Softening Into Not Knowing
Suavizarse en el No Saber
A student describes a shift from resisting the idea of "not knowing anything" to experiencing it as an opening, and the teacher reflects on what it means to trust the intelligence already present in life.
Softening Into Not Knowing
A student describes a shift from resisting the idea of "not knowing anything" to experiencing it as an opening, and the teacher reflects on what it means to trust the intelligence already present in life.
I would like to talk about softening in a certain context. The idea of "I don't know anything" is now being experienced rather than merely understood. Before, I couldn't accept it. Every time I heard people talk about not knowing anything, I went into dissociation and fought against the idea. I often argued within myself: if I don't understand anything, if I don't know anything, if I don't understand what people are talking about, how do I even have a conversation? I had that struggle often, and I also became somewhat dissociated from everything. I fell into a trap of "not knowing anything," and that was my difficulty.
Now I experience it differently. The idea is being experienced rather than being understood. I don't understand what it means to "not know anything," and that itself is the softening. Even intellectually, the softening means there is no rejection of this idea anymore. So that's the softening, or opening.
I don't even try to understand conversations now. I don't know how conversation works. It's a bit like hearing: I don't know how hearing works, but somehow hearing is happening. There is less and less trying to understand, trying to see something. There is a giving up. And it actually feels nice and easier with life. Giving up is easier.
It depends on what is meant by "giving up." I have to be careful with the language and the semantics, because the mind can take that phrase and do a lot of strange things with it.
The bicycle and the intelligence already here
But in the way you're describing it, and what I'm feeling into, it's like this: you've been riding a bicycle for a long time. You know how to ride a bicycle. But you get on the bicycle and you're always worried about which foot to move and how to do it, and that actually makes the riding not only more unpleasant but less skillful.
That is what ninety-nine percent of life is like: a trying to control things to get somewhere, versus simply the flowing of experience and the trusting of the intelligence that is already here, already in the body, mind, and the universe. Because it's one organism. Body, mind, universe: it's all one organism, like a cell in a body. The cell knows what to do if it just flows with the environment and its own nature. We are, in a sense, like a cell within the universe.
Letting knowing flow naturally
So what you're describing is exactly that: the exploration of the opening of knowing, the loosening of the attachment to knowing in a very limited way, which is really the attachment to control. And then letting the knowing that is already there flow naturally. It is more like a spontaneity. It's like when you're riding a bicycle and something moves into your path: you spontaneously move around it. You don't plan for it and practice it.
Yes, totally. I feel it's just softer. Everything feels softer.
That's a really good way to put it. Thank you very much.