Remembering Nothing
Meditation stems from our earliest memories of nothing — times we spent as an infant just being. It was exciting to begin to learn, but it was a mistake to abandon the sweet nothing of just being without thought. We learned to impress adults and peers by learning and immersing ourselves in facts, thoughts, and the recitations thereof. Our little egos developed, and the rest is history (and a tedious one at that).
Spiritual individuals do not abandon that pure state of unknowing. In fact, during the Middle Ages, a movement arose around great mystical works like the book The Cloud of Unknowing. Exhausted by endless analysis, scholars turned to the opposite side of wordiness. They advocated a very sophisticated not knowing. They endorsed states of deep wordless pondering. Few caught the depth of this trend, but those that did went on to live inspiring lives of profound faith.
We live in an era similar to Medieval Scholasticism. We explain everything to death. Words flow. Books abound. Intellectual arrogance snuffs out the childlike need to simply be. We live in our heads at the expense of our hearts. Pseudo-explanations become dogma in all of the sciences. We fear mystery yet secretly seek it. It is even status to be the first one to “eliminate” an unknown with a new buzzword.
I remember nothing. I was a small child then. My mind was not cluttered with volumes of words — all designed to reduce faith and simple being to reason and words alone. In that process, something was lost. I settled for concepts over trust. Surfacing from beneath the ocean of paper and ink, means being intellectual enough to be an anti-intellectual — at least for enough time for the soul to breathe.
There was a time when I would blush if I had to say, “I don’t know.” Now I am proud to announce that fact. It is better to be honest about our intellectual limitations than to pretend that our shallow explanations of the Infinite are sufficient.
