The ending of knowledge
Dishonesty is a pretense, a performance, a mask, and in its shadow and hidden recesses, is born ignorance.
Wisdom is light. It shines on darkness without repelling it, but rather transforming ignorance into clarity. Yet, if one continues to pretend, to try and become someone, something, some image stipulated by a holy book or social convention, darkness shall haunt the mind and blind the heart.
We try to become. We want to be successful, beautiful, powerful, spiritual. We rarely question our rather stupidly persistent effort. To what end? Why achieve when death is at the end? Isn’t there another way of living? With this constant strife, can there ever be a peace of mind, a tranquility of that early morning pond, sensitive, waiting for the first break of light?
It is extraordinarily hard to be honest. Not superficial honesty. But deep, unmoving honesty, of admitting that we don’t actually know anything, that we are lost, that we don’t know who we are, why we are here, what purpose we serve. To actually understand life and ourselves, we must begin with an unwavering ground of honesty, of not knowing. If we begin with our accumulated knowledge, we have already stepped on wobbly ground, and our inquiry will go nowhere except where that knowledge is already pointing. To discover means to not assume, to not pretend we know our destination. With that freedom of not knowing, something else, something different from our habit of effort and becoming might take place, and then we might approach our eternal questions of purpose and meaning. However, all this is only imaginary, fanciful words without the actual ground of not knowing, without letting go the ego’s claim of authority.
Not knowing purifies the mind and heart, so this natural innocence might take place. Not knowing shatters any pretense, any mask. No longer is the purpose to know and to understand. Real understanding is the total acceptance of isness as isness, being as being, without naming, without knowing. The ego’s bind is knowledge. The ending of knowledge is liberation.
Cover photo by Aman Upadhyay on Unsplash
