The Door Between Knowing and Unknowing
La puerta entre el conocer y el no conocer
A student reflects on the paradox that true knowing and unknowing seem to be the same door, and the teacher explores what happens when the unknown begins to surface through the body and mind.
The Door Between Knowing and Unknowing
A student reflects on the paradox that true knowing and unknowing seem to be the same door, and the teacher explores what happens when the unknown begins to surface through the body and mind.
The whole time you kept talking about knowing, I was moving toward unknowing. It's not really a question so much as something beautiful. I think I know what you mean by knowing, but somehow it points to not knowing. It seems like it's the same door. I know the unknown.
Yes, I know you know what I'm talking about. I was in the flow of pointing to that in the meditation. I was trying to communicate an image of a door where on one side is what is known, and on the other side is the unknown. That is where the knowing is.
That's so beautiful. The question was about freedom and the unknown. It's the same thing. That's it.
Identification is always with the mind
The loss of freedom is the illusion that happens when we identify with what is known, with the experience, the body, the mind, which is always the mind, actually. I was hearing Francis Lucille talk about identification, and he said it's with the body or the mind. I actually disagree. I don't think we can identify with the body. We can only identify with the mind, but we can identify with an image of the body in the mind. We don't actually identify with the body.
When the unknown surfaces through the body
In my experience, as soon as I start to actually admit how much is unknown, that it's all unknown, the physical sensations become so strong. That generates thoughts, which generates more physical sensations. Until recently, I just wasn't able to not be taken over by the physical sensations, because I believed that something bad was happening. It's very strong.
It can be very overwhelming. What happens in that process is not just that the reality of sensation gets really intense. There is also psychological material: feelings, stories, the shadow, the unconscious. All of that starts to come up, and it comes up largely through the body and the mind. It starts to get unlocked the more you recognize the knowing. Now you are giving room for all of that which is held in the body and mind to come up and be made known. That can be one of the biggest challenges in this process: to be able to be with all of the intensity of what comes.