What does it mean to know something? You see, to know something…to have that sense of knowing or recognizing something, there must be a simultaneous sense of an inner reference point, an inner knower. This is how things go and we can say we’re in “known relationship” with life.
Try this. Sit down somewhere comfortable and place an item in front of you; a glass of water, perhaps, or a book. Or, look out of the window. What is your relationship with this object? How do you meet it? On what terms are you meeting? What is your relationship to any of this? What is your relationship to life as a whole? Can you feel that slight nervousness?…that sense of meeting a stranger?
These questions are unanswerable. Your relationship with experience is undefinable. Life never clarifies for us, our relationship to any other part of experience. We are constantly left in this unconfirmed place, an ever-undecided now, permanently floating in an estuary of unclaimable experience….always at the mouth of something that we can never truly call our own.
Kn-own-ing (Original post: February 22nd 2013)
Life spends most of its time out of view, existing in private. We spend our days, as if in a concealed room living with a sense that we both know things and own things. Perhaps knowing and owning are the same process? To shift back to sanity means, in a way, to give back everything to life. To put things back on the shelves where they belong and to admit, painlessly, that we never knew or owned anything, inside or out…not even our most familiar feelings belong to us. And as we return them, they reveal how they were never ours and were just taking time in our presence for a while before moving on.
Constant Voice 