You can experience it as unsettling uncertainty, like being called on at school when you don’t know the answer. You can experience it as curiosity, a driving force that leads you towards discovery. You can even experience not knowing as a doorway between what is known and what is not yet known.
That door opens through a combination of alert attention, letting go of assumptions and being receptive. And it can become a genuine source of inspiration.
An unusual experience in family constellations
I first began to notice this kind of not knowing while facilitating family constellations. I was working with constellations in silence, where the representatives do not speak. During some of them, even with my full attention, not knowing would appear: I have absolutely no idea what is happening right now.
At first, when I was still inexperienced, I would tense up if I couldn’t immediately understand what was happening. And when I did, the representatives’ movement would stop. One time, while keeping my attention fully present, I let go of the reins. I leaned back and admitted to myself: I have no idea what is going on right now. At that very moment the tension released, and it was as if a door had opened. The field and the participants began to move again, and from within that state of not knowing, I was able to recognise what was there.
Since then, I have consciously chosen not knowing. I enjoy working with it, and it no longer frightens me.
The possibility within not knowing is right in front of us
This doorway is open to you as well, whenever you realise that you don’t know and that uncertainty is about to make you anxious. Remember: you are an explorer through and through.
You are gathering experiences in every moment — including this one, while you are reading these words. When you clean the house. When you work, negotiate or have a coffee. When you care for your children. When you go on a date, love, get angry, make love, welcome something in or push it away.
You don’t have to know.
Every moment contains the possibility of discovery if you turn towards the moment when you simply don’t know what is happening. And the same is true when you are absolutely certain that you know exactly what is going on, yet still allow yourself not to know. Through not knowing, you step outside your previous perspective. For a moment, you leave the familiar behind, and the world once again becomes that vast space — that playground — waiting to be explored, just as it was when you were a child.
Why shouldn’t you have more moments like that?
The mind wants to know everything
That is why it is constantly looking for answers and solutions — or at least that is what it would have you believe. In reality, it keeps producing new problems. Woody Allen’s wonderfully sharp observation that “any problem can be made insoluble if you think about it long enough” contains a great deal of truth.
Whatever situation you find yourself in, there are an infinite number of causes and conditions that led to it arising. Think about the T-shirt, dress, shirt or blouse you are wearing right now. What had to happen for that piece of clothing to exist at all? You could trace the story all the way back to prehistoric humans shivering in the cold. And for that particular piece of clothing to end up with you — and for you to choose to wear it today — how many things had to happen? You could find an endless number of causes and conditions.
If we don’t want to drive ourselves completely mad by thinking everything through, we need to build a bridge between the infinite and our own limitations.
At times like this, it can be wonderfully helpful to sink into the state of not knowing as though you were dropping into a comfortable armchair. Just as you allow yourself to keep thinking and worrying about a difficult situation, you can also give yourself permission to say: “I have absolutely no idea what to do with this. I don’t know what is happening. I don’t know what comes next.”
Usually, something begins to happen then: out of the fog, the details that matter at that particular moment start to emerge. Not necessarily straight away. What I have noticed is that whenever I responded to a situation with not knowing again and again, within two or three days something would always occur to me. I would simply begin to see where I could move next.
It’s not only the mind that thinks — our consciousness does too
Most people confuse thinking with overthinking, pondering, analysing or endlessly turning things over in the mind. All of these operate within circles of thought defined by our words and concepts.
But thinking also happens without words, on another level. When we settle into not knowing, we make room for a boundless awareness that respectfully steps back for as long as the mind insists on being in charge. It lets us play. Even when that particular game repeatedly makes us suffer. :)
When we make room for thinking beyond words, new connections and new possibilities can reveal themselves. Ultimately, this is where sudden insight, creativity, inspiration and those flashes of understanding come from. It is nothing less than a powerful and loving bridge between the self that lives within limits and limitless existence.
