The Door Between Known and Unknown
La puerta entre lo conocido y lo desconocido
A student reflects on the relationship between knowing and unknowing, and the teacher explores how recognizing the unknown can unlock intense psychological and physical material.
The Door Between Known and Unknown
A student reflects on the relationship between knowing and unknowing, and the teacher explores how recognizing the unknown can unlock intense psychological and physical material.
The whole time you kept talking about knowing, I was just going to unknowing. It's not really a question so much as something beautiful. I think I know what you mean by knowing, but somehow it's also 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.
The loss of freedom is identification with the known
The loss of freedom is the illusion that happens when we identify with what is known, with the experience of the body and 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.
In my experience, as soon as I start to actually admit how much is unknown, how it's all unknown, the physical sensations become so strong. Then 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.
When the unknown begins to surface
It can be very overwhelming. What happens in that process is not just that the reality of sensation can get really intense, but that there is psychological material: feelings, stories, what we could call the shadow and 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, because now you are giving room for all of that which is in the body-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 the full intensity of what comes.