I DON'T KNOW, BUT...

On allowing the mystery be a mystery

I went to a talk many, many years ago, and one of the speakers was Michael Harding, the Irish writer and former priest. He was speaking to a room full of men, mostly young men in their twenties and thirties. And Michael, being the wise soul he is, would preface everything he said with, “I don’t know, but…” And then he would give his experience. He repeated that phrase throughout the evening.

When it came to the questions and answers, a young man put up his hand and said, “Michael, you seem to have it all sorted out. What advice would you give to us young men?”

And I wondered if the young man had listened to him at all. Because most of what Michael had said was, “I don’t know.” But perhaps he had heard something else. Perhaps he had heard a man who was comfortable not knowing and mistaken that for having it all sorted out.

The only thing I know is that I don’t know anything. It’s an old trope. But even in a mystical experience, you can be told that you don’t get to know.

I had a vision, a mystical experience, a dream, whatever you want to call it. I was in a wooded area I know well, and an entity, one of the fairy folk perhaps, arrived beside me. He cleared away moss and stone and sticks to reveal an opaque, face-sized piece of glass in the ground. He beckoned me to look at it, and as I did, I thought, yes, I see. I understand. I get it. I get it. Yeah. Wow.

And then he covered it back up again. As soon as he did, I forgot everything.

I said, “Wait, I’m after forgetting. Can I go back? I want to see it again. I want to know.”

And he said, “No. You don’t get to know.”

There is something in allowing the mystery to be the mystery. Something humbling. And I wonder whether the covering of the glass was as much a part of what I was being shown as the uncovering. Because I wanted to go back. I wanted to have it again. Whatever I had understood, I wanted to keep it.

There are things we can know and things we can measure, and science is wonderful at doing that. There is a part of us that feels satiated by an answer. Filled. We also encounter the world through symbol, metaphor, dream, vision, story. We can apprehend something without quite being able to explain it. You feel that you have understood, but try to take hold of it, try to show exactly what you have in your hands, and you can’t.

Perhaps it isn’t that we don’t want to know. I certainly wanted to know. Perhaps it is that knowing and possessing are different things. We can come closer to something and find that it becomes more mysterious.

Through a glass, darkly. The cloud of unknowing. We speak endlessly about this thing. Sometimes we try to prove our spiritual awakening by speaking endlessly of it. And then we return to something like the opening of the Tao Te Ching: the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.

And here I am, speaking of the thing I cannot speak of. I don’t know.