The Power Of Not Knowing | Eckhart Teachings

Welcome to our gathering meditation talk. As you may know, I spent a little bit of time with the Dalai Lama recently. And one of the most impressive things he said, and he said it several times during those days when people ask him all kinds of questions, complicated questions, the impact of technology on the economy and the economic and this and that. And several times I heard him say, I don't know. Now, you can look upon this as something, a superficial thing, I don't know, or something that's actually very significant because it points to a certain state of consciousness in which the realm of conceptual thinking isn't that important anymore. And I could actually feel that many people felt love towards him, deepening when he said, I don't know, people laughed and he laughed and there was an opening which would not have been there if he had given a very clever answer. And sometimes after he said, I don't know, actually he said something that was meaningful and deep. At other times he didn't. But it started whether or not something came out of that not knowing. The point of departure, the foundation is that state in which you don't need to know conceptually. And once you realize that, it's a kind of denial of the self. The mind made self, because the mind made self lives on taking up positions of knowing, opinions, viewpoints, judgments. And the more one is identified with opinions, viewpoints, judgments, reactions, the stronger the self, which already the Buddha discovered a long time ago, that sense of meness, the me, that's ultimately illusory and creates all kinds of trouble and problems for yourself and for others. If that's all you know, if that's the only dimension that you move in the mind, create itself, then you will create suffering for yourself and others. So to come to a position of. Not a position, a place of not knowing, it is an act that from the point of view of a kind of drama and dissolving, and the same kind of drama and dissolving. So you, you are born, and then you go through a little bit of turmoil here and there into one or two little happinesses, and then that's the end. But mostly, of course, while you are in between the birth and the death, you are waiting for the end of problems. And while you wait for the end of problems, you're creating problems for yourself and others. That's ordinary existence, normal existence. And so this act of self annihilation, this is one way of putting it, that sounds a little bit frightening, self annihilation. But all that's annihilated wasn't real anyway. Not in absolute terms, it was relatively real. One could say the fact that we are here is relatively real. But it won't last for very long. So was it ever really real? If it dissolves like a dream? If the whole story of me dissolves like a dream, very soon, in that sense, it's very fleeting, like a cloud. So the vital question then is, do you assert the self or do you deny the self? Can you live in a balance where the self is still there, but you don't realize it, not as ultimately who you are? So when the Dalai Lama says, I don't know. And of course, everybody projects something onto him, he's the Dalai Lama, so they give him a strong identity. Now, his challenge is not to fall into that same illusion. In other words, people believe that he's a mountain, and he knows his deeper reality is that he's a valley. And that's your job, too, to know that for yourself, not the illusory self, the essence of who you are. This mind made sense of self is also much more focused on the negative than the positive. To be free, you awaken to who you are beyond your history and your life situation. It.