The Value of Not Knowing
Transcript Excerpts of Jane’s Teachings during the
“Shifting into Your New Consciousness” group experience 4/16/09
(Names of participants are changed to protect their privacy.)
(To Janet, in response to her jumping in and asking people rapid questions about themselves, which felt similar to her advice-giving way of relating.)
“The way I work is I’m trying to follow the energy, and let it flow where it’s supposed to flow, and when you do this way of interacting, you’re controlling the energy, which then stops what’s supposed to happen.
(After further discussion Janet started crying and said she doesn’t want to cry because she can’t explain why she’s crying.)
You are down on yourself because you feel you are less logical than people like your husband. And we know you value logic more than emotions. Emotions are heart intelligence, rather than mental intelligence. I know you have made headway with this, but there is still something in there that makes you believe that emotions are not as valuable as logic. And that is not true. Logic and emotions are just different systems for getting knowledge. And it’s been a challenge for you to respect the knowledge that comes from emotional truth. So when you don’t know something — that’s a trigger for you. Apparently you feel it makes you lesser.
I don’t know lots of things. I stand in the question. That’s how I end up knowing things. I walk into the situation, and I know nothing. And so I’m looking, I’m waiting, I’m listening. And then I know something. It just sort of pours in. Being knowledgeable is not about you imposing something on reality. It’s opening the space to allow reality to reveal itself to you. You have to not know first. A Course in Miracles is really big on that, by the way. I know you are studying it. And this is exactly what the issue is here, tonight — that you don’t want to not know. And so you’re trying to fill in the space of what you don’t know as quickly as you possibly can. In doing this you are imposing an ego kind of thing rather than letting the knowledge come in, the awareness, the present moment come in. This is really important. There’s a limiting decision you have against not knowing. It’s some negative decision you have that it’s not OK to not know. Maybe you think it makes you someone who can’t be respected, someone who is not an authority. You think an authority knows, people with power know. But that’s, in fact, not really true. People who are real leaders, who really are true authorities, have inquiring minds, which means they start out not knowing so they can understand what’s really true. If you don’t leave the space open in order to understand what’s really true, but instead impose on the situation your limited human knowledge — what you think you already know — you don’t learn a damn thing, which means you don’t know anything. You actually have the potential — you in particular — have the potential to know a lot because you have an innocent mind. You do start out not knowing, which means you clearly have the potential to know a lot, like an innocent child, but then you undermine this because of the limiting decision.
(To the Group and Janet) Janet emailed me a while back saying she was feeling really depressed in studying an aspect of A Course in Miracles. I think the dynamic we’re talking about applies to what she is depressed about in the Course. When it’s talking about the world being meaningless, it’s talking about the world the ego creates, the false reality. The ego imposes meanings on things (just as I was saying about this dynamic in you that we’re talking about), based on its defense system designed to avoid truth, based on keeping the limiting decision from becoming conscious — because it’s convinced the limiting decision is true. It’s a surface, limited level of knowledge that avoids the heart of the matter. And therefore it never really knows anything. It creates an illusory world that’s meaningless and doesn’t work.
I think what was depressing you is you think the illusion is all there is. But there is actual truth. When you open a space for truth to come in, truth does come in. Limiting decisions are what cause the distortion and blocking of truth. And as you clear limiting decisions, you get more and more truth.
(Renee said she was at Janet’s 50th birthday party in which her father told a story about when Janet was 17 years old she was off by herself crying. And he asked her what was wrong, and Janet said she didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life. And her family at the party laughed at her about it, like a roasting.)
This is a demonstration of the dynamics from which you probably made the limiting decision. In this childhood event, you were allowing yourself to be in a place of not knowing, and feeling deeply about what really mattered to you. You were in the ‘I don’t know’ place. And your father, rather than respecting that and thinking, ‘How deep for a child of 17 to be that engaged, that it matters so much to her about what she wants to be in her life and not knowing’ — instead he was trying to belittle it.
I’m sure Albert Einstein allowed himself to not know. His genius came from allowing a space for inspiration to come in. You have a talent in this direction that you’re blocking by not respecting the place of not knowing and standing in the question. There is some way your mind is extremely open to possibilities that you’re not using in your favor, but using against yourself instead. When you approach something you don’t know, you start feeling uncomfortable about it. So instead of starting with the things you know, start opening up the not knowing and how you feel about it when that comes up.”
