surrender to not knowing

Can one surrender to not knowing?

The human mind loves to know things. And when it doesn't know something, it will usually set about trying to find that information that is lacking, in order to know. And this tendency is so strong that even when one doesn't know, one can very easily fall into the trap of thinking that one knows.

Most of our knowledge is second hand. We read it somewhere, we heard it somewhere, or we just dreamt it up. Remarkably little comes from direct, first person experience. And even when we do experience something, our mind sees everything through its own filters. And so almost everything that we think we know, is really just a belief. And it seems that we cannot live without these beliefs. And here today I'm asking, can we surrender to not knowing?

It would feel like a surrender for sure. We so much want to know, that to give up on that would feel like a caving in. And I'm not at all sure that it is possible. Even in asking this question, that I don't know the answer to, I can see the mind wanting to find the answer. Yes, it is possible, or no, it's not possible.

This is the nature of our thinking mind and its craving for knowledge. It always needs to settle somewhere, somewhere black and white, somewhere clear. And that urge is so strong that we will convince ourself that we know something, even when the evidence for it is very suspect, tenuous.

And why do I ask this question? My feeling is it's of great significance on the spiritual journey. As we delve deeper into spirituality, we don't know things in the way that people ordinarily do. Of course you might just read lots of scripture and take that on as knowledge, and in that case it is again second hand knowledge, really of no value whatsoever. But assuming that one enters the spiritual path whole heartedly, then it becomes a voyage of discovery. But for that discovery to happen, one has to enter this space of not knowing. I say enter this space, in truth it is just a case of acknowledging that we do not know, acknowledging that everything that we think of is knowledge is really just a huge belief system, belief part on top of belief, a lot of hearsay, a lot of second hand knowledge.

And to exist, even for a moment, in a space of not knowing, is a tremendous experience. Suddenly it's as if existence has become infinite for the first time. One can sense somehow, the potential in everything. But to feel this expansiveness, one has to empty oneself of knowledge. One has to become an empty vessel. And really the way to do that is to see that this knowledge, that we have filled ourself up with, is masquerading. It's not really knowledge at all, just a fairly arbitrary set of beliefs and ideas, most of which have been handed to us.

So let's see, at least as an experiment: can we, can we admit that we do not know? And further than that, we cannot know. Having seen that we cannot know, then that surrender can happen. And in the space of surrender, in that vast spaciousness of not knowing, then there is the possibility for something new to come. But only if we have surrendered to not knowing.