“Down deep in his heart he knew that we all have the same promise of the unlimited help of the Universal Intelligence that guides all things. If we want it, we only have to plug into it with the master keys of desire and trust.”
-- Walter Russell
Around these parts we talk about the experiences of thinking, feeling, and knowing quite often. But how do we actually know when we know what we need to know in order to make big decisions? How do we learn to discern knowing from our thoughts and feelings?
Perhaps we should first look at what we do not know to set a benchmark.
We do not know what the true purpose of life is, yet its Grand Spirit has gripped us all for the time being.
We do not know why we are here on Earth, and why simply being alive on this planet should be so incredibly expensive for that matter.
Right from the onset, it seems that the perception of not knowing is an essential part of gaining “Experience Points” in Third Dimensional Life. It is built right in.
Perhaps this is the essence of what turns life into a game where each player competes against themself to bring their dreams to reality alongside others who are doing the same thing.
We know that about one third of the average person’s life is spent sleeping, yet we have no solidified and universal knowing of exactly where our Consciousness goes during that time.
The action of sleep temporarily shuts down the vehicle that enables our Consciousness to experience this world, yet our Consciousness never actually goes to sleep when our body does. It keeps experiencing. It continues learning.
In our dreams we ride fire-breathing dragons through alien worlds. We flex superhuman power to fly at will. We see the future, run through walls, and experience anything else that we could possibly imagine as soon as we imagine it.
Our dreams show us how our thoughts build our outward experiences instantly as they arise. Dream scenes cut from one scenario to the next at light speed as our sleeping thoughts dart back and forth, forming and dissipating at every whim.
Consciousness is the constant factor that unites waking and sleeping life because it is always awake and experiencing. Why then would the high level properties of the reality where we spend our waking life be any different from those of Dreamland if they both facilitate the same end goal?
The manifestation mechanics of each realm seem to work at different rates of speed, but each place offers a venue for Consciousness to learn from experience.
Not knowing is one of the natural challenges that Consciousness issues to each of us when it animates our Earthy bodies with its energetic essence. Perhaps this life is a game of how high we can each climb without a safety net, while trusting the strength of our grip?
And in order to build strength of any kind, we must actively train.
Perhaps experiencing life through conscious observation while learning whatever we can along the way is the point of it all.
Each of us has been to a crossroads in life where not knowing something forced us to have to make a decision without all the answers. These types of decisions require us to have complete faith in ourself and our abilities in order to proceed, despite the risk involved.
The Great Force of Consciousness seems to place what we truly want on the far side of risk barriers. And an undisciplined mind works to further elevate our threat perception of those barriers, making them seem insurmountable.
So how do we learn to trust ourselves enough to jump those barriers like hurdles?
The short answer is that each of us directly experiences the results of our actions as we live, whether awake or asleep. We each possess the Third Dimensional capability to observe our own actions to see where patterns that teach us lessons emerge. And we can use our observations to guide new, well-informed action.
I can not actually tell you how to know when you know what you need to know because only your perspective of the experience of the life you are living can unlock your own inner knowing of what you should do next.
We may ultimately end up knowing the same thing at the end of it all, but the roads we travel to arrive at our knowing wind through the countryside differently.
We synthesize experiential data differently from each other. That means we must each examine our own experience, find the patterns that emerge, and decipher our own unique code to learn more about where we have been and how we can use that information to decide where to go next.
If we were to experience the perception of Pure Consciousness and we knew everything there was to know about everything, then we would not be able to gain the valuable experience that comes from not knowing. That sure sounds like it would get boring after a while.
That sounds like a good enough reason for Consciousness to create a venue like the Earth where it could temporarily send itself down into various bodies to not know for a while.
Alan Watts touched on this in “The Dream Of Life”. Let us read his words together.
“If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death (or shall I say death implies life?), you can feel yourself – not as a stranger in the world, not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke - but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental.
I am not trying to sell you on this idea in the sense of converting you to it, I want you to play with it. I want you to think of its possibilities, I am not trying to prove it. I am just putting it forward as a possibility of life to think about. So then, let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have.
And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say, “Well that was pretty great. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it's gonna be."
And you would dig that and would come out of that and you would say, “Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it?”. Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further- and further-out gambles what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.
That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have. Of playing that you weren't God, because the whole nature of the godhead, according to this idea, is to play that it is not. So in this idea then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality, not God in a politically kingly sense, but god in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. And you are all that, only you are pretending you are not.”
-- Alan Watts, "The Dream of Life"
I would not dare tell you the answers to all of your great questions about life even if I were able to. Doing that would rob you of the experiences that you must choose to create for yourself in order to gain the wisdom of knowing that you seek.
And, if I did have all the answers to tell you, you probably would not believe them anyway.
I would not dare rob you of the feelings of victory that come from your own decision to champion the unknown.
My job is to be the hue-man that lets you know that you can do whatever you set your mind on. And to be your cheerleader as your actions bridge the space between your dreams and this waking reality.
A reality that might just be another dream inside of yet another dream…
What I can tell you though is that your heart and your mind must work together on this one. Because united we stand, and divided we fall.
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During this week’s practice we are leaning into the idea that the experience of not knowing is what seems to enable us to know when we know.
We recognize that there will always be “what if” type questions that arise from the brain when making risky decisions in the dark. But if we analyze our previous experience, we are guaranteed to remember situations where we overcame “what ifs” to make trustful decisions that allowed us to proceed in the right direction even though we were navigating blindly at the time.
Using our observations of previous experience we will look for patterns to see how our thoughts and behaviors of the past can inform our ability to discern meaning from the lessons they taught us.
Remember: you have never seen love’s true form floating through the air, but you know it when you feel it wrap you in its arms.
When you know, you know. Trust yourself, my friend.
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If you are asking yourself, “Who the f&#@ is this guy and why am I sitting here reading what he has to say”, then start back at #1.
You don't know what you don't know, but you always know when you know