Cultivating unknowing

In 1896, Thomas Mann wrote a short story called ‘Disillusionment’. It tells of a young man brought up in a clergyman’s family in which the ‘pulpit rhetoric’ makes him expect great things of life. However, he is constantly disappointed by what he encounters. “I went out into that supposedly so wonderful life, craving just one, one single experience which should correspond to my great expectations.  God help me, I have never had it.”

Disillusionment with life was a popular theme among writers of the late 19th century but often it was more of a pose than something deeply experienced.  For the 20th century Existentialists, however, it was genuine and profound, deriving from their sense that we live in an absurd world, a world which has no larger meaning and where nothing has any more value than anything else.  

So how do people continue to function when they live in a world that disappoints them, or which doesn’t make sense? 

The protagonist of Mann’s short story resorts to gazing at the starry heavens at night, “that being the best way to turn my eyes away from earth and from life.  And perhaps it may be pardoned in me that I still cling to my distant hopes?” For the existentialists, the only way to live ‘authentically’ in an ‘absurd’ world is to impose one’s meaning upon it and live according to this.  Yet another response to a world which constantly disappoints is the fatalistic hedonism of Peggy Lee’s “Let’s keep dancing”:

If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing, Let’s break out the booze and have a ball

Sri Aurobindo and Mother agree that existence is not what we conventionally think it is. Mother was unequivocal. “All our old ways of understanding are WORTHLESS. All, all our values are WORTHLESS.”

However, Sri Aurobindo and Mother offer a very different vision of reality from the pessimism of the existentialists and the ‘disillusionists’ because they affirm that there is an overall purpose, order, which involves a process of spiritual evolution. While this can be intellectually understood, it can only be experienced by accessing a higher level of consciousness than the one in which we usually function. 

And so the problem presents itself:  until we access that level and contact the psychic, the inner guiding compass, how are we to function? For the awareness that all our old ways of understanding are worthless can be very debilitating. How can one plan or take even the smallest step with this awareness? How to continue to function, work and make decisions, when everything is shadowed by this uncertainty?

Of course, we don’t lack signposts. Both Mother and Sri Aurobindo provide plenty of guidance regarding how to open ourselves to levels of consciousness that offer truer guidance than the mind. But many of us are still struggling at the lower levels and we are left wrestling with many pressing issues – like, to take topical examples, whether or not we should pursue a New Town Development Authority for Auroville, or how to choose members for our major working groups or decide upon the design of the remaining Matrimandir gardens – for which no specific guidance from our teachers exists. 

What to do, then? One approach is to take everything much more lightly rather than welding ourselves to inflexible perspectives and attitudes:  Mother’s assertion that conventional understanding is ‘worthless’ should sound the death knell of any kind of dogma. However, this is easier said than done because the unenlightened mind craves certainty, neatly drawn lines and divisions. 

Another way is to try to subvert this tendency by deliberately cultivating ‘unknowing’, a conscious acknowledgement that we do not understand the world around us. This is not easy when people are knocking at the door wanting immediate answers to a problem, or in a society where confidence is prized above uncertainty (when did you last hear a politician say “I don’t know the answer”?). Yet the need for ‘immediate’ solutions is often overstated, and the embrace of unknowing can be a first step towards emptying ourselves of all the mental detritus we have accumulated, and of calling down the peace within which a new, truer guidance can emerge. (The idea that the ordinary mind is the bar to higher consciousness is a very old one, of course. The 14th century text, The Cloud of Unknowing, is a classic work on the topic in which the anonymous author states, “We cannot think our way to God”.)

Of course, the precondition for this to happen is a profound faith that a higher guidance than our minds does exist, and a willingness to surrender to that guidance.  Mother pointed out that the spiritual consciousness is much more efficient than our minds at dealing even with matter but this, as Sri Aurobindo pointed out, is the hardest thing particularly for Westerners with their Cartesian, deeply materialistic, minds to acknowledge. 

Yet faith is not something we lack. The problem is we tend to have faith in the wrong things: in a particularly narrow view of reality, or in our minds as the ultimate explainers and judge of all things.  

So how can we ‘loosen’ ourselves from our present ‘knowing’? It could begin with us recognizing how far the continued existence of the Auroville experiment does not depend upon the Aurovilians or government support, important though this is, but upon larger forces far beyond our control and understanding. As Mother pointed out in 1969, The city will be built by what is invisible to you. The men who have to act as instruments will do so despite themselves. They are only puppets n the hands of larger Forces. 

If we can admit our ignorance in matters like this, we can gradually extend these ‘islands of unknowing’ to more and more areas of our life. Finally, we may recognize that even the simplest action in this cosmic laboratory may be subject to forces and have consequences far beyond our ken. (Ruud Lohman once wrote that if we understood the true significance of what we are engaged in when we work at the Matrimandir, we “wouldn’t dare pick up a nail”.)

Once we have reached this degree of unknowing, if we can avoid hitting the panic button or falling into the slough of disillusionment or nihilism, we can try practising the quiet and confident surrender which is the precondition for receiving the ‘Something Else’ that can help us negotiate a truer path through the thickets and complexities of life here. 

Of course, it’s hard, very hard, to give up an entire way of thinking and understanding around which many of us have constructed our identity and our relationship to the world. But how much longer do we want to keep circling on the same old mental wheel?