Allow Without Knowing How

The Unlimited Power of Not Knowing

When is the last time you found yourself in a situation where you just couldn’t find the answers you were looking for? You were in the Unknown. How did it make you feel? Or better yet, if there were people waiting for you to come up with the “right answers”, how did you feel about how they felt about you not being able to find the answers you were looking for?

(Accompanying audio for this very long and convoluted question can be found here.)

I, for one, thrive in the Unknown because for me, the Unknown is the home of Infinite Potential. However, I have learned over the years that many people are terrified of this space. And so, much of their energy goes into trying to find the answers to the questions that keep them up at night. Therefore, in order to feel safe, a great many of us surrender our decision making faculties over to structures that offer to keep us as far away from the Unknown as we can possibly get. This is why most institutions exist, to protect us from the Unknown. Or at least to distract us from the conscious awareness that we are all swimming in an infinite sea of not knowing.

Something Better Than You Can Imagine Is Waiting

In the previous post, I quoted Einstein as having said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” But, from the angle that I am looking at the Universe, many of our institutions in our societies turn out to be precisely where imagination goes to die. Turning infinite imagination into finite knowledge is the intellectual equivalent of pulling a flower up by the roots. Once it is pulled up from its Source of life, the very beauty that attracted us to it begins to fade.

The IDEALS Way Community is where imagination is encouraged. And so are questions. And guess what, not every question that gets asked needs to be answered. Sometimes, we can live with the questions, i.e. the Mystery and see what gets created with or through the question. For example, when I was struggling with the outcome of the 2024 election, I tapped into my imagination toolkit and asked myself, “What would have to change in me so that I can experience the election outcome as the best thing that ever happened to me, my family, and those I feel called to serve?”

After meditating on the question for about twenty minutes, my body reacted through a shiver up my spine. I knew then that the question had been rooted and that through being creative and imaginative, my life, my family’s life, and the lives of the people I feel called to serve would be improved by that outcome, AS LONG AS I DIDN’T TRY TO FIGURE OUT HOW IT WOULD HAPPEN USING THE UNIMAGINATIVE LIMITED PART OF MY BRAIN!!!

Now, if you are someone who identifies with being for or against an outcome, I am not judging you. But, I will tell you that doing so will drain you of creative power that you would otherwise have access to. I have been trying to tell folks for fricking decades that we don’t owe it to ourselves or anyone to go into despair just because our efforts don’t yield the outcome that we expected. But, because of the way we get taught in school and religion and frankly work, with the ignorant pass/fail testing structure, most of us get programmed to believe that if we don’t get an A according to whoever we gave our power to, we somehow effed up. THAT IS A LIE!!!

I’m not going to get into it now because this is getting long and I still need to get to my “allow without knowing how” point. But, I want to invite you into the imaginative possibility that one’s grades according to some pretty arbitrary criteria has nothing to do with what we know, our capacity to learn, or the creativity we can conjure simply by virtue of the fact that we might NOT KNOW what someone thinks we are supposed to know. And what I mean by that is that sometimes not knowing and being willing to work with that awareness on our learning journey actually makes us more imaginative and ultimately more creative. But, in a society that thinks an alphabet with a plus sign beside it is the height of intelligence capacity, we are missing out on some real magical possibilities.

You know what. Never mind. just watch this video and it will catch you up on the “Allow Without Knowing How” magic.

Video - Allow Without Knowing How Magic

There's More Where This Came From

To be continued for free on The IDEALS Way Substack

What's covered over on Substack:

• Filling in the Gaps
• Toxic Winning
• The Dangers of Denying Limitations
• Living and Dying Like Socrates

If you choose to join at any level (free or paid), you will find material not offered here. But for the inaugural week of my foray into Substackery, everything I share will be freely accessible as I experiment with the tool and lay some groundwork for what I look forward to becoming a flourishing community of curious souls who know that possibilities for greater relating abound.