Over the course of this day, in between tossing and turning trying to find a comfortable position free of vertigo, one question has been nagging me.
That question is: Why does it feel so uncomfortable to not know?
I watch President Obama hang the Medal of Freedom around former President George H.W. Bush’s neck, a man who I’m almost positive played a hand in the assassination of John Kennedy, who oversaw the CIA’s drug empire while Director, and who is widely regarded as being as high in the New World Order as any person I can think of. I ask myself: Why is the President doing that? Surely he knows about ex-President Bush. And I have to admit I don’t know.
Or I discuss with a correspondent whether President Obama is or is not an American citizen. Anderson Cooper says on tonight’s news that he has a “live birth” certificate. My correspondent insists he has no valid certificate. And I have to say to myself that I don’t know.
But in saying that, I notice feeling of failure or defeat. Moreover, in saying to myself that I do know, when I do, I notice a feeling of success or victory.
As well, I feel vulnerable, almost undone, almost in a state of collapse, when I feel that I don’t know and invulnerable, almost in a state of solidity, a made man, when I feel I do know.
What is it that drives me to value the one and not the other?
I don’t know.
I remember being roughly treated as a child whenever I was wrong or whenever I didn’t know. Could that be it?
Or was it all the game shows where the reward goes to the one who knows?
Or is it all the smart crop of current TV shows where everyone is battling with each other to show who knows the most? When the dialogue is so slick, one person adding to the common knowledge after another, that it’s like Sherlock Holmes got cloned.
I don’t know.
Without imploding or falling apart, without condemning myself to jail or selling myself down the river, I just don’t know.
The only glimmer I get is that the one who wants to know is valuing something outside himself that he gets. There is always a reward and that reward is, as far as I can see, almost always something won, something earned, something gotten. Without the hungering for something more, there is no issue.
Why then am I not enough? As I am and as I’m not? Why is what I am insufficient?
It takes a conscious unhooking of myself from the Pavlovian nature of third-dimensional life for me to extract myself from this predicament.
I am enough. I am sufficient. I don’t know and it is not an indictment of myself. I cannot know everything. I have heard avatars (Sri Ramakrishna, for instance) say they don’t know everything – that knowledge is supplied them when they need it.
I passively observe not knowing. I be with the feelings of discomfort that arise. I accept the condition of not knowing. I outlast the feelings of discomfort without acting on them. I am left in just the neutral space of being. I am as I am and as I’m not. That I know and that is all I really know.
The rest is unreal. The rest is identity. The rest is all story.