The Beauty of Unknowing
Part One: Discovering Reality through Knowing and Not Knowing
THREE WAYS OF KNOWING REALITY
Ordinary knowing is our most common way of knowing. It’s what appears to us as everyday reality. Beginning in childhood, especially kindergarten on, we gather information using language, images, and concepts. From there, we learn to figure things out based on what we know from these sources. This indispensable knowing allows us to make reasonable decisions and navigate life’s everyday challenges.
Spiritual Reality Beyond Ordinary Knowing
Spiritual knowing is another kind of knowing that is accessed by moving from ordinary awareness into awakened awareness.
Spiritual knowing is different from religious faith and belief. It is also different from facts, images, concepts, or memory. Spiritual experience can emerge from our beliefs, but faith and belief are not spiritual experiences in themselves. You may have faith and believe that there is a God, which is a good foundation. However, spiritually knowing that belief would be to noticeably experience God’s presence and love in an altered or heightened state of spiritual awareness.
Spiritual knowing connects us to something greater than our ordinary lives. It is a higher knowing that helps us deal with life’s challenges. Not that we never experience doubt; it’s just that we hold that experience within the comforting embrace of deep knowing — knowing that comes from spiritual experience.
Forms of spiritual knowing are found throughout the ancient spiritual traditions of the world. In Christianity, we see this phenomenon in the Bible, the life of Jesus, and the early church. Jesus’ visionary appearances came in this mystical awareness, and this way of knowing continued in the Christian mystics down through the centuries and today in some forms in Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement. It also can be found in secular form in mediumship and psychic channeling.
We come into this way of spiritual knowing through entering non-ordinary consciousness or what we often call an “awakened state.” Meditative prayer can help us get into a place of heightened spiritual awareness. Here our knowing isn’t ordinary! That can be new or scary for many folks, especially as we are so trained to be anchored to ordinary forms of knowing.
Spiritual Knowing in ICN understanding is an embodied experience that focuses on the inner knowing that comes from our whole body. We can spiritually know in our head, heart, gut, and feet centers. Many ancient Eastern traditions use the head, heart, and hara triad. Some also use forms of grounding in nature. We have integrated all four centers in our Whole-Body Mystical Awakening meditative prayer practice, which serves as a gateway to spiritual knowing. The original basis of this practice comes from the graduate school practicum of the California Institute of Integral Studies.
When we enter into a state of embodied spiritual knowing, often initially with self-touching our centers, we come alive with new “information.” In spiritual knowing as incarnated divine-human beings, we can learn to notice spontaneously arising sensations, feelings, images, words, energy, and other forms. These allow us to experientially “know” God and the spiritual realm in its many manifestations.
In the context of a spiritual community, the results are intensified by the collective energy field.
The inner silence of unknowing is a third kind of knowing. It is classically referred to as the “cloud of forgetfulness.” This does not refer to ignorance but rather to a deeper knowing that does not use any forms such as words, images, thoughts, or concepts. This unknowing knows God and the spiritual realm beyond “knowing.” It is quietly resting in the presence of God, away from all thoughts, words, and images. It is called by other names in integral such as transcendence, nonduality, and the causal state of consciousness.
Unknowing
This is a mystical, wordless resting in the presence of God beyond all thoughts and images. So, we are not thinking of anything. We are resting in a Presence beyond thought.
In contemplative methods such as Centering Prayer, we do not seek to know through words, images, requests, intercessions, or rituals. It involves the quieting of one’s mind and the settling into the essence of being, which allows one to deeply experience the presence of God.
Spiritual unknowing finds its name and roots in the fourteenth-century writing called The Cloud of Unknowing. This work inspired the creation of Centering Prayer and teaches a way of praying that involves surrendering our thoughts so that we can simply be in God’s presence. In one sense, this is the deep spiritual knowing that comes from the not knowing of silence.
The cloud of unknowing, spiritual knowing, and ordinary knowing
Professor of Theology at St. Louis University Frederick G. McLeod describes it this way:
“The author of The Cloud of Unknowing insists that no method or technique can bring about the kind of experience that he is about to describe. While confessing that they are all ultimately useless, he does suggest a way that may be helpful: centering prayer. One is to choose a single word, such as God, and then let go of whatever thought, image, or feeling may well up to center one’s attention solely upon the reality beyond the word. This state is called the cloud of forgetfulness. It blocks out words, images, and conceptions from one’s awareness and turns to the cloud of unknowing hovering between God and self.
While totally lost, as it were, in this impenetrable cloud, one awaits the stirring of a gentle but powerful movement arising out of the depths of one’s being. Though this stirring is the lightest of touches, it fills one with unsurpassed joy and enthusiasm.”
“There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen.” Rumi
Author Lisa Colón DeLay, speaking of the difference between ordinary knowing and unknowing, says, “Many of us in Western context and cultures are accustomed to only word-based praying. We understand God mainly through acquiring knowledge that affirms what and who God is. This is the kataphatic way of knowing God. Kataphatic is a theological term meaning positive spirituality that is image-driven and uses analogies to speak of God. This is the first way we begin to know God (or anything, for that matter): with definitions, descriptions, concepts, categories, images, and words. After some development, we understand more fully that God is transcendent and uncontainable. We may notice that God shatters any box of mental understanding we have been misusing. Then we may come to a place that points beyond conceptions so that we may start to discover what God is not and allow room for what we can hardly conceive—God is no thing.”
Sometimes other names can help disrupt our hardened and limited concepts of God, such as Divine Love, Mystery, and Source.
Apophatic theology, seen most fully in Christianity within Eastern Orthodoxy, invites the spiritually devoted beyond limitations and known categories to ways that make room for what we don’t know and cannot comprehend about the Divine.
Apophatic, or “negative” spirituality, stresses interiority, “imageless-ness,” and “wordlessness.”
The prayer of quiet draws us ever deeper into the Mystery that is worth growing familiar with but is ultimately unknowable in its totality. There is a boundlessness of the One who we, in English, sometimes call God, and apophatic prayer may lead us into that unknowing to experience the divine beyond what we know.
Richard Rohr stresses the importance of not-knowing to the authentic life of faith:
“To presume we know is always dangerous. There is an arrogance that comes from knowing and thinking that we normally have the right answer. That’s why great spiritual traditions balance the kataphatic way (knowing God through words and ideas) with the apophatic way (knowing God through silence and unknowing). We see it very clearly in the desert fathers and mothers, and it lasts pretty much through the first thousand years of Christianity. The Franciscan theologian Bonaventure (c. 1217–1274) ended his classic text The Soul’s Journey into God with this instruction, which represents the apophatic tradition of unknowing:
‘If you wish to know how these things come about, ask [for] grace, not instruction, desire not understanding, the groaning of prayer not diligent reading, the Spouse not the teacher, God not man, darkness not clarity, not light but the fire that totally inflames and carries us into God.’”
Entering the Cloud of Unknowing with Our Whole Body
In the head center, spiritual knowing comes in forms such as images or words. Sensations, feelings, or impressions may promote these from other parts of our body. However, these forms cease in unknowing silent meditative prayer such as traditional Eastern meditation and Centering Prayer. These are classic ways of learning to move into the transcendence of unknowing in the head center and beyond. The subtle mystic state flows with forms. The causal state of altered consciousness is empty of these.
Therefore, many mind-centered paths emphasize the quieting of the mind. The ICN practice of WBMA tends to gradually quiet the mind by first focusing on heart, feet, and womb before the mind is focused on.
My first experience in this path was while in quiet meditation using a Holosync brain wave entrainment CD. After an hour, I opened my eyes and saw the walls and floor of the room I was in had become dim and transparent. This was quite bewildering, unaccustomed as I was to the material world disappearing. Traces of my disorientation lasted for several days. I can see why some decide from this kind of experience that material reality is an illusion. That is not my conclusion. It seems to me that both material reality and transcendent reality are real.
In a three-hour conversation one afternoon with Ken Wilber in his Boulder apartment, I described my experience to him. He said, “That’s One Taste” — his poetic term for the causal state, an integral name for the cloud of unknowing.
Some days, I easily move into this mind-centered transcendent state. On other days it seems remote. I would like to access this state as easily as I access the subtle state of spiritual knowing.
In the heart center, spiritual knowing usually emerges as feelings, primarily love, but also other feelings such as anger, sadness, depression, loneliness, and hostility. Loving heartfulness, which is more profound than these other feelings, is another way to move into the cloud of forgetfulness. Learning to move deeply into this radiate field of pure love can quickly bring one to a state of bliss — the joy of transcendence.
This is a much more accessible state of transcendent unknowing for me since I get there easily via my heart center. For others, too, this is often the most accessible way to the joy of unknowing. Coming out of this cloud of bliss, I often think of the final words to the beautiful hymn Love Divine, All Loves Excelling — “Lost in love, wonder, and praise.”
In the spiritual womb center, spiritual knowing comes from intuition, courage, creativity, and an increasing knowledge of our True Self, our Divine Identity. The spiritual womb is another path that gives a different flavor to transcendence beyond spiritual knowing.
I currently experience this as a flow of gut energy, the very current of vital life. I relate this to Jesus’ description of living waters flowing from one’s womb (John 7:38). When deeply in this causal state of blissful, vital life, I lose all sense of anything else.
What do you experience in the inner depths of the Divine Source within your spiritual womb?
In the feet center, mystical, spiritual knowing emerges in inner sensing and physical sensations from our grounding in nature — the earth and the cosmos. Our feet connect our bodies to all material reality and nature’s Christic energy. Here, too, one more flavor of transcendence can be accessed from our bodies through our feet anchored in nature.
This is why mother Nature is so healing and renewing to many. A walk in the park. A garden in the yard at home. A week spent in the natural beauty of many regions around the world.
In my feet center, I aim to be in the conscious presence of the Divine Source and let go of everything else. When I can do this, I experience a kind of oneness with material reality here — no separation between me and all others, and no separation between me and nature, the cosmos in all of its glory.
Holding with the open hands of not knowing
I integrate these three ways of knowing — ordinary, spiritual, and unknowing — by realizing that those who know most deeply also always know that they don’t know. They know while holding their knowing with the open hands of not knowing. More on this next time.