The Unknowable – In Gita Verse 6.10 A transcendentalist should always engage his body, mind and self in relationship with the Supreme; he should live alone in a secluded place and should always carefully control his mind. He should be free from desires and feelings of possessiveness.
When Krishna says – A transcendentalist should always engage his body, mind and self in relationship with the Supreme – means the secret of love and the secret of prayer and the secret of anything that can make you fulfilled is surrender – the capacity to be possessed.
What is surrender? It is a mystery.
The false knowledge demystifies existence; the true knowledge re-mystifies it. Knowing, if authentic, makes life more of a mystery than it has ever been before. Knowledge certainly covers your eyes with dark clouds, creates a wall of thick smoke, and you start feeling you know. In fact, you are going deeper into ignorance. To be knowledgeable is to be more ignorant than even the ignorant ones.
The Upanishads have a tremendously significant statement. They say: The ignorant man is lost in darkness, but the knowledgeable is lost in deeper darkness than the ignorant – because the knowledgeable lives in an “as if” world. He thinks he knows, but he knows not. He only believes; he has not seen. He believes in God, he believes in love, he believes in surrender, but belief is always a cover-up. Your wound is covered, but it is not healed that way. In fact, the more you cover it, the less is the possibility of it ever being healed. Expose it to the sun, to the wind, to the rain – expose it to the healing forces that surround you.
Mahavira standing naked under the sky is simply saying, making a silent statement: “Be naked! Drop all your clothes! Don’t hide!” And we are not only wearing clothes on the body – they are not that important – we are wearing clothes and clothes, layers and layers of knowledge, which are really hiding our truth from ourselves.
To be really naked before God is to know, but that knowing is totally different from knowledge. It is closer to feeling than to knowledge. It is closer to love than to logic. It is closer to experiencing than to believing. It is existential.
The blind man believes in light; the man of eyes sees it. And when there is seeing, no question of believing arises only the blind believes; the seers have no need to believe – they know! But to know life is to know that it is unknowable. To know life is to know that it is an unfathomable mystery, immeasurable.
The word “matter” means measurable; it comes from ”measure.” Science is wrong because it thinks that life can be measured, fathomed, de-mystified. Knowledge believes that life can be divided into two departments: the known and the unknown. That which is known today was unknown yesterday; that which is unknown today, will become known tomorrow. The unknown will go on receding; the unknown will go on disappearing. The known will go on becoming bigger and bigger, and one day all will be known.
The Buddhas, the awakened ones, have divided life into three planes: the known, the unknown and the unknowable. The known and the unknown are not different, not very different. They belong to the same category: they are measurable. That is the world of matter. The unknowable is the world of life, consciousness, love, light, truth, God.
Surrender is the beginning of real knowing, when all life becomes a mystery, when you come to a state of not knowing at all – agnosia in the words of Dionysius…. Or remember the words of Socrates: I know only one thing, that I know nothing. Or the words of the Upanishads; the Upanishads say: The person who thinks he knows, knows not; the person who knows he knows not, knows.
To enter into the unknowable is the greatest adventure, the greatest ecstasy, but one feels afraid; one feels that one is losing something. You can lose only that which you have not got. Let me repeat. You can lose only that which you have not got. You can never lose that which you have got; there is no way to lose it, that which you have got. If your knowledge has disappeared, that simply means it was not real, knowing.
Krishna says Surrender is the quantum leap from mind to no-mind, from ego to egolessness. And in a single step the whole journey is contained. It is not a long journey from you to God, it is a single-step journey. It is not a gradual phenomenon; it is not that slowly, slowly, gradually you come to the divine. It is a quantum leap! One moment you were in darkness and the next moment – all is light. All that is needed is to put the ego aside.
Tags: The Unknowable
