not knowing

In the last episode, I talked about curiosity. And in this episode, I'd like to talk about a related attitude, and that is, not knowing. Ordinarily, we tend to believe that we know things, lots of things. And that sense of knowing is what allows us to live from habit. We just assume that everything is as we know it to be, as it was yesterday and the day before. We have become, effectively, know-it-alls.

And what a pain in the ass know-it-alls are. Isn't it annoying when you're talking to someone and they know everything? And the difficulty is, most of us are like that, with ordinary day to day things at the very least. Without really bringing too much awareness to it, we believe that we know things. And what I'm suggesting here is to develop an attitude of not knowing.

This not knowing allows us to be curious. Otherwise, how can curiosity exist? And the other thing about not knowing is that it really honours the fact that life, existence, is a changing, flowing, moving thing. It's not rigid, it's not fixed. We don't just live in a concrete world. Things change.

So when we are wedded to knowledge, that knowledge is really an attempt by the mind to make things fixed, to make life stagnate. Luckily, life doesn't allow this, and it keeps flowing regardless of our thinking mind and its knowledge. So not knowing is a more realistic attitude.

And with this attitude of not knowing, I encourage you also not to be in too much of a hurry to know. See if you can come to live in a world where you don't know things for sure, where everything is a little uncertain. Things are not black and white, but they are rather shades of grey. Things are not clear cut, they're rather fuzzy around the edges.

This sort of approach is rather difficult for the thinking mind, which always wants things to be neat and organised and categorised. But when we live in that knowledge, that world of knowledge, we distance ourself from direct contact with the rest of existence. Life is here all around us, and inside us too. To really dwell in life, to really make contact and immerse oneself in life, we can't afford to sit at home in our safe, secure, comfortable knowledge. That's like a concrete cell that we have built for ourself. It's very square, very regular, and it's dead.

So to really taste life in an intimate way, to really live life, we need to develop this attitude of not knowing, and not being in a hurry to know, to rather enjoy dwelling in the space of not knowing. This space of not knowing has such an innocence to it. From this space, we can really see what is around us. We can once more be alive to our senses. We can once more meet life.