Knowing and Unknowing

The story of Adam and Eve is an allegory describing the loss of paradise through
the arising of self-knowing. So, it seems, there is wholeness (paradise) and within that
boundless, free-floating, causeless energy, something appears which experiences itself
as being separate from that wholeness (paradise).
Here is a metaphor pointing to what seems like the story of self-consciousness, out
of which is apparently born the knowing and experience of free will, choice, time and
space, purpose and direction.
As the story unfolds, so the self learns to know the world out there and attempts
to negotiate the best deal possible for itself . . . it apparently takes action to find
pleasure and avoid pain. The greater the knowledge the more effective the action, the
results and the apparent sense of personal control . . . or so it seems.
All of these efforts bring varying results, and so the individual comes to know
fluctuating states of gratification and disappointment. However, it can be noticed that
there seems to be an underlying sense of dissatisfaction which drives the self to find a
deeper meaning.
Because the apparent self can only exist through its own knowing, its search for a
deeper meaning will be limited to that which it can know and experience for itself.
Within these limitations there are a multitude of doctrines, therapies, ideologies,
spiritual teachings and belief systems that the seeker can come to know. There can
also be the knowing and experiencing of states of silence, stillness, bliss, awareness
and detachment, all of which seem to come and go like night and day.
All of these teachings, recommendations and prescriptions are attempting to provide
the seeker with answers to that which is unknowable, and ways to find that which has
never been lost.
So the self is the separate seeker that pursues everything that it thinks it can know and
do, excepting the absence of itself. That absence is the emptiness which is
unknowable, but paradoxically is also the very fullness, the wholeness (paradise) that
is longed for.
Should the apparent seeker meet with a perception which reveals in great depth the
real nature of separation and also exposes, without compromise, the sublime futility of
seeking, there can be a collapse of the construct of the separate self. That totally
impersonal message carries with it a boundless energy into which the seemingly
contracted energy of self unfolds. A resonance can arise which is beyond self
awareness . . . something ineffable can be sensed . . . a fragrance and an opening to
the wonder of unknowing can emerge.
Suddenly, there seems to be a shift and an impersonal realisation that this is already
wholeness. The boundless, naked, innocent, free-floating and wonderful simplicity of
beingness is already all there is . . . it is extraordinary in its ordinariness and yet it
cannot be described.
Tony Parsons