Not long ago someone I dearly love responded to a short story I wrote (admittedly about them) with the idea that it’s not what I don’t know, rather it’s what I don’t know I don’t know. Turns out it’s true, upon reflection, that I had been making a lot of assumptions about the world. One tends to do that, wouldn’t you say? We observe others, host a body of knowledge, and have our emotional and intellectual responses. These are our assumptions. I make ‘em, you make ‘em, and all too often I find myself marching about in the world as if these sets of responses were the facts, and not the limited perceptions that they actually are.

I’ve pondered this idea of what I don’t know I don’t know as a piece of with my study of non violent communication. What I come to is the idea that while there’s nothing wrong with not knowing something, in fact, knowing everything is impossible and would probably make life no fun at all, but when you think you know… wrong or right… that’s when the real party-fun begins.

What is the alternative? I mean, surely there’s no point in staying up all night talking about talking is there? There can’t be any good that comes from confrontation, however gentle, and rehashing the same old brick walls. Do we determine a course of study by which we will begin to determine the things we don’t know that we don’t yet know, and systematically deduce where our system of assumptions have fallen short? How about redoubling our efforts at communication and research, or perhaps we could hire of team for more elaborate and extensive analysis of the data? Surely there must be some effective means of determining our failures of perception apart from accepting our blindness, this greasy cloth pulled tightly over our eyes, and continue cutting up our digits on the cold stone walls of our minds, yes?

Last night in an after-hours discussion with a friend of mine, I asked for more information about this practice of determining what we don’t know we don’t know. She kindly described how there are various methods for this, but that lately she’s been thinking about it in this way:

There is so much that we don’t know, and so much which we think we know (I am totally paraphrasing here, so try and endure) and while there are many methods of research and discovery, perhaps the most prudent response is for one to assume they don’t know anything at all. In this way, we meet each situation from a neutral place, and are more able to gather information, knowledge, and insight without the bias or burden of self interfering.

This is only my perception, some eighteen hours later, rewritten here on my journal, and not a literal translation of the exchange, but I have to say that this was most auspicious. The very words, at the very moment. I have been aglow since this conversation, busy quieting my mind, and listening to what the rain has to tell me, the creaking floor of my apartment, and rather than living in reaction to the onslaught of email which came flooding across my desktop this morning, I was able to be still and read carefully.

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that there is some measure of true liberation in approaching the moment as if no other moment has ever existed. I meditate, and I reach my arms to heaven, opening my mind and allow the moment to quietly arrive. Oh, what joy, what peace there is in this practice. Yet, my emotional life seems to overwhelm this sense of spirit. It never fails really. No longing, no love, no passion is too mild that it wouldn’t operate as a most efficient butt plug for my soul. It’s a disgusting image, I know, but it’s about right.

I pray that I may meet love’s face in this moment, and know nothing about her. I pray that I may meet longing’s searing attacks with the neutrality and innocence of a dairy cow at retirement. I pray that I may take hope’s hand with the blank stare of child in pure awakening. I pray that I may appear, quite suddenly, in this moment… here and now.
Where we shall go from there, I do not know.

what is it with me and Abba? Sheesh…