Imagine to Remember

Intellect, even by its own definition, is limited. It is not, despite what we have been told, the only way of knowing, or even knowing about knowledge itself. This something I have only come to understand quite recently, understanding not with the faculties of the mind but through something more primitive. I think I have come as far as my intellect can possibly take me, in this most essential task of life, attaining knowledge of self, not the projected self or the idealized self, but what is truest, the original essence, that is to say the soul. 

I have read the books, listened to the lectures, seen the specialists, and spent hundreds, thousands of hours contemplating all my neuroses, becoming an expert in what I now see is a faulty science based on eroding foundations. I have considered seriously, various spiritual traditions and philosophies in an attempt to find the key that would unlock for me the mystery of my own self. I have analysed my childhood, looking for that crucial moment for which to attribute all things bad and painful. I have played armchair psychologists diagnosing myself and others. And all this time I spent contemplating myself made me a sort of spiritual narcissist. 

All of this of course came after a period of intense ignorance, years of wandering in a static greyness. A time in which I could and would not even begin to consider all the things that ailed me. Not because I was in denial, no, because I was all to aware of all the pain carefully locked away in the rooms of my psyche, and this awareness was a horrible knowing, I dared not open that door, terrified of what I may find on the other side, convinced that it would be my undoing. And it was in a way, there came for me, and it eventually comes for us all, a point when I could no longer hide, when the contradictions became untenable, when my centre could not hold.

So I stand now on a precipice. My intellect cannot take me any further. I must rely on my other faculties and yet somehow I am blocked, I suspect by my own reliance on my reasoning, in my unwillingness to surrender, I am cut off from something essential. 

While yes, this initial dismemberment, this first separation was something forced on me as it is forced on us all, from the world of the wondrous, the world of children and the childlike, to the “real” world in which we now live. But now there is no outside force, no teacher or parent standing over my shoulder dictating to me my every move, no feared punishment should I not comply. They are replaced with something much more insidious, something from within, something that resembles me, knows me, very well in fact, but is yet is not me, it is the spectator I have mistaken for my true self. You see, even when I am alone I am not alone, I perform for myself, this is one of the ways we stay in “our heads” so to speak.

Awareness of this problem is only so useful as we look to access that which is entirely unintellectual, we will have to draw on those faculties we’ve long abandoned. Rumi advised that you “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment is intuition.”And intuition is an entirely different way of knowing than intellect.