The Book of Not Knowing: Exploring the True Nature of Self, Mind, and Consciousness
Highlights
The Book of Not Knowing: Exploring the True Nature of Self, Mind, and Consciousness
I urge you to consider that enlightenment is not a matter to be pursued as an abstract concept or some fantasy on a mountaintop. Taking on the work in this book means a real and personal commitment to experience the truth of your own being and reality, whatever that may turn out to be. I can help you with this, but it will do you no good just to believe what I say. In fact, as any Zen master knows, students need to cast aside all beliefs and make the trip for themselves.
The Book of Not Knowing: Exploring the True Nature of Self, Mind, and Consciousness
I promise that if you delve deeply into what’s being said, create the insights you’re invited to create, and work hard to truly grasp this communication in your own experience, your entire outlook and experience of life and self will be transformed in ways that you cannot yet comprehend. This book is about penetrating to the very source and nature of the human condition. In other words, it is about you.
The Book of Not Knowing: Exploring the True Nature of Self, Mind, and Consciousness
We question not for an answer, but to experience whatever is true.
Beyond the Self Mind
As we grow, we assimilate and develop very basic beliefs and conclusions, not only about the world but also about ourselves. These core beliefs fall into the background as permanent organizing factors for all new information. As a survival mechanism it’s quite efficient, but one of the major drawbacks is that all future encounters will be biased by these previous conclusions. This is no small matter. Anything we perceive—even whether or not we perceive it—is subject to the filter of our beliefs and assumptions. What we don’t realize is that we are so deeply entrenched in these convictions and beliefs that they are unrecognizable. Our core beliefs simply appear to us as reality.
We don’t know who discovered water, but we’re certain it wasn’t a fish.
—John Culkin
Beyond the Self Mind
It’s not hard to discern when other people’s beliefs and assumptions are self-serving or mistaken, but recognizing this dynamic in ourselves is another story. Just as an eye cannot see itself, the awareness from which we perceive the world has no ability to perceive itself. This makes recognizing and questioning our own beliefs a uniquely difficult undertaking. As with an eye, we are constantly aware of the view, while giving little or no thought to what is providing it. We don’t notice the set of assumptions from which we comprehend the world, and yet it determines our reality in every moment.
Beyond the Self Mind
If you are honestly willing to look into these considerations, this work will engage you in a process of becoming increasingly conscious of the real nature of self, and the true nature of being. If you happen to discover some handy tips for better living here, fine, but that is not the purpose of this communication. To get anything truly useful, you’re going to have to get it in the form of a conscious experience. You’re probably not sure what I mean by that, which is one of the reasons we’re going to proceed with this whole endeavor as though we’re ascending a steep mountain. Like traversing a switchback trail, we will encounter the same views again and again, but always from a slightly higher vantage point.
Knowing and Not-Knowing
Although the dangers associated with physical survival may have eased a bit over time, our increasingly more complicated social structures demand an ever-expanding range of knowledge. The stakes are high in our social survival. What we “know”—or appear to know—not only creates our sense of identity, it also establishes our place in the community, which determines the degree of access we have to all that we need in order to survive, both socially and physically
Knowing and Not-Knowing
It’s not surprising that we frequently hear the phrase “knowledge is power.” In fact, that is one of many culturally accepted truisms that so often obscure the larger truth. We unquestioningly assume that if knowing is power then not knowing must signify weakness.
Knowing and Not-Knowing
Every aspect of a person’s individuality—indeed, his entire experience of self, life, and reality—is largely a product of the culture in which he lives. And of course, everything he knows to be true, and all the knowledge that he can access, is also based on this unrecognized cultural framework. Becoming aware of this framework creates the possibility of freedom from it, and freedom from it empowers our ability to discover the truth for ourselves.
Knowing and Not-Knowing
Humanity advances through the contributions of individuals. Before any contribution, there is insight, and before insight, there must be openness. The opening power of not-knowing is found wherever creativity is active. Whether they’re aware of it or not, artists abide in not-knowing when they create, athletes need it to get into the “zone,” lovers use it to allow total communion with another, and scientists must continually return to it before they can make any new discovery. This key to the very source of creativity is available to every human being in every circumstance, and we can all use it to help find our way to a deeper and more genuine experience of ourselves.
No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.
—Albert Einstein
Self and Being
Our ability to transcend the conceptual aspect of self isn’t some mystical journey to be undertaken with lots of chanting and incense. It requires no rituals or ceremony, no spiritual doctrine, and no beliefs at all. Such efforts can only supply us with additional concepts, which often merely feed our fantasies, or at least distract us from our goal of an authentic experience. Transcending the self does not involve making “additions” to yourself or to your knowledge, or increasing your activities, but rather the opposite. It is simply the ability to locate and become deeply conscious of a genuine experience of “being.”
Knowing and Not-Knowing
Unless we’re open and willing to directly experience the truth of something for ourselves, there is no way for such an experience to take place. If we rely on hearsay, or fill in all the blanks with beliefs, no genuine experience is likely to occur. Any time that we can open up and not know, we clear a space for understanding something beyond our habits of thinking. This is how someone like Picasso might suddenly be able to see the world in a new way.
Self and Being
We probably all get a glimpse of our own “being” at one time or another, so it’s safe to say that everything needed to accomplish this is already with us. What’s also true is that just about everyone experiences some form of resistance to the work of becoming more conscious of self and being, and this resistance is often hard to recognize at first. Remaining open and honest without ignoring whatever we experience can help us face any challenges that may arise.
Self and Being
Making a distinction between our real selves—what we might call “being”—and our conceptual selves can sound simple enough on paper, and essentially it is. But in practice we find that we continually bump into obstacles that arise from our habitual thinking and familiar emotions, and from assumptions that we unknowingly share as a culture. That’s why one aspect of this work involves learning to recognize how cultural assumptions and habitual beliefs can stand in the way of any genuine experience.
The most profound experiences arise from questioning the obvious.
Self and Being
In the hope of “finding” ourselves, we might explore yoga or extreme sports, practice meditation, study an art form, join a spiritual movement, or read books on philosophy. We might not find our real selves, but we do keep busy!
Self and Being
It seems that an honest and clear perception of oneself is “incompatible” with any familiar and habitual self-identity. Rather than dwell in the uncertain realm of the real, it’s much easier for us to revert to an already established and acceptable sense of self. Wary of uncharted territory, our awareness falls quickly and easily back into the habits and routines that serve our many self-concerns. What we don’t realize is that anything we do, think, or feel from here simply adds more layers to the self-identity
Self and Being
If you inquire a little into boredom you will find that the cause of it is loneliness. It is in order to escape from loneliness that we want to be together, we want to be entertained, to have distractions of every kind, gurus, religious ceremonies, prayers, or the latest novel. Being inwardly lonely we become mere spectators in life; and we can be the players only when we understand loneliness and go beyond it.
… because beyond it lies the real treasure.
—J. Krishnamurti
Self and Being
Consider once again the two aspects of your self: the one that you know as self, which is founded on a collection of overlooked assumptions and beliefs; and the other, which is who you really are prior to the layers of conceptual identity that presently obscure your authentic experience of being. What if you could learn to live your life from this more genuine self? Would it make you rich, sexy, lovable? Maybe
The Book of Not Knowing: Exploring the True Nature of Self, Mind, and Consciousness
The Delphic Oracle said that I was the wisest of all the Greeks. It is because I alone of all the Greeks know that I know nothing.
—Socrates
Learning to Not-Know
In any sport, art, or craft, the techniques can only give us a direction. At some point we must diverge from our reliance on intellectual data, let go of assumptions, associations, emotional considerations, and “knowing.” Once we open up to engage with what is truly real in this instant, genuine insight becomes possible, and we reach our greatest levels of creativity.
Learning to Not-Know
Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.
—Arthur Schopenhauer
Natural Contemplation
Any valid inquiry begins with not-knowing, or else it merely serves to confirm what is already known.
Natural Contemplation
Making a shift from knowing to not-knowing opens up a space for new understanding to arise. Clearly this shift is necessary for creativity, but many people don’t realize that it is also the basis for contemplation.
Natural Contemplation
Unable to train as much as I wanted, I’d spend hours working out the throws in my mind. One day, I suddenly realized what the “essence” of Judo was, and my skill took a giant leap forward. Virtually overnight, I became good at it, whereas before this insight I was no better than any other beginner in my class. From this experience, I became convinced of the power of contemplation to bring about insight. I wanted more, and naturally continued to investigate things on my own, but then at age twenty I took up the study of Zen.
Zen Influence
The word Zen means “to sit” and refers to a practice of meditation. The purpose for this meditation is to reach what Zen people call “enlightenment”—a leap in consciousness to a sudden awareness of the essential nature of “being.” Since such an experience cannot be achieved through the use of the intellect, it lies outside of what we know. It is literally “unthinkable,” which is why Zen has a reputation for being puzzling or nonsensical. Through prolonged meditation, the austerity of having no distractions, and the Zen master’s unanswerable questions, the practitioner is pushed beyond his “knowing.” At this point, if he lets go of his mind, he is ripe for life-altering insight. Not-knowing is an essential part of making such a leap in awareness.
Zen Influence
one of the more significant discoveries came as I worked to discern the difference between what I personally experienced to be true and what I only believed to be true. It was here—beyond beliefs, dogma, and wishful thinking—that I discovered the awakening power of not-knowing. Since it exists in a place that few think to look, it isn’t common or popular, but venturing into this domain produces a freedom and provides new possibilities with each step. Everyone has access to this same facility, but the “place” we need to come from is buried under countless layers of beliefs.
Zen Influence
It’s true that beliefs are very powerful. It’s not a new idea that to change anything about ourselves, we must change the beliefs from which our emotions and behavior are created. Several popular self-help trainings involve consciously exchanging one set of beliefs for another. For example, a person who lacks faith in himself might try to override his negative self-image by deliberately formulating a belief that he is intelligent and capable. If he can maintain this new perspective, he will begin to interpret events differently, and his more positive interpretations will support an increasingly positive view of himself. Although this kind of work can have a positive effect, it does nothing to increase our understanding of the real nature of mind or the self.
Relating Differently to Beliefs
Fabricating a few more optimistic beliefs might help alter some aspect of our behavior, but it does not, and cannot, lead to a more genuine sense of self.
Relating Differently to Beliefs
In fact, most of what we think of as our selves is simply an amassed collection of beliefs and assumptions
Relating Differently to Beliefs
Being driven by your beliefs is a very different matter than consciously understanding how it is your beliefs are created and what purpose they serve.
Relating Differently to Beliefs
If all you’ve ever done with your beliefs is just believe them, taking a look “under the hood” at what you hold as true can be a radical shift. It’s an investigation that takes place within your self, so while it may sound strange, it’s not inaccurate to call this direction more “intimate” than blindly following your beliefs. If you’ve been reading mindfully, you’ve probably noticed something of this already. Such “self-intimacy” on an immediate experiential level can be exhilarating, as well as uncomfortable at times—something like getting a glimpse of the unexplored frontier of your own consciousness. So, while it’s wise to be prepared for some sort of reaction, all you need to recognize for now is that it’s possible to make a shift regarding your beliefs, and open up to a genuine experience of this moment.
Relating Differently to Beliefs
Once we truly experience the nature of beliefs, we can decide to keep those that we consider empowering or otherwise useful, or take steps to detach ourselves from all of them if we choose. And while “detachment” from something can sound cold or emotionless, it also aptly describes an experience of freedom, of unencumbrance, and that is what I mean here. I’m talking about opening up to the possibility of experiencing what’s true rather than believing whatever comes to mind based on the same old presumptions.
Relating Differently to Beliefs
Shifting from belief to experience is like the difference between, say, trying to eat the picture on the menu rather than the food itself
Creating a New Perspective
Get that in this moment you personally do not actually know what shape the planet is
Empty Your Cup
If we look closely at this state of mind, we find that at its base is simply openness, a willingness to not-know. This aspect of wisdom’s clarity usually goes unrecognized, since what followers most often seek is knowledge and answers
Empty Your Cup
Since this is impossible to understand, for most people such wisdom will always seem mysterious.
Empty Your Cup
The more you can free yourself of countless beliefs—instead staying with a sense of not-knowing—the stronger your sense of the present moment will become.
Empty Your Cup
Although the beliefs might be numerous and varied, the not-knowing will always be the same. It is only one experience, and it is always now and always true. Use this to open up and wonder about the nature of your awareness of this very moment.
We Are Culture
Our culture is, in fact, what constructs our frame of mind. We all operate from a set of shared taken-for-granted beliefs—the matrix of our culture. This “consensus reality” may unite us in a shared domain of thought and perception, but many of the inherited assumptions behind it actually foster a sense of uncertainty and isolation. Various perspectives of our culture seem to offer solutions to our individual doubts and insecurities, but since these remedies arise from the same assumptions that cause the difficulty, they do not and cannot resolve our deep sense of personal inauthenticity and disquiet.
We Are Culture
Over time the word “culture” has come to indicate the collective viewpoint and customs of any group of people
We Are Culture
We tend to overlook the fact that a culture exists only within the people who make it up.
We Are Culture
When we look at it impartially, it’s plain that culture is purely conceptual—there is no culture outside the minds of the people who comprise one. Our culture is made up of our collective temperament and values, our assumptions and beliefs, our methods of thinking and our cosmologies. Our culture is found in every building, every word, every idea, every routine, every ritual, every method, every book, every mind, every emotion, every value, every action, every bias—in short, it’s made up of everything we do and are.
We Are Culture
Since we’re born into a culture, we can no more avoid being shaped by it and passing it along to our children than we can avoid being the product of a gene pool
We Are Culture
The assumptions of our culture exist in our minds and perception, in our feelings and beliefs. Although they are “merely” conceptual, they live within each of us, as a very basic part of our experience, and they manifest in every activity we undertake and in every place we live. Our culture, our community, our society is you and I—and everyone else. Culture exists in us. It is one of the most basic factors in the framework from which we perceive the world around us.
We Are Culture
Cultural assumptions are part of the foundation for our perceptions. We can’t help but take them for granted. We look out from them, which makes it difficult to look at them. No matter what we encounter, much of our interpretation of the event or object or person is predetermined by the assumptions that unconsciously shape our perceptions
We Are Culture
These assumptions are shared beliefs adopted not from personal choice but simply as a result of being part of a community.
We Are Culture
Even various subcultures, regardless of their differences, are founded on the same basic assumptions. It may sound as though these assumptions are somehow force-fed into our thoughts and perceptions, but our indoctrination comes about quite naturally in the process of growing up within our culture. These background beliefs are reinforced at every turn and simply fall into place like basic “truths” that dictate the nature of our experience by shaping our interpretation of whatever’s perceived. Since these assumptions are shared by everyone around us, we don’t recognize their considerable influence.
We Are Culture
By design, the modern human mind craves knowledge, especially in places where we can find none. When faced with an absence of information, we’ll make something up—we will believe and assume. This tendency appears to be universal—in every culture, some form of beliefs arises to fill in for the lack of absolute “knowledge.” Every subculture with a set of beliefs clamors to have the last word on the subject, claiming themselves guardians of the Truth. Many of the different factions are willing to war over their inventions, but no one is willing to confess that they simply don’t know what the truth is.
We Are Culture
We delude ourselves that we want to implant honesty in our children: what we really want is to imbue them with our particular kind of dishonesty, with our culture’s dishonesty.
—Sidney Harris
We Are Culture
While we might understand and accept that there are consequences to the actions we take, it’s difficult to grasp that our beliefs and assumptions also have a cost. To recognize this, one would first have to forego attachment to his or her own personal opinions and admit that the ideas at issue are beliefs rather than the truth. Acknowledging this point is scary for anyone. It opens the door to doubts, and few people can tolerate the possibility of their whole belief system unraveling before their eyes.
We Are Culture
Keeping that in mind, it becomes easier to understand how difficult it is for us to question any of our beliefs, no matter how subtle or seemingly inconsequential they may be. We’re quite willing instead to accept the consequences.
We Are Culture
what if a great deal of our suffering is based on assumptions that are false? The resulting consequences would be completely unnecessary
Not-Knowing in Our Culture
The state of not-knowing is the mother of openness, questioning, authenticity, and freedom. Its nature is consciousness without form, possibility without limit, honesty without distortion
Not-Knowing in Our Culture
There is no freedom of thought without doubt.
—Bergen Baldwin Evans
Not-Knowing in Our Culture
we need no longer take any of our assumptions as reality. At any time, we can set them aside, open up to not-knowing, and seek out a more genuine experience
The Self in Our Culture
In order to experience what is so, what we need to comprehend is what’s prior to all of our beliefs and knowledge.
The Self in Our Culture
Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you do is for yourself—and there isn’t one.
—Wei Wu Wei
The Cost of Our Assumptions
Emptiness
Self-Doubt
Feeling Trapped
Suffering
Struggling
Your Own Experience of These Consequences
Since we are already programmed to believe in our assumptions and to regard their presence and effects as an aspect of ourselves, our inclination will be to excuse and defend them. In order to approach their dissolution with the necessary intent, we must clearly experience that the pain of these consequences is caused by our own assumptions. Only then will we be able to regard these beliefs and reactions as separate from us, and as unnecessary. Once it becomes clear that our assumptions and their consequences are indeed not our real-selves, our resistance begins to subside and we become empowered to let them go.
Learning versus Knowing
If I were to ask, “Which is more important: inhaling or exhaling?” you might see the question as nonsense. Grasping, as you do, the need to exhale before you can take in more oxygen, you are not likely to keep sucking air trying to expand your lungs beyond their capacity. Instead, you will blow out stale air and breathe in again.
4:2 Obviously you have to do this to stay alive, but maybe you do it poorly and with resistance, making your breathing difficult and certainly not what it could be. If you investigate, you’ll realize that even something so taken-for-granted as breathing can be fine-tuned and improved. You’ll learn that blowing air out is just as important and necessary as drawing air in. You might even discover that using different muscles and intention will pull the breath deeper into your belly, affecting your physiology in several beneficial ways. In time, you’ll learn to breathe more naturally and with greater capacity.
4:3 It’s the same with knowing and not-knowing. To be efficient, there has to be a balance. Whenever you or I learn anything, “not-knowing” has occurred—whether we intend it, or we haven’t a clue that it is taking place. Even when we try sliding quickly through not-knowing to get to knowing, somewhere in there not-knowing has occurred or learning didn’t happen—just as exhaling occurs, or inhaling doesn’t happen. In either case, this interchange can proceed with different levels of efficiency. If we resist not-knowing at any stage, our learning capacity is impeded and we’ll have more difficulty acquiring new skills or understanding
Learning versus Knowing
from our usual cultural vantage point, the first step in such learning would appear to be a step in the wrong direction. We generally ignore the not-knowing part since we prefer to think of learning as something like gathering valuable nuggets of information, preferably ones that fit in with and support what we already believe
Learning versus Knowing
I’m suggesting we look in a direction other than the one that follows from what is known. The shift required to do this is both subtle and open-ended, and it may take some effort at first. The main thing to grasp at this point is that it’s simply not possible to wonder, to truly question, unless we acknowledge that what we already know is not what we want to learn. In short, by definition, we want something unfamiliar to us, something new.
Thinking without a Net
right now what we’re looking into is the state of wonder itself. The entrance to this state—and even this questioning—is a particular one. Once you manage to get a glimpse, however, the experience of not-knowing opens your mind to a whole new relationship with life
Thinking without a Net
It’s helpful to remember that when I say knowing, it includes all that is available in the vast domain of knowledge, even if it is not coming to mind in this moment. It also includes the idea that somewhere out there is an answer that can be read in a book, heard from another, or deciphered from some wisdom or facts already known. So, although you might say you don’t know something at present, this is not the same as experiencing a state of not-knowing
Thinking without a Net
Simply having the idea that you don’t know will not allow powerful wondering to arise. The idea itself is a form of knowing because it takes place as a thought that something knowable is temporarily unknown by you.
Thinking without a Net
Unless we experience a real and open state of not-knowing, our wondering will be limited to our familiar ways of searching for an answer among what’s known or knowable.
Thinking without a Net
When someone does actually grasp it, the understanding comes almost as a bodily sensation that no matter what knowledge they possess or what their mind generates for them to view, at the root bottom they in fact do not know. Such a genuine experience of not-knowing profoundly deepens their contemplation
Thinking without a Net
Any information that you read here is like a one-way ladder. I want you to climb up the ladder and get off. You may have to climb the ladder many times, but the goal is to be able to throw the ladder away. If I asked you to use the ladder, climb up on the roof, and describe the view to me, you’d have to get off the ladder, right? You can’t just carry the ladder around. If you say, “I understand the ladder” and just walk around with it, that may be great, but your view stays the same, doesn’t it? So this isn’t about collecting ladders. It isn’t about merely figuring something out. You can intellectualize about it until your brain breaks—and right there would be a good place to start—but real progress begins when you set out to experience what’s being communicated.
Thinking without a Net
OK, so maybe you had to be there. I like it because it hints at the tendency in our contemplation to wait for some punch line, or the next step, as if those are somehow going to “do it” for us. We forget that what needs to occur can occur right now, without further explanation or any outside occurrence, and without a punch line. This is it. This is you and your experience. What is it for real? Who are you, actually? What is the nature of your existence?
What Is an Experience?
we can experience the thought versus just thinking it, or experience the rock versus just seeing it. The difference between perceiving something and experiencing it can perhaps be found within our level of participation in the encounter
What Is an Experience?
do that, and put our awareness on the rock independent of any notions or reactions about it, then we are “experiencing” the rock.
What Is an Experience?
We are quite certain that we are aware. Yet awareness is not an object, and when we look more carefully we also see that awareness is not even perceived. We perceive many things, but it’s that very act of perceiving that we call awareness
What Is an Experience?
Try it. Notice that you are aware. Usually this is taken for granted, and your attention is on the object of your awareness. Now see if you can experience awareness itself, rather than thinking about it, or assuming it, or imagining what it is. When you experience this awareness clearly and presently without conceptualizations, then you’ll have a better understanding of what I mean by “experience.”
Questioning
The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a magnificent world in itself.
—Henry Miller
Questioning
our assumptions are habitually absorbed into our perceptions, and so they’re normally received as part of the whole experience.
Questioning
real questioning comes from a state of not-knowing, and with no attachment to an answer, just a commitment that it be the truth.
Embracing Paradox
As we embrace a willingness to not-know, however, we see the discomfort for what it is, and our confusion becomes acceptable. We’re free to explore in any direction we choose, and we find that committing ourselves to these simple principles will guide our efforts as far as we want to go.
Relating Differently to Beliefs
If manipulating our beliefs is this powerful—if we can alter our sense of self in the world simply by switching to a different set of beliefs—imagine how powerful it might be to get free of our beliefs entirely
Relating Differently to Beliefs
The good news is that we don’t have to live exclusively in relation to our beliefs. Rather than manipulating ourselves into exchanging one set of beliefs for another, we can look into what beliefs are.
Relating Differently to Beliefs
a large part of our work here is learning new ways to think about some very ordinary things. In fact, the more familiar they are, the harder it can be to see them in a different way
Relating Differently to Beliefs
Here’s an analogy that’s useful for approaching this belief business: if all you’ve ever done with your car is put gas in it and drive around, it would mean a huge shift in both focus and effort if you decided to start learning how cars work. Each of these activities concerns a car, but understanding the mechanics involved is very different from using one for transportation