WAYS OF KNOWING
More than mental intellect
The default program of our mind is control. Controlling this or that thing, situation or scenario gives us the experience of “known.” Known feels like solid, certain, reliable fact, which our mind then says “it’s ok to relax now” and our body follows suit. While this seems like a program for success, it leaves us tight, constricted and constrained most to the time. All the while doing our best to keep things known or the same. The issue with this is that when things are unknown, which if we are honest is most of the time, we don’t enjoy our experience of living because we don’t feel like it’s safe to relax. We also spend a lot of time tensed up in our body-mind. We can’t quite unwind the tension because we don’t see how much control we are exerting over everything in order to feel like we know what is going on.
It is curious why we have such a negative relationship with the unknown, or what I prefer to call the mystery. While our mind’s near constant attempts to make sense out of things dominates our awareness, nothing else seems to get to participate in the experience of living. It is not negative to attempt to understand things, however when we use only our mental faculties to do so we are massively handicapping ourselves. While the mental intellect with its thinking processes has dominated the landscape of our human way of being for some time now, it doesn’t mean that it is our only mode of learning, taking in information or being with. We are more multifaceted than we give ourselves credit for. We have physical bodies that can purely sense. We have an emotional body that can feel. We have soul bodies that can instantly and intuitively know. Not necessarily know factual knowledge like 1 +1 = 2, but know what our lesson is in whatever experience we find ourselves in. We can also know how to move our body, where to metaphorically turn, or what to do without “knowing” why in the way our mental body thinks it knows.
While these ways of knowing may seem foreign to you, it’s simply because you haven’t been using them. It is not fundamentally hard to sense, feel or intuitively listen, you just need to train yourself to do so. When you find yourself going up to your mind in attempt to figure something out logically, and you begin to feel that old familiar tension creep in, you need to pause yourself and try a different way. Activate the other pathways of sensing, feeling and intuition that are available to you rather than depending solely on your mind. Stop exhausting yourself, and physically burning yourself out, trying to use your thoughts to control and make sense of your life.
BEING WITH MYSTERY
Relaxing into confusion
Ok so now that you’ve discovered that there are more ways to know let’s dive into mystery. What is mystery? Mystery is the present moment. It is suspension of what we think we know. It is the experience of magic. It is knowing without knowing what, why or how you know. You just do. Not because you are thinking, but because you are not thinking. While this is likely very confusing to your mind, that’s when you know you are on it. It’s really a matter of a shift in relationship. See when confusion arises we perceive it negatively. We think we need to get clear by attaining some mental understanding, which often we can’t seem to attain. Inside of this experience we create a lot of tension trying to get our minds to make sense of whatever is appearing or not appearing. Tension is resistance to what is rather than experiencing what is. The remedy to this so speak is that we need to relax into confusion rather than resisting it. This is the shift in relationship.
Relaxing allows us to experience whatever is present. This is the only state of being where we can receive information. So often our experience of “not knowing” is simply us experiencing our resistance and not a true not knowing. Our resistance gives us the experience of not being able to know something, but no information is secretly kept away from us. All is available, it’s just that you can’t receive what’s here because you are in so much resistance and have attachment to things being a certain way in your life. I promise that even if your mind can’t perceive information there is no shortage of information. Information is in everything! In fact information is everything. All forms, all expressions, all content is made of information.
So the paradox here is that when we relax into confusion, into not knowing, into mental uncertainty, then we know. We may not know what we think we are going to know. We may discover and reveal completely different things, but nonetheless we will come alive and into the experience of living. We will finally let ourselves be informed rather than attempting to figure things out. We will step our mind out of the central knowing position, give it break, let it rest and decommission it as the primary knower. Through this we will see that the mystery is what knows. How could that which seems so illusive, so uncertain, so intangible, be the knower? I don’t know how or why, all I can tell you is that it is.
When you finally get to your breaking point, where you can no longer resist what is, when you’ve got no fight left in you at all, when your body starts falling apart from all of the tension you’ve placed on it and when you can no longer go on as you’ve been going on, you will arrive at the doors of the mystery. Entering the doorway opens you into the vast landscape of potentialities and possibilities. What will arise up out of the landscape is whatever is relevant for you to experience. There is no agenda here. No force, no grasp, no control. There is only participation with the mystery. There is agreement with whatever is. There is playing with the flavors of experience without any resistance to anything. There is the naturalness and the soulgasmic experience of being part of all that is.
Dr. Amanda Love, Network Spinal Chiropractor, Boulder, Colorado
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