Holding Knowing with the Open Hands of Unknowing
Part Two: Finding Reality through Knowing and Not Knowing
Three Kinds of Knowing and Their Shadows
To become genuinely grown-up and mature on our spiritual journey, we need all three kinds of knowing — healthy ordinary knowing, mystical spiritual knowing, and deep unknowing in our lives. This is because each form is limited without the others. There is a shadow or limiting side to all three.
The first kind of knowing we usually operate with, ordinary knowing, is limited to what we can learn with words, concepts, images, and thoughts. The shadow of ordinary knowing leaves is that it excludes the vast realm of reality that is mystical knowing and spiritual unknowing.
The second kind of knowing we may allow to emerge is spiritual knowing. Spiritual knowing opens up to the vast and profound information fields all around us. The shadow of spiritual knowing is to avoid further Growing Up by thinking and feeling like we know all we need to know with absolute certainty. This means we settle for ordinary and spiritual knowing and never let go of words, images, and concepts by moving into the luminous emptiness of unknowing.
Unknowing is coming to see our knowing is best held loosely with a deeper wisdom that can emerge which allows us to know God beyond the limitations of words, images, or thoughts. Mature spiritual knowing means we can hold our knowing with the open hand of unknowing. This means we regard what we seem to know with loving humility, holding it loosely, not tightly as in fundamentalism.
Unknowing doesn’t actually mean not knowing. But it does mean a kind of knowing we are not accustomed to. It is transcendence beyond words, concepts, and images. This place of wholeness is also a place of bliss and pure joy. It can be addictive if we enter it too soon, before we begin to heal our wounds and shadow. We can benefit from this transcendence while facing our pain, but that is different from using transcendence to avoid our pain. The shadow of unknowing is spiritual bypassing, trying to escape our pain and shadow in transcendence. This can actually be good to do, so long as we don’t always stay there avoiding our pain, the other ways of knowing, and material reality.
The “ordinary” knowing of inner healing, competent therapy, and the spiritual knowing of practices such as Whole-Body Mystical Awakening are antidotes to spiritual bypassing or premature addiction to transcendence. They ground us so we won’t simply avoid Cleaning Up and facing our struggles, problems, and inner trauma. More on this next time.
When we hold our ordinary knowing and spiritual knowing with the open hand of unknowing, we can benefit from our knowing while resting in the deep wordless wisdom of not knowing.
Unknowing is classically and mystically approached in deep wordless, imageless, thoughtless meditative prayer as we explored in Part One. In this essay, we explore a less mystic and more cognitive dimension and antidote to the shadow of spiritual knowing called “construct aware” in integral terminology. It’s an excellent way to begin to think about what is, ultimately, the mystery of unknowing.
Becoming “Construct-Aware”
Susanne Cook-Greuter is an independent scholar who is recognized for her groundbreaking work in ego development theory and the function of language in meaning making. She has a doctorate in human development and psychology from Harvard and is a founding member and elder of Ken Wilber’s Integral Institute and the integral community.
What follows is based on her talk about the Construct-Aware stage of human development at the 3rd Integral Theory Conference in Siófok, Hungary, May 2018, and my experience with the Terri O’Fallon Stages program, which includes the Construct-Aware stage.
The Construct-Aware stage of development is when we become aware of our constructs rather than being unconsciously embedded in them. We start to understand the human need to create ever more comprehensive explanations of reality despite knowing that lived experience cannot be captured in words. It is a Construct-Aware capacity to see through the ego’s efforts at safeguarding our illusion of knowing with certainty.
Cook-Greuter points out that it takes courage to acknowledge that we are all prone to fool ourselves in many ways about our achievements, including how far along we are in our spiritual development. She says,
Mature integration as a human being entails an increasing capacity to notice ego’s workings. At the same time, we can lighten-up and experience the simple and childlike joy of being alive. We can delight in the senses and our inner world – moment to moment as well as appreciate the lives and struggles of humanity.
The Construct-Aware stage is the first stage in the sequence of ego development stages that sees through the function of the ego to make us feel safe, important, and permanent. Construct-Aware meaning makers expose and laugh at all that is pretentious, inauthentic, and unpoetic.
Cook-Greuter recommends the fine art of laughter as a tool to lighten up our own lives and the lives of those around us. She says, “It is a late-stage discovery to recognize the poison of taking ourselves too seriously and its antidote: light-heartedness and delight. Let’s face it, we Integralists take ourselves and our mandate to raise collective consciousness very seriously. That is why we exchange ideas and work with each other. As integralists, we have much important knowledge to share. And while that is as it should be, I am here to remind us of the fool in all of us and to engage in our work with a deeper level of awareness.”
She goes on to explain more about why this awareness is so vital:
Based on my observations, the Construct-Aware stage in ego development theory is the first in which some people begin to explore our astounding world-wide impulse to explain everything under the sun and the concomitant capacity to fool ourselves about what it means to know. It’s liberating to be able to take life more lightly and to laugh at ego’s sincere and relentless efforts to cement its illusive supremacy.
First, what do I mean by ego? As I define it in ego development theory, ego underlies the universal drive to explain everything and make us feel safe, important, and to belong. Ego represents the striving of human beings to understand themselves and the world they live in. It is the tireless organizer, interpreter, and synthesizer of experience. Its task is to turn experience into a coherent narrative about the world. How does it do that? It does so by telling a culturally influenced story about who we are, why we are here, and for what purpose.
Overall, the ego labors mightily to create and maintain meaning and vigorously defends against dissonant information and its deep, unspeakable sense of helplessness. Indeed, when we are not able to tell a good story about ourselves and our tribe, we feel anxiety and despair.
It is at the Construct-Aware stage that one becomes aware of ego’s narrative function and its cleverness at fooling us into thinking we can know and understand. Few people begin to question the function of ego and our need for myths, stories, and theorizing. Even rarer among ordinary adults, some individuals learn to look kindly at ego’s tireless striving for security and preeminence while seeing through its hopeless efforts.
It is ironic that all of us have to communicate via symbols. Ironic also that concepts such as “purpose” and “soul” as well as “ego” are symbolic abstractions that do not exist outside of language and our agreed upon definitions. Yet we treat them almost always as if they were palpable, real things. We could choose to remain silent in the face of this paradox or to speak out and laugh at our dilemma while remaining conscious of the trap of speaking.
Many also feel empowered, masterful, and proud of their understanding as they indeed know a lot more about themselves, human nature, and the world than people at any stage before. Pride about how much one knows is one of the shadows of this stage along with its inner certainty and sense of importance. ‘If only everyone were second-tier then the world could be saved.’
The maps of reality we construct can never depict the undivided whole, the actual lived territory. They are, at best, temporary, and useful approximations that serve us as guidelines.
While complex reasoning is an aspect of later-stage meaning making, it is not sufficient by itself for becoming a mature adult. By mature, I mean a wise, discerning, and compassionate human being.
It takes courage to acknowledge that we are all prone to fool ourselves in myriad ways about our achievements, including in terms of development and spiritual attainment. It requires great grit to believe in the value of simply being alive and not to despair in the face of fundamental doubt about ever knowing and understanding.
As I like to say, we are all bozos on the same bus. Once we get this joke, we can become more light-hearted, and see ego’s striving for control in a more benevolent light because it can do no other. Fooling us and misdirecting our attention is ego’s task. It makes us feel secure, permanent, and important.
One of the surprising insights of late-stage maturity is realizing what a hoot ego’s efforts are. It is folly to wish experience to be different than it is. And yet many of us idealists feel it is its own madness to see life as it is, and not as we wish it to be, and as we think it should be. It is natural that we want to feel that we are here for a higher purpose, that our lives mean something beyond simple existence.
So, what do mature Construct-Aware meaning-makers, wise fools, and jesters have in common? Cook-Greuter says:
“•They unmask intellectual arrogance, expose mental rigidity, and uncover (defrock) spiritual ego inflation.
•They expose and poke fun at sacred cows and pompous behavior of any kind, especially in authorities.
• They deliver the truth raw without embellishing or softening it to please.
• They are spontaneous and often irreverent towards the established order.
• While they challenge the conventional mores and beliefs of society, they generally do not try to overthrow them as would rebels.
• They shake people out of deep-rooted patterns of thought and behavior and remind us of our human frailties and limitations.
• Like very young children, they embrace innocence, are joyful, imaginative and can play on the world stage with abandon.”
We might sum up Cook-Greuter’s words by saying that those who know most maturely always know that they don’t know. At the deepest level, this is what the mystics call “unknowing!”
As I explored how Cook-Greuter opened up this unknowing of the Construct-Aware stage, I often thought of Jesus. He said it is only when we view life as the unknowing little child that we can enter the higher consciousness of the realm of God (Matt 18:3).
She says, “The job of wise men and jesters has been to expose the blind spots of society and to unmask any emperor with new clothes since time immemorial. They often do so at the risk of their own lives as their message is rarely welcome.” How about that for a description of Jesus’ teachings and actions in exposing the religious leader’s distortion of God’s love which led to his crucifixion!
Jesus often used humor. There is ironic humor when Jesus gives impetuous Peter the name “rock” (Matt 16:18). There is the painful comedy of Jesus’ story of the rich fool and his barns. When he learned he was about to die, we encounter probing humor in the question, “Then who will get all your stuff?” (Luke 12:16–21)
He said it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. (Mk 10:25).
Jesus asked, “How can you say to your neighbor, ‘Here, let me get that splinter out of your eye when you’ve got that log in your own?” (Matt. 7:4).
And then did you hear the one about the religious leaders who are the blind leading the blind? (Luke 6:39)
Then there are his zingers about the exalted religious leaders who strain out gnats and swallow camels” (Matt 23:24).
We might imagine smiles, if not laughter when Jesus says to the multitudes, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.”
In the maturity of Construct-Aware, we can laugh at our grandiosity, especially religious pomposity. Some very wise people knew this:
Socrates said, “I know that I know nothing.”
Thomas Aquinas, thirteenth century immensely influential philosopher and theologian, said three months before he died, “All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.”
From the same time period in history, theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart puts even our theological knowing into laughing perspective when he says,
Do you want to know
What goes on in the core of the Trinity?
I will tell you.
In the core of the Trinity
the Father laughs
and gives birth to the Son.
The Son laughs back at the Father
and gives birth to the Spirit.
The whole Trinity laughs
and gives birth to us.
— Meister Eckhart
Letting go of our certainty with the childlike delight that Jesus recommends allows us another pathway to trusting God. That ego reduction, trusting God instead of our overblown ego, humiliating as it is, is a really good thing.
Smile, even laugh, as you hold your knowing with the open hand of unknowing.