Fully Confused

I want to start with a statement and try to find my way into it. The statement (which is more like a hypothesis at this point): The way to spirituality is not to arise out of confusion, but to be more fully, deeply confused.

 I think this statement means that one surrenders to a reality that one simply does not know, and to be with the utter anxiety of not knowing. This anxiety is a huge mental gap. It is perhaps close to that feeling I get when I lose something that I know must be somewhere, even close to me or on my body. And there is also the push from within that says, hey, you should know this. You have it. You are it. How did you not know? So you can imagine the utter anxiety this might provoke: of not knowing on the one hand, then knowing that one should know. And there is with this the accompanying fear that I might die not knowing what I already know, or at least have the potential to know. Maybe it is the fear of not really knowing who I am.

 All the knowledge of the world and even the universe is there to be received. Not taken or stolen, or borrowed, or bought, but just received, as a kind of gift that comes with open hands. Yet, I am convinced that I need to earn it by ‘knowing’, through some ritual that assures me I took all the right steps to know. In the Lotus Sutra, there is a story about the father who recognizes his son but, in order not to scare him, decides to hire him as a stable hand to do some menial jobs. Gradually, the son begins to learn that indeed, he is his father’s son. But he has to go through that whole process of discovering that he didn’t need to be the stable hand, or ‘move up’ in any position to get to knowledge of what he already is. I suppose the hardest part would be for the son to recognize that he doesn’t need to win the approval or the title of a son. This is similar to ourselves, perhaps, because we learn early on in life that we need to ‘acquire’ some special insight through some special effort. And if there is a point where all one’s efforts are exhausted or prove to be ineffectual, a kind of panic starts to ensue. Why isn’t this working for me? And the only way to deal with that panic is, right in that moment, to completely let go of trying to erase anything, to surmount anything, to progress to anything.

 But of course, this is a reality that I am not prepared for, as long as there is still “I”. It is only the promise of what awareness already is and reveals, in spite of the self’s protests.