claiming you know

The only time you're really honest is when you admit you don't know. Let's face it: you don't. Not about the things that matter most. I'm talking about spiritual questions now. What's the meaning of your life, of all life? What's your purpose in the grand scheme of things? These may seem like grandiose concerns, and they are. But they bear directly on a question aimed straight and simple into the heart of every human being: how to be happy. The only time you're really honest is when you admit you don't know.

Sure, you've figured a few things out. Trial and error has served you, if sometimes led you astray to do it. You know, for example, that going into the woods and communing with nature is uplifting in some way, grounding in another. You know you lapse into plenty of habits that clearly drop your joy. Everyone does. It's a starting point anyway. But what about being genuinely happy? The only time you're really honest is when you admit you don't know. It's also the only time you're genuinely happy.

How can that be? If you really want to understand how, you have to be willing to look at what it means to think you know something, to claim you know. You have to be willing to ask what you're up to underneath the claim. You have to look at the mechanics of claiming in the first place. What does it mean to claim you know how to be happy? Does it mean you're right? That's the first thing you'd like to believe. That's mechanics number one. You'd like to believe you know what it means to be happy. You'd like to. We all would. In fact, most of us think that the grand outcome of all our sleuthing on the subject is finally to know.

But what goes on when you know something? You put the flow of life into a box. Let me give you a pedestrian example. In school you learn that the unfathomable mystery we refer to as water is made up of two atoms hydrogen and one atom oxygen and together those three atoms repeat over and over and fill your glass, hopefully half full not empty. That's a fine explanation of water, I suppose, but it's also reductionist. It's purpose, in fact, is to reduce. Why? Because reduction of complex things into more basic things gives us mastery over the more complex thing. Mastery. We want mastery. We want to be able to say that now we understand water, and by understand we mean own.

Water laughs and let's us proceed with this idiot notion. Happiness doesn't. Go ahead and tell yourself that you know how to be happy and connect the dots. The second you make the claim, or not very long after, the happiness is nowhere to be found. The act of making the claim begins to scatter the happiness. The effort to sustain belief in the claim insures the prolonged disappearance of the happiness. The happiness wants you to have it, but it's not something you can have, and by have we mean own. Your claim that you know how to be happy is the same as saying you own something that doesn't permit an owner. You can get away with this clumsiness with water (well, actually you can't, but water flows with everything anyway, including nonsense), but you can't get away with it with happiness. Happiness is not something you can put in a box, and by box we mean brain.

The point is there's a profound difference between knowledge and happiness. Knowledge is a reductionist exercise to gain a sense of leverage or mastery over an aspect of the world, while happiness is not. The former has as many holes as a swiss cheese, speaking metaphysically, while the latter is the holes. When's the last time you put down the wheel of cheese and walked away with one of the holes? That's the last time you were happy! Or it might be better to say that yes, you are trying to gain mastery over an aspect of the world when you try to nail down what happiness is, but the aspect you're interested in is yourself, and that makes the effort too direct and reflexive to permit the illusion of objectivity.

Without that illusion, knowledge falls apart. The law of associative leaping (also known as high creativity) therefore reveals that self-knowledge is actually an impossibility. Once you know what yourself is, you know it's something you can't know. Knowing it isn't how you relate to it. Direct experience is its only handle. Handle is the wrong word. There's nothing to grab onto. No words will do. Only direct experience. Your true self is direct experience. Those are more words, but context momentarily suspends their word nature. I'm asking you to do the same. I'm asking you to suspend your word nature, and by word nature we mean knowledge. Take yourself out of the box, and by box we mean person.

The only time you are honest is when you admit you don't know. Are you a person? Be honest. You don't know. Are you a knower? Be honest. You don't know. Are you a wheel of swiss cheese? Be exceptionally honest. You don't know. You might be. In fact, you are. If you see you are, you'll see you aren't only a wheel of swiss cheese, but all the holes too, and the big hole all around it (known as empty space) that makes it seem to all the knowers as if a wheel of swiss cheese is an independent entity. It isn't. That's only language and knowing. Without those you have one big everything that's self to us all.

But more to the point, without language and knowing, you have happiness. You don't "have it" have it, but you experience it directly, as yourself, as the one self of us all. Divide that one self up again by knowing it, by reducing it for the sake of mastering it, and the nuttiest thing takes place. You don't master anything, but generate problems. Problems that didn't exist until you meddled with perfection and plucked out all its feathers. So what's the meaning of your life? Do you have a life? Be honest. You don't know. You're just generating problems. Here's another: what's your purpose in the grand scheme of things? Be honest. You don't know. You're just generating problems. What a purpose! It's the only one.