“Knowing the Unknowable”
August 25th, 2016 adminBe forewarned that this is not a very clinical piece and is rather some personal reflections that I wished to share. I had the great pleasure of celebrating an extraordinary friend’s birthday last night at an intimate dinner. I leafed through the pages of a book she’d been given, In Love with the Mystery. Later that same night before bed, I came upon a daily meditation written by Richard Rohr entitled, “Paradox. Mystery is Endless Knowability.” It caught my attention because the title and content were strikingly similar to what I’d just been reading.
Rohr writes: “I’m deliberately using the word mystery to point to depth, an open future, immense freedom, a kind of beauty and truth that can’t be fully spoken or defined.
…This sounds like a contradiction, but in fact, when you allow yourself to fall into the abyss—into hiddenness, limitlessness, unknowability, a void without boundaries—you discover it’s somehow a rich, supportive, embracing spaciousness where you don’t have to ask (or answer) the questions of whether you’re right or wrong. You’re being held and so you do not need to try to “hold” yourself together.”
I suddenly realized that I had had direct personal experiences of entering into the Unknowable and discovering the Knowable on the other side. This included a near drowning incident in which I was in a small boat that capsized, tipped over by gushing water that suddenly poured into a break in the levy along the San Joaquin/Sacramento River delta. My heavy pea jacket quickly soaked and became a weight that took me straight down into the fierce current. I had no orientation and during that time, I had a glimpse of the netherworld that was terrifying and awe-inducing, with no connection to my body. I “saw” a vast grey-brown horizon without sky or clouds, an endless panorama that I absolutely “knew” did not exist in the world I’d known. This was not a thought but an immediate, observable, experiential reality. As I reflect, I realize there were intense feelings in this bodiless state of pure awareness. Miraculously, the long, strong arm of a friend, who’d also been in the boat, somehow hoisted me, in a single, powerful swoop, up and out of the water.
After I was helped to land, it was suggested that I begin walking back to the single house on the island. The others would follow shortly. I was in an altered state from the experience and I’d never before felt my exquisite state of vulnerability as I had that night. My shoes were missing and the path was rough with an occasional thorn. As I looked at the tree branches in the moonlight and the stars overhead, I felt that I was walking on sacred ground…like a naked human in a primordial state, with no way to survive except for the goodness that would come my way. I’ll never forget the sight of the lights in the house sitting inland as the dusk was deepening.
It was an experience of being lost and found, having life taken away and returned as a gift again. Like being caught when you’re falling and then propped up again. So often we think we must make something happen or that we must do it alone. And if we face the truth of our ultimate powerlessness and dependency, we feel shame. But on this night, I knew the absolute truth of my powerlessness and dependency and felt only gratitude.
It was similar to the time I discovered my birth family through an impossible series of synchronicities too extraordinary to believe. There is no way this could or should have happened. But it did, and I met one sister in the hallway outside her Manhattan condo, another at a train station in Westchester County and another nearby in her tree-filled front yard.
The “unknowable” that I “know” is that invisible helping hand and it is as familiar to me as the sun rising, although my consciousness forgets these awakenings and lapses back into ordinary life. The two readings mentioned above, coming to me simultaneously, caused me to remember. They remind me that no matter how great our traumas can be in this life, there really is something very BIG that catches us. And it often doesn’t look like that is possible. We go into the abyss and there is nothing and then suddenly, something or someone pulls us out of it! If we have not yet come out of it, that does not mean we never will. Perhaps we have not yet noticed the lights in the house ahead or right in front of us or even within us.
Sometimes it is my great privilege to be a source of illumination for another who wanders in the darkening dusk or may be walking away from wreckage. People tell me weekly about emotional pain so great it feels like plates shifting beneath the earth, and these stories can feel crushing to either of us. And yet there is a force upon which I’ve come to depend that will emerge and flow between us, lifting us up. It is the gift of “knowing” we are loved in our nakedness, our powerlessness and our dependency. It is my sense that when we let this “knowing” seep into our bodily being, we may experience the ultimate peace we seek.
Some will wonder, “How does this come about? How does this happen?” Theories abound and surely have use. But no theory will ever be complete because here we enter the realm of the Unknowable. As I sit with others in my role as therapist, I wish to allow myself to connect with the love that has been shown to me and convey this love and compassion to the person across from me. I hope to provide that steadiness that allows both of us to look squarely at every facet of truth that emerges, whether we peer into the abyss; or feel the pain of the thorns; or face our most destructive urges. To the degree that each of us can “know” that we are not alone and loved, the impossible becomes reality.
It has been most meaningful to reconnect with personal memories that allow me to feel again this knowing in my body and my senses. Before I may forget this truth again, I thought I’d share this with whoever may read these words and perhaps find comfort too.
