Number Seventy Eight

There are two kinds of knowledge -- explicit and implicit, what is seen and what is sensed.  We know a tree has green leaves.  We sense a principle of life, a form of consciousness in the spreading limbs. If we listen, we sense the possibility of relationship to the tree.

Implicit knowledge is the whispering of our own wisdom, gleaned from many lives.  Implicit knowledge also comes from listening to the twitter of the Noosphere, the sound of all souls conversing.

A gun is blue steel.  A hand touching your face is soft and warm.  We know this, with explicit clarity.  Beyond what the senses tell, the mind enters a world of shadows.  The implicit world.  In this world concepts and ideas collapse.  They become like Styrofoam, brittle and insubstantial. Implicit knowledge comes from listening without sound.  To the deepest truth of the relationship between things.  Meditation was invented to learn the implicit truth.

Number Seventy Seven

Time doesn't contain anything.  The dates of a lifespan do not hold that life.  The years of a particular war, or even an empire, cannot contain the conflict or a civilization.  Everything that has happened continues to happen.  It goes on outside of time, in a form that can be reentered at any moment.

The lowest, least authentic form of reentry is memory.  More powerful is dissociation, which brings the past into the present so seamlessly that the current moment is obscured.

At some level, the tape of every cruelty, every conversation, every creative moment, every helpless scream is still playing.  It is going on, exactly as it occurred, waiting to be revisited.  Time can't touch it.

The whip cracking on a slave stone mason, building the pyramids, can be felt right now.  The lesson is waiting.  The wisdom in knowing each form that pain takes -- is waiting.  Each moment of hope, of arrogance, of love, of running away is still alive.  Waiting.

Number Seventy Six

We are here to choose.  Every hour, every minute.  Our bodies and minds are a vessel in which decisions are formed so action can be taken.  What happens after each choice is then observed, and becomes the source of our personal wisdom.

A baby chooses to crawl from a high step.  And falls.  The outcome -- a first awareness of gravity -- will influence other choices.  And will expand to a deeper knowledge: that support can prevent so many kinds of falling.

Every outcome observed creates wisdom -- whether the choice is made freely or unconsciously, coerced by pain and pleasure.  But free choice is only possible with full awareness: completely facing and knowing an experience; the willingness to see and feel all there is.  Free choice is the source of wise action -- what we came here to learn.

Number Seventy Five

The mind does four things to protect the life of the body: it predicts, explains, judges, and chooses.  These are its tools for solving problems, the clear and temporary threats that arrive daily in our lives.

But in the face of continuous uncertainty -- the actual fabric of life -- the mind tries to solve the unsolvable.  The mind predicts catastrophe, shuttles from theory to theory, makes searing judgments about what's wrong or right -- and becomes paralyzed.  Thoughts race, but no truth can be found.

The tools of the mind become a plague when we try to solve the core uncertainty of planetary living.  Problem solving mind becomes, inevitably, monkey mind.  The the only way forward, toward truth or knowing, lies just beneath the breath. In that stillness lives all that we've learned, in hundreds of lives, and the conversations -- loud and continuous -- of all the souls who love us.