Make Space for Your Inner Wisdom
Knowledge is finite. It is the facts of life: a butterfly has two wings; Earth is round; the sky is blue. Knowledge has defined edges, beginnings and endings, a specific this is it; it is information the mind grasps in completeness… until it doesn’t; for our understanding of things evolves.
One day we live in a geocentric solar system, and then the next day it is the sun, not the Earth, the planets revolve around.
One day our knowledge informs us that we must spank children. The next day this is considered cruel. Like a monkey, we swing from one narrow vine of knowledge to the next, holding on until we have the desire or courage to release our familiar grip and reach new understanding.
A sudden gale of insight, gust of creativity, blast of concern that in no way can be made sense of by the facts of life.
Mysteriously, this inexhaustible universal knowing mind exhales itself through us and is then gone, leaving perhaps only a chill, a resonance, a trace, a reminder of its presence.
Outer versus inner sourcing
Knowing is felt within, also known as felt-sense or gut feeling.
Yet knowledge is thought up from the external world. A fluffy flying creature is what we collectively call a “bird”; a thin green substance of water and lignin rising from the ground we arbitrarily label “grass”; 2 + 2 = 4 because “4” is what we are told; it’s what we read in books and see on the TV.
Knowledge is accumulated from the outside in, and we can control how much and what kind enters our mind. Over time the database that is our mind is increasingly filled with information, the arbitrary “facts of life”.
Knowing, on the other hand, like wind, cannot in any way be gathered, controlled or held. It cannot be targeted or gotten, for, unlike knowledge, it is not quantitative; it does not derive from finite objectivity, numbers and details.
Rather, like the fluid and subjective experiences of imagination, dreaming and wonder, knowing has its roots in the immeasurable, qualitative and mysterious realms within.
Spontaneously, it finds us from the depths of uncertainty, often when we are relaxed and open, when we make room for it with our breath, and often without forewarning. Sometimes to our delight, and often to our dismay.
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Thank you …Knowing beyond knowledge
“Listen to your heart. Even though it’s on the left side, it’s always right.” ~
Unknown
Somehow we know that we must stay in our relationship despite all the struggles and logical reasons to leave.
We know there is danger in the other room, the one we cannot see into from where we are, the danger we have no knowledge of but sense somehow.
We know we have to pull the car over for someone without any knowledge of who they are or why we feel this impulse. Somehow, we just know!
We know we must continue blindly stepping forward into our purpose even though money is running out and everyone around us thinks we are unreasonably impractical and caught in fantasy thinking.
Knowledge about our poor financial status places our defiant and persistent knowing in the clear light of scrutiny.
Those who care about us corroborate these ostensibly dire pragmatic details with their own grasped knowledge of “how things are and ought to be” as expressed through their regular admonishments of our pie-eyed decision-making.
But in our heart quietly burns courage and trust. A faint knowing knows what knowledge has no way of knowing.
Beyond our thinking mind and in our cells and bones we feel our inner mandate to dream and live boldly, a mandate our knowing tends to that cares less about the details of the temporal world and more about adventuring into the mystery of our soul and soul’s path.
Want to add word or two?
Intuitively we sense that our knowledge-driven family and friends cannot, for now, resonate; they can’t feel that while knowledge may help us build our wings, only knowing tells us where and how to fly, and it is flying that we most long for, not building.
And so we continue onwards trusting this knowing, moving forward with irrational optimism that dumfounds our seasoned knowledge and those well-intentioned family and friends who witness our incomprehensible journey.
And with each step we take our knowing only grows stronger, leading us further into our heart, into the mystery.
Your comment ….?
The interplay of knowledge and knowing
Knowledge and knowing long to play together. In fact, for humans to live joyful, healthy and productive lives they must act in consort, rather than separately.
Knowledge is only useful to the degree that knowing guides it.
Disconnected from the human heart and inner wisdom, knowledge is simply dry head-based myopic information that further separates humans from their hearts, and from the hearts of others.
Knowledge, while useful, alone cannot properly serve.
Without knowing captaining the ship of humanity, we will run into fiercer and fiercer storms of industrial waste, corporate greed, stress and illness, and perhaps even be forced to the bottom of the sea.
We will continue letting fear and hatred manage our growing database of knowledge.
Knowing, being the emissary of the heart, is meant to put knowledge to good use, sprinkling it with wisdom and loving nudges, ensuring that mathematics, biology, physics, engineering, government, technology and all other fields of human information carry the fragrance of the unseen.
Only then, when head serves heart, and knowledge puts its faith in the unquantifiable, mercurial nature of the soul, does our planet have a chance.
More knowledge is not what the world needs right now, certainly not without equal gains in wisdom.
Knowledge without knowing is dangerous, as world affairs increasingly tell us.