In This Episode…

“If we want to live our lives immersed in the mystery of awakened consciousness, we need to give up the idea that we could ever know this mystery with our mind. This means we have to give up trying to know it with the mind, trying to get a handle on it in any way. If we want that extraordinary dimension to become the source of our life, we must learn to live in the innocence of a beginner’s mind.”
—Craig Hamilton

We’ve all heard it said that spiritual awakening requires us to leap into the unknown—to go beyond the mind and discover who we are beyond our familiar reference points. But what does this really mean?

In “The Power of Not Knowing” Craig explores one of the most subtle but persistent traps we face on the spiritual path: our deep need for certainty.

We often experience life as insecure and unpredictable, and the need to “figure things out” becomes a way of navigating an uncertain world. However, on the spiritual path, this compulsive drive for certainty leads us in the opposite direction of where we’re trying to go.

Craig unpacks this paradox, illuminating what it means to embrace the unknown in your meditation practice and the transformative freedom that comes with the courage to step into it.

This episode includes a 12-minute guided meditation, so we encourage you to listen when you can avoid distractions and give yourself the space to be fully present.

If you’re interested in exploring more of Craig’s approach to meditation, you’re invited to tune in to a 90-minute online workshop Craig will be hosting called Meditation 2.0 – The Miracle of Direct Awakening. Register for free at: FreeMeditationWorkshop.com

Discover More about Craig’s Awakened Life Membership Program

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

It’s probably obvious to all of us why it’s useful to have a beginner’s mind. We don’t want to impose our ideas from the past onto every new moment, coming to each situation in life full of preconceptions, with a rigid plan about how things are supposed to go. We don’t want to have firm, rigid ideas about every person in the room, and a firm identity about ourselves and what we’re capable of and what we’re not, and who we are and are not.

I think all of us can sense the value of a kind of fluidity that is really different from the rigidity I was just describing. We know what it’s like to encounter other people when they’re rigidly holding a lot of preconceived ideas and firmly held beliefs, should’s and shouldn’t’s, and theories and stories about everything. We’ve encountered that in other people. We know that it’s oppressive.

We’ve encountered it in ourselves, also, and we’ve seen the tyranny of that already-knowing mind, that certainty. I think even beyond being a spiritual person, beyond being an enlightened person, we all know it’s a good idea to be open-minded. This is a very colloquial, simple, and maybe superficial way of talking about what it means to not know — to be open-minded, to be fluid.

We understand that, and we’ve worked to be more open, innocent and receptive, and less rigid, controlling, and certain all the time. When we see ourselves imposing our stories and theories and plans in a way that’s too rigid, we back off, we make space, and we listen better to other people. We pay more attention to the actual situation that we’re in, so that we don’t set a trap for ourselves with our convictions.

Abandoning the Trap of Already Knowing

What I want to speak about now is why the trap of already knowing, and our habit of needing to know, are so important to transcend on the spiritual path. In this context more than any other, we have to let go of the known and even of the need to know, in order to make room for that which our mind will never be able to comprehend.

To some degree in life, when we let go of the “I know what to do, and I know how this is supposed to go, and I know how it’s going to go, and I know how you’re going to react,” when we let go of all that certainty, in a sense what we’re doing is making room for new knowledge. We’re making room for information that we wouldn’t otherwise see because we’re blinded by the filters of what we already know.

To some degree, we’re just letting go of what we think we know in order to be more receptive and open to discovering what’s actually true. It makes us more available to the truth in life and in practice. Even in life, it’s paradoxical that letting go of the need to know is what makes us available for truth. That’s true, and I think we can all see it.

Letting Go of the Mind As Our Primary Way of Knowing

But when it comes to spiritual awakening, we’re being asked to do something much more significant than that. We’re not just being asked to give up all the reference points we already have in our mind about awakening, enlightenment and life. And we’re not just being asked to give up our existing worldview in order to make room for a more accurate worldview.

We’re being asked fundamentally to let go of the need to have any fixed reference points at all, to have any coherent worldview at all. In a sense, we’re being asked or invited to let go of the mind as our primary way of knowing and navigating reality.

Spiritual awakening requires us not just to let go of what we think is true in this moment, so that we might see it more clearly. It asks us to give up the need for certainty itself, and never pick it up again.

Awakening is Like Blindness for the Conventional Ego.

It’s an invitation into what feels like a kind of blindness for the conventional ego and mind. It’s as if I’ve lived my whole life able to see and get around, and everything has worked by using one set of organs, one set of capacities. That’s how I’ve achieved my success, and maybe raised my family, and done all the good I’ve done in the world. And now you’re asking me to give that up or to put a blindfold on that whole way of seeing, of knowing.

This is very counterintuitive, counter-instinctual. We have a bias toward knowing, understanding, and certainty. Because of that, when we think about spiritual awakening or enlightenment — the way we imagine it, or what we tend to focus on if we’ve had powerful experiences of awakening — we look at it as a better way of knowing.

How the Ego Thinks About Awakening

We also look at it as feeling good, feeling connected, feeling in touch, and all the positive feeling that flows from that. But perhaps more than that, we look at it as, “I’m going to see and know in a new way.”

When we imagine that, we can’t help but superimpose our conventional experience of knowing and understanding and seeing onto it. What we imagine is a kind of super-knowing or a super-ordinary version of the same kind of knowing, certainty, and clarity that we get in our best moments, in a conventional sense.

We imagine flashes of blazing intuition where our ego self finally gets the certainty it’s been looking for its whole life. We think about the emergence of enlightened wisdom as this final moment of absolute clarity. We’ve lived with the insecurity of not quite being sure if we know, and trying to know throughout our whole life, and we imagine, “Ah-ha, enlightenment will be like knowing exactly what to do and exactly how to do it, in all the right moments, in a way that will be completely satisfying to my ego, which is just dying to be right and to be sure for once!”

I’m not teasing you — I’m teasing the human condition, because this is how we are. We can’t help relating to awakening in the way I’m speaking about it.

It’s that part of us that’s so eager to have something to be sure of. That part of us feels like life will work best when we’re the most certain and the clearest, when we really can anticipate and know beforehand, have a clear map and a clear picture, and have it all figured out. There’s a belief that that is the path to the life I want. The idea that we would be giving that certainty up seems incomprehensible, nonsensical.

So why on earth would we do it?

A Leap Beyond the Mind

Spiritual awakening is about a leap entirely beyond that framework and structure. It is about a leap into a dimension of who and what we are, and what reality is, that our conceptual mind will never be able to know, will never be able to comprehend. That’s why it’s always been referred to as “beyond the mind” — it’s who we are and what reality is, beyond the mind.

Beyond the mind lies a vast, sacred, extraordinary world, a universe of being and becoming, that the mind will never be able to think or understand or say anything about. Not really. Sure, at times I use words to describe some dimension of that, so that the part of us that already knows it will recognize it and be propelled in that moment beyond everything we already know. That’s what spiritual teaching, or a part of it, is.

But nothing we can ever say, nothing you can ever think, and nothing any of us can ever conceptualize or grasp with our mind will ever even come close to touching, to naming, to describing, the infinite.

The only way we can approach the infinite is to utterly relinquish our mind and transform our relationship to our already-knowing mind, which has the arrogance and the hubris to think that we can get a handle on the infinite.

The Infinite Is Unknowable and It’s Also Who We Are

Now I want to make a distinction. When we speak about the infinite depth of our true nature or awakened consciousness in the way I have been, our mind with its conceptual makeup will make an assumption when we hear about something that big.

Because we can’t understand it with the mind, we can’t get to it, then we assume the only way we can know something about it is to put it outside of us, far away from us, and “know” that it’s far away and that it’s big and vast and out of reach.

I just want to be clear that the infinite depth, the extraordinary sacred dimension that I’m talking about is who you are, right now. It’s already who all of us are right now. It doesn’t exist somewhere else. It exists right here, right now. It’s the infinite depth that is hearing the words I’m saying, the infinite depth that’s having the experience of being here.

We’re just making room for the mystery that’s always here, permeating every moment, to to be recognized, to be apprehended, to be experienced, to be embraced, to live in us.

Giving Up Any Idea of the Goal

What I’m trying to say is that to live in this mystery, to live in this extraordinary consciousness, or to allow it to live in us — whichever way you want to look at it — we have to give up trying to see it. We have to give up the idea that we could ever know it with our mind. We have to give up trying to get a handle on it.

If we want to let that extraordinary dimension begin to be our life, our home, or to have a home in us, we have to give up the need to know it, to see it, to understand it. We have to come to live in this innocence, this beginner’s mind, not just in relation to the events of life, but in relation to the ultimate.

And then it shows up. It shows up again and again. It shows up in all kinds of ways, not because we were looking at it, not because we figured anything out about it, not because we now have a handle on it whereas before we didn’t. It shows up precisely because we have let go and stopped trying to grasp after it, stopped trying to look directly at it, stopped needing to know how it works, how to be enlightened, how to have a guarantee that if I let go, I’ll be able to still function in my life.

We have to let go of it all. And then, mysteriously, something extraordinary starts showing up here. Maybe first it’s in my meditation, then in my encounter with that person during my day, then in my problem-solving and creative work, then in my intimate relationships, and on and on. It’s just showing up. And the only way it keeps showing up is through the renunciation to not try to know it, to not look at it, to not turn toward it and say “Oh, it’s finally here, whew, now I get to know something.”

This is the renunciation and austerity that the spiritual path has always called us to. Any outer renunciation was a kind of metaphor or support for this radical, inner renunciation of the mind as my home. You still have a mind, a conceptual mind, which can be a tool. It can be something we use to analyze things, solve problems and introspect.

This isn’t an anti-mind teaching, but it is about a radical transformation or transmutation of our relationship to the mind and to knowing. We hear the mystics say things like, “Dying to the mind, slaying your mind, no mind.” We hear these exhortations in the wisdom traditions because the leap beyond the mind is that great.

Guided Meditation: No Relationship to the Mind

I’m feeling compelled to get us into practice.

So we’re going to begin with the assumption, if you will, that all of us can leap directly beyond the mind into a dimension of being that already has no relationship to the mind at all.

I invite you to move into your meditation posture.

I want to invite you now to step into a part of yourself that never had any idea. Just slip into a part of yourself that has always been beyond the mind, that never entered this world of time and change.

Allow all of your attention to just fall into the deepest part of the self. Fall outside of time, outside of the world, into who you were before your mother was born.

Letting go of any attachment to your life, your relationships, your work, your goals and ambitions and dreams and plans. Just letting all of that fall away.

Coming to rest in a primordial innocence that doesn’t know anything, and doesn’t need to know anything, just being — pure, infinite, innocent being.

No idea who you are. No idea where you are.

Free from every idea.

No interest in concepts. No interest in thought.

Anything the mind produces is like static on the radio, just background noise of no interest to you.

Give your whole being to the non-conceptual. To having no idea. Even if thoughts arise and continue to distract your attention, you don’t need to wrestle with them, you don’t need to fight them to go away. Just keep diving into the freedom of that which is beyond the mind, that which has no idea and has no need to know at all. Give your attention to the infinite.

I now want to invite you to gently let go of the meditation. Just allow yourself to stay easefully with this meditation on not knowing.

Thank you.