A Map To Here

This exhortation is easy to say and in fact easy to get our mind around. We can see it cognitively, that is we can grasp the notion that there is no distance except in our mind. However, I do not think we can let go of mind by appealing to it. The mind will never let go of itself. For me anyway I need to get into a different center of existence. The center of which I speak is a way being with or in the cloud of unknowing. It is in the cloud of unknowing i feel uprooted from the familiarity of who I have been with no apparent comfort in who I am becoming. I am in a space of betwixt and between. In this space, which is not a physical space but an emotional space, the past is experienced as lost and the future as unimaginable and without hope. So, where does this leave me? In the space of unknowing which leaves me only with my will, my will to choose. Freedom is not a “freedom from”, say fear for example, but a “freedom to” exercise my response-ableness, for only, I would suggest, in the moment of choice do I feel my freedom to be who I am. To be awake, can only mean to be awake to the choice I have in the moment of response. Every moment of response, is by definition, a moment of being here and now. The question is, by suggestion of this exhortation, how do we live with the idea of growth into wholeness. We focus on the only thing we really have control of, our ability to choose. This kind of focus comes only into awareness when we have been stripped from the anchors of our past and a hopeful vision of the future. It is in this moment of unknowing, of finding ourselves betwixt and between, that we have the possibility of coming home to our self, to the essential freedom that I am, which is in every moment I am free to exercise my response-ability.

One can have and use one's mind without being captured and controlled by it. I think being in the cloud of unknowing of which you speak is being in the present. One can be in the present with freedom to choose and with response-ability and with acceptance of not knowing what will happen and be comfortable.

Thanks David, that's the point of it for me, when we come home to our self with the only thing we have which is our response-ableness we are "in the present with freedom to choose and with acceptance of not knowing what will happen" we find the comfort and the peace that passes understanding of being who we are in the moment of choice. This comfort is, as I would call it, the experience of being an integrated and coherent self. We can "use" the mind as a part of being an integrated self. The crux of the mater as far as mind is concerned, for me, is keeping it in its place as an essential but no less just a part of our whole self.