Wednesday, October 30, 2019

That whereby the mind can think


What cannot be spoken with words, but that thereby words are spoken:
know that alone to be Brahman, the spirit, and not what people here adore.
What can not be thought with the mind, but that whereby the mind can think:
know that alone to be Brahman, the spirit, and not what people here adore.
-Kena Upanishads (excerpt from Sacred Scriptures of the world's religions, Joan A. Price, 2010)


How do I serve?  How do I give what is left of "my life" ( Life) away? What is my Life? Who am I?

I  am praying on that  and I am meditating on that  and ...the answer I keep coming up with is I just don't know!

I used to be so terrified of those words, "I don't know."  I thought they diminished "me"...made me smaller and less adequate. I would ceaselessly attempt to find the answer to every question brought to me. Now I see how absolutely freeing and powerful those words are.

There is beauty in "I don't know." There is freedom, peace and "relief".  Not just because it is an easy way to answer all questions and dilemmas that come our way.  Not because it is an escape and a cop out...but because it is actually a key that takes us further into stillness, presence and truth. It takes us to Self.


We do not need to know everything with the mind.  We do not have to understand it all with thinking.  Beneath all that thought and that mental schemata, what Patanjali referred to as "mental modifications",  is something that cannot be known.  It is that something we wish to tap into.  It is the "I don't know" that teaches, not words or explanations.

When we remove all the pseudo understanding from our experience as we do something so simple as look out upon a tree, we  are   going to slip into something a little deeper than a mental construct.  When we remove the "Oh that is an O ak and those are its branches.  Those seeds are acorns that the Blue Jays like to eat," and instead just sit there looking at it with an, "I really don't know this," something amazing happens.  We get out of our limited   heads  and sink into a true experience of alertness, stiness,    appreciation and awe. We stop thinking, narrating, describing and we just are with the tree.

We can do the same when we look inward and ask that age old question, "who am I?"  And by that we are not asking what is going on in my psyche; we are not necessarily trying to analyze out r thinking.  We are taking it farther than words or any idea we have of self.  We see that we truly cannot understand who we are with the mind.


"Man, know thyself!" should really be, "Man, be okay with not knowing Self."  Self realization is all about realizing how little we do know, how much of our being, our experience here is so miraculous and mysterious we could never understand fully with these limited minds we are given.  And the thing is...we don't have to.  We do not have to reduce all that beauty, all that mystery into words and concepts that we bound together under the term "knowledge."

We can simply be in awe as we don't know.  Mind cannot go into that ultimate stillness within where "not knowing" takes us.  No words, concepts or ideas will ever be able to describe it.  So we do not limit its magnitude with thinking...we simply experience the truth that is there.

How cool is that?

All is well in my world.


Eckhart Tolle ( March, 2016) Omega 3. Namaste Publishing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ld2YRg23vkY







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