Knowing, Not Knowing & Love
Be Still and know…
The Tao* that can be put into words is not the true Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. (Tao-Te-Ching)
Some 2,500 years ago, and long before he downed the hemlock specialty shake, Socrates famously said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” His student, Plato, steeped in the Hellenic way of seeing the world, wrote that if we want to understand human life, we need to separate the parts. He labeled them mind, spirit and appetite. In speaking of human consciousness some 2,300 years later, Freud used the terms Id, Ego, and Superego. They somewhat overlap with Plato’s division. In our own time, Social scientists have said that the vast majority of humans have only an opaque understanding of who they (we) are. We are not ego.
That’s a cursory look at how we know and don’t know ourselves. How we come to know anything – the world around us, the heavens above and, for many of us, God, greatly swells the enquiry. The sciences have been a primary source in coming to know our world and beyond. To science we are deeply indebted.
Yet, for those among us who cannot let go of a deep longing; who are pretty certain we are living in and with Mystery, another kind of knowing cannot be dismissed. It is the kind of knowing that the quote above from verse 1 of the Tao speaks. It is in a way, Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince telling us that: “…it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.” It can be a Mahler symphony, a mountain, the ocean, or a migrant child. It is this verse from Psalm 46: “Be still and know that I am God”.
In, A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle wrote:
“Through the present moment, you have access to the power of life itself, that which has traditionally been called "God." As soon as you turn away from it, God ceases to be a reality in your life, and all you are left with is the mental concept of God, which some people believe in and others deny. Even belief in God is only a poor substitute for the living reality of God manifesting every moment of your life.”
Spiritual writers have said that to come to know and be united with God, we have to reconsider the sensible (left brain) world and pass beyond the human condition and beyond knowing to unknowing, from knowledge to love. That pursuit (if it is a pursuit at all) might be added to any of our New Year’s resolutions that contain the words, exercise, chocolate, alcohol or Brussel Sprouts. Our prayer sometimes needs to live with the unknown if we are to change in depth and live in Mystery.
* Tao = the road, the path, or the universal way