Splash No. 198 - Not Knowing
Life with Myself
In Zen Buddhism, there are statements known as koans, which are used as tools of inquiry and focus to meditate upon. As a result, they’re often inexplicable statements or questions that don’t fully make logical sense, such as “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” or “if you meet the Buddha, kill him.” I cannot begin to try and explain those two, but one that has held my mind captive all week is “not knowing is most intimate.”
As someone who has written times about how much I LOVE knowledge and knowing things, first reading this was confusing. I had gotten used to “ignorance is bliss,” a phrase that only partially promotes the lack of knowledge, but this was a completely different level. Not only was not knowing a good thing, it was the most intimate thing. What was so incredible about a lack of knowledge that it could grant an intimacy to life that the joy of knowledge couldn’t?
When I googled it, apparently the full koan referred to someone going on a journey with an unknown destination. So perhaps aimlessness provided some sort of intimacy. Not knowing the direction of the future could allow for more intimacy in the present. Yet, this felt like an unsatisfying answer, especially for something that was meant to require hours of meditation to solve.
I thought about all of the things that I thought I knew: that seahorses mate for life, that my speaker is probably listening to me all the time, how my favorite bedsheets feel. Was this knowledge keeping me at a distance from life itself? I thought about how I felt before I knew these things and the experience of discovering them. Didn’t the lack of knowledge make the revelation so much more beautiful? Like how you wish you could listen to your favorite song again for the first time? Isn’t it so much harder to find wonder in things that we already know?
The world is so much more miraculous before we know how it works. How wondrous is the sunrise when it could rely on the sun god’s chariot! How incredible is the dew when it could be painted on by angels! How holy is the rain when only our tributes and love can bring it to us! And once we know, how can we ever go back? Once we know, how can we ever appreciate how divine it seems that anything could exist at all?
I think this is the purpose of prayer — to surrender to our lack of knowledge. I bring my head down every morning and every night in front of a picture and an idol. I speak to something larger than myself that I cannot comprehend and the lack of comprehension brings the intimacy: I can bare my fears, I can bare my smallness, I can, even if just for a moment, find peace in giving up the future to the most high power above.
Drops of the Week
PLAYLIST - march 22 - March is already over! How did that happen?
ARTICLE - "No News Is Good News" by Thomas Bevan - great article breaking down our strange obsession with news
POEM - "How Prayer Works" by Kaveh Akbar - "we were boys built to love what was in front of our faces"
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🤷🏻♀️,
Nikhil