Knowing
July 6, 2022
Knowing……..
“Mans real illness lies in ‘not knowing that he does not know’.
Yet you should not think Lao Tzu is recommending some kind of negative, mystical dependence, some kind of mystical rejection of the fruits of understanding. No, Lao Tzu is simply saying that the mentality is like a dam, preventing the flow of the spirit, and that is the reason why your way of thinking must be set aside.
Just ask yourself what, in fact, you are doing with your thinking faculty. You are intellectualising gnostic thoughts and your heart is mystified by your emotional thoughts. In this way you erect a dam, preventing the influx of the spirit. Yet doesn't universal wisdom teach that heart and head must form a unity?
Besides, as long as we refuse to acknowledge that we know nothing, the highest reality will remain, at most, a beautiful dream, and only we ourselves can remedy this lack of new consciousness.“
He who recognises this sick spot is already healed thereby.
Recognition is the arcanum of this dark disease.
The essence cannot be touched by intellectual thinking.
Neither can the sublime ideal he attained by human deeds.
Extract from “Introduction”
Jan van Rijckenborgh and Catharose di Petri
In each of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves. When, therefore, we find ourselves in a difficult situation to which there is no solution, he can sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude - the very attitude that led us into the difficult situation.
Civilization in Transition
C.G. Jung
Nobody knows this little Rose
Nobody knows this little Rose
It might a pilgrim be
Did I not take it from the ways
And lift it up to thee.
Only a Bee will miss it
Only a Butterfly,
Hastening from far journey
On its breast to lie
Only a Bird will wonder
Only a Breeze will sigh
Ah Little Rose, how easy
For such as thee to die!
Emily Dickinson 1830 - 1886.
”But if you will not know yourselves you dwell in poverty, and it is you who are that poverty.”
Gospel of Thomas, Saying Three.