Life offers you, again and again, events, situations, and challenges that put you in a state of not knowing. You may call it uncertainty; you may call it simply, “I don’t know.” It may express itself as deep confusion or disorientation, but they all share the fact that you have met a state of being of not knowing.
The trained reflex you have is to reject it, be bothered by it, and try to bring it to an end as quickly as possible. In doing that, you literally miss the one beauty of life—not because of the event, the feeling, or the experience, but because the eye that can meet beauty, the inner eye that can meet beauty—inner in the sense not mystical, but the holistic capacity of oneself to meet beauty—can only come to be in a state of not knowing.
Because beauty is that which was never before, that is always a start: always new, always now. It is more beautiful than an object or experience, inner or outer—it doesn’t matter—and it is more beautiful than any measure. It is not beautiful on a scale. It’s a living beauty that you meet when you don’t reject the not knowing.
The other significance of that state is the learning that comes with it—learning that is not learning to the mind. It’s not knowledge that you can write a book about. If you want, it’s the learning of the now, or the learning of learning, naked from knowledge: the capacity to learn. And by now you may see that learning can only be real in a state of total receptivity, total openness, unburdened by any direction or any conditions.
That freedom, that beauty, that openness is that beauty; it is that openness. I’m trying to say it’s a thing in itself. It’s not a thing. The words are trying hard to point you to this: the next time life invites not knowing, at least be curious to stay with it for a while. See what happens to your whole being in a state of not knowing.
Because in a state of knowing—where you know what you want, you know where you go, you know what you are, all that—surely you cannot be happy. Your happiness then is only on the surface, if at all. But when true not knowing is allowed and openness is real, who is there to challenge happiness? Not knowing is the mother of all happiness.
