Have you ever noticed that the best way to get to know something, whatever that is, always start with not knowing it? That it is from not knowing that knowing emerges from.

I am not talking about bumping in the wall of “I don’t know” and immediately running to Wikipedia or Google for an answer. No, I am talking about the important things, the important questions in your life, although the same process works for all the simple questions too. Anything from “What am I going to eat tonight?” to “What is life?” It doesn’t matter. It always starts from that place of not knowing from which inspiration can arise.

Now, although it may seem obvious from where I am standing now, I have learnt over time that the amount of not knowing needed to find what I am looking for is proportional to the depth of the question that I am asking. It’s relatively easy to figure out what I feel like cooking for dinner: I sit down for a few seconds and wonder what I would like to eat. Note the use of the word “wonder”, I’ll come back to it later. But you see, in this case, it’s easy because the answer we’re looking for it is precisely that, an answer, a concept, a word, an image, mind stuff: a thing. But what if the question I am asking is a lot deeper, something that leads beyond concept like “What is Faith?” And that is where the whole expression of not knowing takes a completely different dimension.

Most of us have a portable answer ready for everything, including mysterious concepts such as God, the Universe, the Soul. It’s easy, it’s written in whatever book and scriptures that we decided to buy into. The answer is here, it’s written and we don’t need to look for it, we learnt it, it’s easy to find. But that’s precisely where it hurts: what we consider as knowledge is essentially a bunch of stuffs that are written in books and that we never were courageous enough to question the relevance or validity of. And I’m not limiting this to religion, it works for pretty much anything, including science books. If I know something from a book, something I have been taught and I haven’t spent the time to figure out if it checks out in my experience, then it is just a belief. A belief is not founded on knowledge, in fact, it is founded on ignorance. BOOM! I said it.

And there’s nothing wrong with that, but why do we work ourselves into such tight corners? Why do we prefer to believe rather than question? On one side maybe because it feels a lot more safe, it’s reassuring. It’s something we can stand and count on when somebody ask us questions. It’s also a tool we can use to be “right” and “prove” others wrong, hereby solidifying our sense of identity by belonging to a group of those who know the real truth versus those who don’t. I can only be right if someone else is wrong, you see? Otherwise there would nothing solid for me to stand on, and good Lord how scary would that be! Surely we can’t have that. And that is what it boils down to, we’re afraid to admit to ourselves that we don’t know, that we don’t have the first clue.

Understand that I am not attacking anyone. In fact believing is an essential part of the equation. You need to start as a believer in order to be able to be able to come out of beliefs. Believing is a form of materialism, it never is self sufficient, never enough. The believer knows itself as incomplete and perpetually needs to gather more beliefs in order to consolidate its unstable integrity. Such dynamic is eventually unsustainable, there is always a point where the beliefs are stacked up so high that the whole edifice, lacking foundation, starts collapsing on itself. Have you ever looked at the sand in an hourglass, the way it piles up until it hits the critical point and whole starts sliding in tiny avalanches? It’s exactly like that, and there is no way to predict exactly when it’s going to happen. In practice, it translates in a shift of perspective, gradual or sudden but always lethal to the believer. And when the believer dies, Truth starts revealing itself. Whether it is accepted or not, it will find its way through. How painlessly the process unravels merely relies on how willing we are to embrace it. Because once it has started, there is no way back.

In my experience, that is a fantastic place to be. I feels liberating! It was scary and disconcerting at first, to finally come to the realization that I have no clue about anything whatsoever, that any knowledge I had acquired in life is completely relative and hereby unverifiable. Everything I knew collapsed, not all at once, but quite quickly over the space of a few months of close inspection. I began having no clue about anything whatsoever. I still had opinions, but they became transparent and disposable. They still pop up every now and then just because my mind still likes telling stories, I’m only human. It also can be challenge as it is certainly not the norm. I find it hasn’t helped my social skills, for one thing, not that I had many to start with, but maintaining a casual conversation has become a surreal exercise. Not because I find myself superior to my interlocutor, but often because I have no idea what to say. When asked for an opinion, I find myself walking on hollow grounds. All I can come up with is most of the time a big blank because I’m incapable of establishing a judgement about the subject of our discussion, I can’t agree or disagree so I just nod and smile like an idiot or just say that I don’t know. Suffice to say it cuts short to most conversations. The big upside however is that I am much more creative, much more capable of letting myself loose and let the drawing, sculpting, cooking, writing, or whatever it is I am doing at the time happen by itself. Anything that requires inspiration finds its source beyond knowledge.

Anyhow, it took me a while but I finally came to the conclusion that not knowing was in fact the answer to any question I could possibly ever have. However, to properly understand, it becomes improper to talk about an answer at this point, the traditional sense of the word answer does not apply in this case. An answer is finite, quantized, reductive: a conclusion. Not-knowing is open, boundless: infinite potential. The question and not-knowing blend together as one, what is a question apart from already an expression of the unknown?

How do I explain not-knowing? Trying to talk about the unknown is like a professional game of beating around the bush. I could be playing it for centuries without ever touching it. It is not a thing, it is the lack thereof. It is formless, empty, unfathomable. How can one express the lack of things by only using things as a mean of expression? How do I express in words that which by nature cannot be? That won’t stop me, it’s an exquisite game and I love playing it.

The only way to find the unknown is to actually “do” it. The best part is that there is nothing to learn, you already know how to get there. In fact you don’t need to do anything. Not-knowing is not-doing. It’s as simple as asking a question, even something like “What is it to not know?” and as you stay there, it will reveal itself to you. Now remember, it will not come to you as words or sentences but in experience, or more precisely through experience. Notice the choice of word. I said “through” and not “as”. It is not the experienced, it is the experiencing. A context, a background of silence, of stillness, of … Not Knowing. Don’t look for a specific for experience in particular then, what is already here is perfect, you don’t need to change anything. This is a mistake that many people do, to try and find a particular aspect of experience, cling to it as if this was IT. Very often it is a meditative state, which wile it may feel supremely wonderful is still an experience and experiences, as you surely already know, come and go. Let them do that. No, what I am talking about is present in all circumstances, a simple undercurrent of intimate silence, a sense of wondering, of being . You may find there is nothing exceptional in that, it is extremely familiar, which is probably why most of us don’t pay attention to it in the first place. I’m saying unexceptional, that is only at first sight. When you visit a new house you want to buy you don’t just stand at the door and say “Yup, it’s a house, I’ve seen one of those before.” It is no mere house that you are buying here. You’re moving out of the little house into infinite grounds, that’s a lot to explore! It’s already all yours, all you have to do is to ask questions, the deeper the better. Aaaaand… be patient. Very patient. There, that’s where it starts and also where it ends.

Now, be prepared to meet the unexpected. Most of us at this point will be faced by a little something called the ego, a mind construct, merely another bunch of beliefs. It gets bored easily, even scared at the perspective that it is losing grounds. It will have a million reasons to not keep going. I have found myself in many occasions absolutely terrified, convinced to the last of my atoms that I was going to be swallowed forever in a black hole of oblivion. Again, just an experience, so I got past it, through it. Waited it out, stayed in the question until terror eventually ballooned out. It comes back every so often when I hit a “nerve” but I now welcome it. Anyway, don’t make a big case out of it, it’s normal, don’t make it a problem, that’s just more ego. Simply ignore the story and return to the question.

Finally, I discovered that in fact there are many ways to approach the unknown, some do it through the body, some through silence, meditation, acceptance, now… All of those ways are ultimately one and the same, they all combine together as a stream of being. Once you get familiar with one, you quickly realize that whichever approach you take already includes all the others. It all fades into a somatic emptiness, a serene loving peace where everything disappears and appears only to disappear again. I realize that describing it like that seems exotic, or fancy but it is nothing of the sort. It is of utter simplicity and familiarity.

I don’t know when this article became a lesson. I merely wanted to describe my experience but I find it flows better if I pretend I’m explaining it to somebody else. If anybody’s still interested, please don’t believe a word I said. Try it for yourself instead. Find the question, be silent, stay in it, dig that hole a hundred miles deep and see where it leads you to. The unknown is what you are, to know it as yourself, just be. You may never find anything, but what if that was precisely what you were looking for? What if this is exactly what Faith is?

There, I’m done! I have a big pile of laundry waiting in my washer, I have to take it to the laundromat to dry. I’ll do that now.