Who knows
A reflection on not knowing and transformation
IDENTITY
10/6/20261 min read
I don’t know what I’m doing or what I hope to achieve...
Great! That means the work of transformation has begun.
Knowing is great and essential for a certain part of our life. But according to philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual mystics, our knowing must fail us. “All I know is that I don’t know”. What wisdom from New York-based ska/punk band Operation Ivy.
Knowing might be able to take us to the threshold of Mystery, but it doesn’t seem able to take us through the door. We have to fall through, and often unwillingly. Our knowing, our ego, would never willingly walk us into our own death and rebirth. Once we cross that threshold, as Richard Rohr says, we begin the journey of discovering what we are doing, when we’re doing what we’re doing. We start to journey towards the current that flows underneath all of our identities.
One of my lecturers used to tell us how he would ask clients this infuriating question: who are you? ‘I’m a 20-year-old man’, they would say. ‘Wrong’, says my lecturer, ‘who are you?’ A student, wrong; a brother, wrong; a son, wrong; a human, wrong. Over and over again. Until finally they might say, in frustration, ‘I don’t know!’ Now we’re getting somewhere. None of these identities is wrong, but they aren’t the true self. Through the process of disidentification, according to the transpersonal therapeutic approach, Psychosynthesis, we begin to journey towards discovering who we really are. And as cringy as it may sound, the question is as valuable as the answer; how we get there is where we arrive.
