It is not ignorance. Rather, one could say, a particular process of cognition that has little or no use for words. It is part of our heritage at birth, the infant’s first primer. And the young child lives by it, gathering into its growing body and aboriginal heart a cosmography of wonder.
Unknowing, if one can be open and vulnerable, will take us down to the very deeps of knowing, not informing the mind but coursing through the whole body, artery and vein–provided one can thrust aside what the world calls common sense, that popular lumpen wisdom that prevents the emerging of the numinous.
Unknowing needs that a man be in a certain state of grace, playful, artless, inwardly aquitted of opinion, not at all as children are but rather as fools or saints. We cannot wipe the mind clean of its knowing, as one would wash a face, for, indeed, paradoxically, we need that knowing. It is an essential part of living and not to be despised. Only when the mind attempts to usurp the whole realm of consciousness, of which, after all, it is but a fragment, are the possibilities of discovering Unknowing overlaid and lost. But for one intent on seeking the Unknown, that “I do not know” is the door to it, the “Open Sesame” which to pronounce costs nothing less than everything. So, he drops from his busy awareness into the stillness whence life springs, into the void within him.
~Pamela Travers
and indeed, the wildish moment passed, and you probably denied it even happened, and really didn’t own that there is any wild in you at all…..but the bare feet and the need to dance reveal the truth….
inquiry for today~ to be free, we let go of our need to know it all……how do you unknow for a moment or two to realize a little wildish knowing?
The wild prayer of the natural human voice,
deep down, shy, reticent.It’s source, the wild nature from which we came
It waits for us,
In quiet,
Like a loon’s call on a wilderness lake
Out of the dark night
A prayer from a forgotten past.
~Roderick MacIver
