of experience is tightly bound up with our sense of self.
Ordinary knowledge may come to us in an exciting flash but is soon dulled. People in the SE-Explore group remarked how often in their lives this had happened. That breakthrough in understanding had a palpable excitement to it, and yet, a short time later, the shine had gone off what remained.
The nature of what remains is the story of how experience is translated from vivid reality into something quite different, and grasping this can be the key to opening a different relationship with our real world.
When the mind encounters something for the first time, it does not know its details. But it knows it to BE. In truth, this knowledge of the object’s Being is a deep and mysterious form of knowing in itself. The mind is forced to encounter this new ‘thing’ at a higher level of itself than that of the repetitive ‘now’ – ordinary knowing, as we have termed it.
But the mind’s function is to reduce all experience to concepts: the building blocks of its logic and the basis of the economy with which it can deal with the world’s sensory input. The problem is that such concepts are essentially pictures – representations of what was a vivid new experience, carefully labelled and packaged into the ordinary known.
Over a short period of time, the freshness of the experience is transformed into the ‘sameness’ of memory, and the excitement and energy of the first encounter with the true reality of the ‘object’ is lost. We may wax lyrical with prose or even poetry – which often get closest to restoring a sense of being freshly with the original experience. But the initial vitality of experience is usually gone.
To deepen our consideration, we need to think about the state of not-knowing. Is it valid to ‘not-know something?
It is, in fact we do it all the time…
When we approach something new – perhaps learning so make something in wood, learning a new language or cooking a new dish – we have a beautiful moment where we truly do not know what lies ahead. In view of what we said, above, about the dullness of previous experience, re-experienced as an representation in memory, it is to our great benefit to carry out this learning of something new by assuming a state of mind where we embrace the state of not-knowing. Then, when we embark on the new, the intensity of the experience will leave lasting and very alive traces in our soul.
Repeated use of this will change the way we approach everything new. Gradually, this will alter our consciousness, showing us that vivid experiences are possible at any stage of our lives.
In the final part of the series, next week, we will look at the states of mind and being needed to give your life enough of a ‘shake’ to make an initial path into this most exciting of journeys.
To be continued in Part 9, the final part of the series.
To join our monthly SE-Explore Zoom meetings, simply send an email to Rivingtide@gmail.com. There are no prerequisites and you will be very welcome.
Other Parts of this series:
Part Four: The Edge of the Known
Nine Keys (6) An uprising of Self
©Copyright Stephen Tanham
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
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