Knowingness
The inherent knowingness, or nous, was called the logos by some Christians, total intellect by the Sufis, and discriminating awareness by the Buddhists. Now, this discriminating awareness or knowingness is the source of all experience – the various impressions, forms, and colors. Whether they are extraordinary physical experiences or unusual spiritual experiences, they are all the same to the inherent knowingness – they are all knowingness at different levels and intensities of brilliance. The ego experience is just dull knowingness, while the essential experience is bright knowingness, a luminous presence.
Spacecruiser Inquiry, p. 41 • discuss »
Spacecruiser Inquiry, p. 41 • discuss »
The fifth major characteristic of true nature is that it is not only awareness, oneness, dynamism, and openness, but also knowingness. This is similar to the Buddhist notion of the “wisdom of discrimination” or the discriminating awareness of the Buddha. It is inherent to essential presence that it is not only awareness of presence but simultaneously the discrimination of the particular quality of presence, such as Compassion or Peace. This knowingness is inherent to presence, inherent to the awareness of presence. It is not that presence arises and a separate awareness knows it as Compassion.
Spacecruiser Inquiry, p. 36 • discuss »
Spacecruiser Inquiry, p. 36 • discuss »
The feeling of an essential presence is part of its very substance; it is a quality of consciousness, a felt knowingness, a state with a recognizable quality. The closest we can come to describing the present quality is to call it a feeling of identity.
The Point of Existence, p. 36 • discuss »
The Point of Existence, p. 36 • discuss »
So, the knowingness we’re talking about has to be immediate. That’s why we say you not only have to be aware, you have to be fully present. Your consciousness of what you are experiencing has to fill the entire field of your awareness. It has to feel whatever is there, without veils or filters. Whatever you are feeling—hatred, rejection, resistance, anger, happiness, spaciousness—you allow it to fill all of your awareness, so that you feel it directly and completely. And the feeling of that, the experience of whatever is arising, is inseparable from the knowingness of it—because you cannot know True Nature conceptually, through the discursive mind.
The Unfolding Now, p. 122 • discuss »
The Unfolding Now, p. 122 • discuss »
We can eventually become quiet enough or secure enough in our knowingness that we no longer need to hold on to our knowing. Or perhaps through our inquiring, we have come to recognize what knowingness can and cannot do—we have seen its capacity completely, and so we don’t need to reify the knowing as something to hold on to. Either way, something falls off. The need to hold on to that knowing falls away, and there is just the luminosity of Being, on its own. And our True Nature continues to be our True Nature—because it is timeless, eternal. It was there before we started to know and it continues to be there.
Through our experience of living, we have developed the potential of True Nature to know, but True Nature is itself beyond that; it is pre-knowing, more primordial than knowing. It is just the “simply being there”—the awareness of being there without the awareness of being there meaning anything. The experience is: “I am aware of being here, but there is nothing in the mind that says I am aware of being here. There is no recognition of being here; I am just being here.”
The Unfolding Now, p. 193 • discuss »
The Unfolding Now, p. 193 • discuss »
We need to find out how to use the knowingness in a way that doesn't ensnare but liberates. The fact is that we need knowingness to get to enlightenment. Without knowingness, we would just become stupid saints. A cow is a kind of saint—she grazes peacefully, lies down when she has eaten enough, has no hatred for anything, doesn't want to kill anyone, is completely harmless. But a human being in that state would be called a stupid saint because the knowingness that brings in creativity and learning would be missing. Our human intelligence, our knowingness, our discerning capacity, is what opens many of our potentialities. But it is a double-edged sword; it can turn back on itself and cut us into pieces, disconnecting us from the primordial place of unity and innocence.
The more we learn to be in that place and not fight it, the freer we can be from the dangers of identification, reification, and the reactions that happen in the mind.
The Unfolding Now, p. 199 • discuss »
The Unfolding Now, p. 199 • discuss »
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