Death/Dying Not Knowing Absolute Truth is a Healing Quality

The passion you speak about when you use the words not knowing when you enter any circumstance like this. And the belief some people have when they come into these situations that they do know and meeting the not knowing and the knowing as an example, people thinking they know why they're ill, and people talking to patients with an attitude about whether it's their fault or not, or whether they have bad care or whether whatever it may be, but the not knowing part of it, the aspect of that, what about that with us? What do we bring to that attitude that we may see sometimes where people feel badly because people who put that on them.

I mean, the not knowing place is like the closest place to my heart because I spent really in my personal life since I was a little boy. I always wondered if somehow the questions weren't shut down. Well, what about death? What's the deal? Nobody's talking about it. We're in bodies and we're going to die. And how can we not be interested? Hey, mom, dad, brother. And I learned at a very young age that that was odd and weird in this culture. And as that led to exploring, when I finally became 18, 19, 20, and was able to start to go through and approach different types of teachers, what I found was extraordinarily interesting teachings. But I never found anybody that knew. It's now 43 years later. And that not knowing in any kind of a deep way seems so uniting of all faiths and all non faiths that it feels so loving towards everyone that's dying. It allows you to have respect for the best part of everyone and not to come in loaded with, okay, this is my belief. And so I think the more we come in as an empty slate, flexible in some kind of paradoxical way where we so don't know that we're even comfortable with people that know. So if we're with someone that's dying and they say, I know I'm going to heaven, I'm positive I'm going to heaven, that you can be right there with them and join them in their world because that's what they need inside themselves. Now granted, there might come a moment where they might find a crack or not, but we're ready just to join them in that place. And so the passion for not knowing is something born of seeing a lot of the dangers of not being able to experience our humanness. The side of us that's afraid of dying, that doesn't really have a very clear picture. Oh, that's right. I'm for sure going to go from this body into my father's house, or I'm for sure going to go from this life to another body in a reincarnation, or I'm for sure going to go into ashes. That, for sureness, is something that is a liability. As a counselor, the sense of having some humility, some room to not know allows us to be flexible, to give more and more people that are dying what they need. So, yes, is an enormous passion for the caring and the flexibility that we can bring to anyone when we don't feel like we know actually we know we don't know at some level when we have that place. There's something wonderfully both, one the one hand, inspirational, on the other hand, vulnerable.

For a counselor, for a therapist to come in with that inner not knowing is pretty remarkable. It's remarkable. It means they've done that work to some degree to know they don't know. So are you saying that that work is almost a prerequisite to being effective with a person in this circumstance?

I think anybody that has a good nature, a good heart, can be effective. In order to be very, very effective, I think the individual needs to have explored their own mortality and they need to have some sense of the vulnerability that's involved with, you know what? Everything that I know, including my name, every finger in my body, every toe in my foot, every joint is gone. Even my security of being the one that's thinking this thought. I'm not sure if it's going to exist. There's something about that that brings another dimension because then you have room to go with the vulnerability that the person that's dying is in. They may not be aware of being there, but you have the flexibility to be with them in another way. But I don't want in any way to present the image that you have to be there or else you can't be useful. Because a good nature and a good heart goes a long way. And someone that understands the basic importance of being a receptive presence, of being a follower who's awake to want to pursue an opening but doesn't feel like they have to do it to be effective, that that brings so much to a person that's d.