We live in the known— through experiences and knowledge accumulated in our memory. We react to situations based on our life lessons, traditions, culture, beliefs and so on. As we grow older and accumulate more knowledge, we become more and more inflexible and stop looking at things afresh. That is one of the major differences between a child and the an elder person. The child has no conditioning and looks at everything with total innocence. The elder person shuts himself into his known space and can’t look at anything anew.
All spiritual practices try to take us back to the our innocence. And the only way to do that is by removing our past influences, by unlearning whatever we have learn. All known comes out of the unknown and is a very tiny – almost negligible – part of the unknown. Yet, we cling so strongly to the known that we shut ourselves completely to the mystery of the unknown. Only when we start tuning into the unknown, we can get a glimpse of the ultimate reality within us.
It is for this reason that Shiva, in Shiva Sutras, says that knowledge is bondage In every situations, the mind looks back at what it knows and goes through its calculations of profit and loss, coming up with its likes and dislikes, which stops us from looking at a thing or the situation the way it really is. We are always clouded by whatever is going into the mind.
On the other hand, the heart doesn’t function through the past knowledge. When we are respond through the heart, we flow with our energy – not caring about where it takes us. It opens up spaces which mind keeps avoiding.
Going into the known requires an honest look at how our mind is operating and a deep awareness of our conditioning. The simple awareness of ourselves starts bringing us more and more into our hearts. And once we start flowing through the heart (it has to be an effortless flowing, because heart space cannot be accessed through effort), we start venturing into and becoming comfortable with the unknown.
Many times we try to get into the unknown as a reaction of living too much in the known. When we realise that we have been living a stale, mechanical life, our reaction is to do something different — to rebel, to have new experiences and do different things, but we cannot enter into the unknown through a reaction. The reaction also takes us into the known. Living into the unknown happens only when there is no effort; we do not even become aware of moving into the unknown space.
In one of the meditations in Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, Shiva says that there is a mysterious space beyond the known and the unknown and he asks us to go into that space? How can we do that? Is it even possible for our responses to be not based on our known space and our conditioning?
It is a little subtle, but it is possible. It starts happening as our awareness grows and the chatter of the mind starts dropping. It happens when we operate through the heart, which just flows out in its own energy and does not care about the known or the unknown.
The existence keeps all its doors open for us, and when we are in the heart, we just flow through one of those doors — without any effort, without even realising. We have got to give it a try to see how it feels when our life is always full with freshness that existence keeps sending our way..