by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, May 4, 2003
How do we know what we know?
For most of us, our first-cut answer to that question is: We learned it. Whether we learned in school or from our parents, in our workplace training or in the school of hard knocks and experience, most of what we think of as our knowledge came to us through some form of learning. For any of us in whom curiosity stays lively and engaged, we keep on learning through multiple avenues all of our lives: we read, discuss, ponder, listen to lectures, try a new skill on for size, and as we move through our lives we keep on learning in all of these ways.
That part of the answer is pretty straightforward. But there is more to what we know -- and how we know -- than what we learn in the obvious ways. There is gut knowledge, the sort of thing we mean when we say, "I knew it in my heart". Sometimes it's called intuition, and more recently it's been labeled and studied as 'emotional intelligence'.
There is wisdom, which we easily recognize as something different from knowledge; the word points to an ability to deepen knowledge into something more rare and complex and useful. There is the whole realm of learning that comes to us through avenues other than our linear, analytical minds: the ways we are moved to new insight through poetry and stories, rituals and dreams and imagination and art. And there is the flow of insight and understanding that comes to us when we simply greet the world and open ourselves to it without reserve, without judgment or analysis, the way very young children do, eyes and ears wide open and everything a source of pure wonder.
Author Richard Lewis calls this state of mind "living by wonder". He writes, "In our grasshopper and salamander days, who among us didn't ask why the grasshopper could jump so far -- or why the salamander had black dots on its orange body? In those days we trampled leaves with our feet just to hear what kind of sounds leaves made. We threw flat stones over the surface of streams to see how far the stones could skip. We listened to crickets cry in nights far beyond our grasp of what the darkness was…We were the listening body to our own questions and curiosity, played through us without censorship of ordinary boundaries of reality. For a few minutes we were startled by the life within things…"
One of the things I think I've learned from Buddhism is how to seek again this way of learning -- this ability to be "startled by the life within things". This willingness to let the world speak to us -- instead of believing we know ahead of time all that it's going to say -- is both essential to us and more difficult for us than the other ways of knowing that are so familiar. It's essential because when our minds are still and open, we are far more likely to truly see what's in front of us, to accurately hear what is said to us, to wisely respond when a response is necessary.
A quiet mind is what Buddhism calls "don't know" mind: I don't know what you are about to say, or the task that will greet my hand when this one is finished, or what will unfold in the next moment, however routine it might seem. And if we greet each moment with "don't know" mind, then we hold ourselves wide open to what each moment might teach us. Every encounter shimmers with possibility.
All of us who have helped to raise children from infancy can remember with delight the open-eyed and eager wonder with which the young ones wake to every ordinary day. Strawberries for breakfast! A fabulous splash of milk on the floor! The cat's gorgeous fur coat and delightful squall when its tail is grabbed! For little kids, every moment is absolutely extraordinary. There is no such thing as a routine, so the world is greeted with an utterly open mind and heart all of the time.
But now we're grown-ups. It's very hard for us to greet our days with such an open and receptive mind. We don't have an expectation of wonder when we wake up and start the routines of our days: we don't expect to be surprised as we brush our teeth and greet our children, pour our coffee and head off to work. We don't expect to learn anything, really: We think we already know. We already know what strawberries taste like, and that spilled milk is just a hassle to clean up, and what the cat's fur feels like against our skin. We already know what our agenda holds, we already know how the day will progress, how the week and month and year will progress. Often in conversation, we even think we already know what someone is about to say to us.
And what we think we already know so thoroughly rules the airwaves much of the time that we are closed off to all the other messages that might be flowing our way. Quieting our minds -- cultivating "don't know" mind -- is a way to open up again to all that might be possible.
This past Monday I went home a little early so I could claim an hour of study time before the girls would be delivered from school by the bus. As I opened the door I was greeted by both cats, one of whom promptly bolted outside while the other wrapped himself persistently around my legs. A sudden motion in the family room -- where there should be no motion at all in the empty house -- made me turn my head, and then I saw it: there was a duck in the family room. A duck: a live duck. In the family room.
My brain actually stopped completely for a couple of heartbeats. What should the brain do, after all, with so utterly unexpected a sight? I stood there in the doorway and said out loud, "There is a duck in the family room," as though it would help me believe it. None of the windows were open. The doors had been properly closed.
The duck huddled in a corner of the room next to the tapes and c.d.s, radiating the hope that if she kept perfectly still I wouldn't see her. Carefully I caught her up -- a small wood duck, female, her heart tapping frantically against my hands -- and carried her outside. I looked at her, full of wonder for this little visitation, talked to her softly to wish her well, a little prayer of thanks, really -- and then I opened my hands and she leapt into the air in a great arc of liberation and beat her wings in a straight line of escape all the way to the horizon.
I looked a little harder around the house, and within a few minutes the world got anchored again around the reasonable explanations we always expect in our lives. There was a trail of ashes from the fireplace, and here and there on the wall little feather-shaped shadows of ashes left where the duck had thrown herself up toward the light.
But I am so grateful for those few moments in which my linear, deductive, rational mind was shocked into silence. It reminds me that there is a state of wonder we can enter from time to time, in which the momentary silence of our minds is like a window flung open on the world. Instead of the routine and predictable story we're living each day, there is something new under the sun. And for just a moment, we see. In Richard Lewis's language, we are once again, as when we were children, "startled by the life within things."
I share this small story with you because afterwards, basking in the dazzlement of that unexpected encounter, it seemed to me that it really shouldn't take a duck in the family room to reawaken wonder in this way. Isn't the same lovely little wood duck just as wondrous, just as worthy of my awe and my open and grateful heart, when she is out in the woods where she belongs? The real miracle here is not that her frightened heart beat against my hands for a moment but that her heart beats at all -- that her heart beats, that my hands can hold, that my eyes can see.
Sometimes it seems to me that what we're missing in our ordinary rambles through life is a little more balance between what we know with our heads and what we know with our hearts. Albert Einstein was one of the great scientists who saw no contradiction at all between scientific, analytical explorations and proofs on the one hand, and on the other hand a profound sense of wonder and awe.
He said, "The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the source of all true science…To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists…This knowledge, this feeling, is the center of true religion." This isn't a statement about God -- at least not in the way God is usually imagined. It's a statement about wonder and awe, and the limitations of what we can explain and define and categorize.
In his book Emotional Intelligence, psychologist Daniel Goleman offers a scientific explanation for the longstanding folk distinction between 'heart' and 'head'. There is a wealth of information, in this book and elsewhere, to help us understand why there are things we know "through the heart" or through what he calls "emotional intelligence", which we can't know through the logical mind we trust so well. He writes, "From the most primitive root [of our brain], the brainstem, emerged the emotional centers. Millions of years later in evolution, from these emotional areas evolved the thinking brain or 'neocortex'…The fact that the thinking brain grew from the emotional reveals much about the relationship of thought to feeling; there was an emotional brain long before there was a rational one…"
Goleman generated a lot of buzz and attention when his book was first published eight years ago because of his claim that emotional intelligence matters much more for our success in our lives than does the sort of brain power measured by i.q. tests. What his argument boils down to is that it is emotional competence -- rather than analytical -- that opens us up to the full range of information in our world and the full range of response of which we're capable.
In the head/heart split, it's the metaphorical heart -- literally, the feeling center in our brain -- that gives us our ability to hope, to imagine and to empathize. It's what we call 'the heart' that hears what people say not just in their words but through body language and expression and tone of voice. It's the heart that knows how to decipher the complex languages not bound by the rules of logic.
Goleman writes, "…metaphor and simile, along with poetry, song and fable, are all cast in the language of the heart. So too are dreams and myths, in which loose associations determine the flow of narrative, abiding by the logic of the emotional mind. Those who have a natural attunement to their own heart's voice [will be] more gifted in giving voice to the 'wisdom of the unconscious' -- the felt meanings of our dreams,…the symbols that embody our deepest wishes."
Poet Kathleen Norris tells this story in her book, Amazing Grace: "Once a little boy came up to me and said, 'I saw the ladder that goes up to God.' I closed the book that I was reading,…and I listened. The boy told me that the ladder was by his tree house and that God had come halfway down. God's clothes were covered with pockets -- like a kangaroo, he said, and we both laughed. Even God's running shoes had pockets, he told me, full of wonder, and we laughed again. He told me that God carried food in the pockets to feed all the dead [animals] and the dead people.
This boy had recently experienced [that fierce childhood loss], the death of a beloved dog. It had been bitten by a rabid raccoon on his family's ranch, and his father had had to shoot both animals. As the boy told me of his dream, I thought about [the biblical] Jacob, who during a crisis in his life had also seen a ladder going up to heaven. Jacob's response has always appealed to me; when he wakes, he says, 'God was in this place, and I did not know it.'"
"God was in this place, and I did not know it". It can be framed in different theological languages, but what it draws us toward is wonder. It calls us to a full stop, cracks open the little box of our expectations and shows us something much larger, brighter, more wondrous than what we thought we knew. The little boy in the story had found an image from within himself that taught him there was safety and solace even in a world in which a beloved dog has to die. It isn't real -- the kangaroo-pocketed God on a ladder -- but it's true because it teaches the heart what it needs to know.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, in his well-beloved book The Little Prince, said, "It is with the heart that one sees rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." Hearing this statement only with the analytical mind, it is sheer nonsense. We know perfectly well that the heart is a muscle and that its job is not to see, but to keep on pumping our blood for us. We know that all the avenues of perception we've got, through all of our wide-open senses, pass through our large and miraculous brains, and that all of our knowing, of every variety, is known there.
But we know equally well what it means when we say, "I know it in my heart". We know what it means to receive the world and its lessons in ways we cannot explain logically or can't find words for at all. We know there are ways of knowing that are not subject to proofs or theorems, that can't be analyzed or dissected, that sometimes give us guidance in our lives more faithfully than anything our logical mind can provide.
So surely, the path of wisdom for us is to honor both the intuitive truths and the intellectual ones, the impulse of spirit and emotion as well as of logic, the insights of poetry and image along with those of science. And perhaps above all, to leave room for those teachings from our world that don't fit into any of the categories, where we find ourselves brought to silence before the mysteries we cannot yet unravel. As the poet Federico Garcia Lorca urged,
Listen, my [child], to the silence:
The undulating silence where valleys and echoes slip
bending foreheads to the ground. Listen.
AMEN.