Civilize: Thinking the Unknown

Thinking, ‘this is unknown.’ Thinking, ‘the unknown is somehow dangerous.’ This is thinking. Recognize, accept, investigate, non-identification, fold it into practice. I did not always think this way. I thought I knew what I was supposed to do. Now I know better; now I ‘don’t know’ better (accept not knowing better than before).
Perhaps practice is not about knowing but about how to ‘don’t know’ better. Once upon a time, I had no trouble at all not knowing. Then for some reason I got the idea that knowing was the thing to have confidence in, that knowledge was the place to anchor myself. But what is knowledge? What is knowing?

Maybe it’s good to know certain methods, certain techniques, but at the end of the day, there’s just this moment. Ironically, that’s how I lived in the first place; that was how it was early on. I was taught something else that was only half of it. I took this half for the whole and abandoned, forgot the other half.

I was persuaded that this other half was dangerous, unsafe, but it’s merely the other half. This perpetual contraction is learned, required effort. It’s something I learned how to do. Thus, all I am learning is balance between the innate (what I came with) and what I have learned, between instinct and rules/philosophy/structure/ culture/order, between chaos and order; bringing chaos to my order and order to my chaos. Life is a mixture, a blending, a continuous, unified whole.