Releasing my need to know

I’m pretty sure I own about 300 books, not counting my kids’ books.  Most of my books at this point are non-fiction.  I have books about yoga, spirituality, feng shui, cooking, energy healing, women’s health, parenting, psychology, counseling, metaphysics, mythology, butterflies, gardening, butterfly gardening, spirituality and gardening, physiology & psychology, spirituality and psychology, yoga and psychology, yoga and physiology… you get my drift.  How many of these books have I read?  A lot of them, but there are lots with the binding pretty much intact, waiting until I have the time to actually take them off the shelf and get acquainted.  Why do I have all these books?  Because I’ve been addicted to knowledge.

I remember reading once that humans are the only species that collects information just for the sake of having it.  Until that point, I didn’t view my accumulation of knowledge as frivolous, but as essential.  After all, the more I knew the more informed choices I’d be able to make, right?  Well… maybe.  As it turns out, I’ve found that the main impact of my thirst for knowledge was that there never seemed to be enough.  Not enough time to gather more knowledge, and the more knowledge I accumulated, the more I realized I didn’t have and therefore the less I thought I knew.

One of the abstentions prescribed by yoga is non-greed (aparigraha).  I came to recognize my “thirst for knowledge” as just another form of consumerism. As the unread books and yet-to-be-heard audiobooks began to accumulate I began to question my motives.  Collecting more information was supposed to make me feel more competent, wiser, and therefore more in control.  But I found myself feeling oppressed and overwhelmed by all these other people’s words, pronouncements, condemnations and conflicting points of view.  I felt as if I had gone out to a buffet and eaten too much but was still putting more and more food on my plate because it all looked soooo good!  Someone out there had to have the answer to this mystery of life!

As someone who has a hard time making decisions in the first place, more knowledge just added to the number of permutations I had to keep afloat in my brain.  This had the effect of keeping me “in my head” and leading me to distrust or disregard my intuitive center, my inner knowing.

After a while I began to crave silence.  I got tired of words.  My husband always said that he didn’t think I would find out anything in all those books that I didn’t already know. But I enjoyed reading all those books, and I think I learned a lot from many magnificent authors.  And after all that reading, though I think I’ve realized that what I really want is not going to be found in any of those books.  It is not a fault of the books themselves, but of my use of them.  I read to accumulate knowledge to fill a void that I perceive exists in my own inner knowing.  I am searching outside for something that can’t be found outside – myself.

Working with the releasing techniques of The Sedona Method after the recent death of my friend has helped me to realize just how much I feel the need to understand and explain the twists and turns of life.  I also realize that this craving, this need to know, to understand, to have it all make sense, will never be satisfied.  What I really want is freedom, which is beyond knowledge.

So, I am formally releasing my need to know, (and the need to know what will happen when I fully release my need to know!).  It may take a while, or it might be quick.  We'll see.  I’m also allowing for the possibility that there is a knowing beyond knowledge that is enough.

I want an owner's manual

Do we choose our life experiences?  Does it matter if we do or don’t?  If we do choose, where’s the fairness in some people getting a user’s guide and others not – it sure seems that way.  Or is it karma that determines our challenges and our outcomes?  And if so, could some of us really have screwed up that badly in the past?  And what’s the logic behind paying for something in one body that you did in another (and don’t even remember doing)?  Maybe we can blame human suffering on God?  Or maybe there’s some Universal Senate making up new rules that even God has to follow?

A dear friend recently died and her passing has thrown off my already precarious balance.  I’ve read the books, I know what I’m supposed to be doing and supposed to be thinking, but I’m still questioning and wondering and doubting.  I mean, I get that we have an opportunity in every minute to choose happiness.  And I get that a lot of what we see as reality is really illusion, but shouldn’t that be something we learn in preschool so we don’t have to spend the rest of our years feeling put upon by the world?  It’s too easy to explain the vagrancies of life as “Universal Laws” or “karmic debt.”  the truth is that it seems plenty unfair that some gentle and loving people carry heavy burdens all through life while egomaniacal miscreants seem to get an easy break.  There are lots of explanations out there, but I think our assignment of cause and effect is really just a mental exercise to relieve our own need for an explanation.  Really, just because some old guy in a cave 1000 years ago said something that sounds profound, does that make it true?

And where does that leave us?  If we don’t rely on explanations like “karma” or “Universal Laws” how do we make sense of all this craziness that we call Life?  Truthfully, I don’t think we can.  The trying to make sense is in itself crazy-making.  But can we live with all this craziness without it taking a toll?  At some point you have to put a stake in the ground and just decide on a perspective that makes you able to move on with energy and enthusiasm.  Isn’t that what we do as humans?  Isn’t that what religion, science and politics are?  Just ways of trying to make sense of the craziness in the world.  In the end they’re all just perspectives – different ways of trying to make logic out of a weave of events that could as easily be attributed to cause and effect, as seen to be chaos.

And so I choose my perspective and hope that it will not only help me, but also those with whom I come into contact.  Today, I choose, instead of grieving the loss of my friend to honor the gift of our friendship and the blessing of knowing her.  She was a gentle, kind soul who even in the midst of her own suffering was always looking out for others.  Instead of regretting not spending more time with my friend, I choose to cherish the time we did spend together, including phone calls and a visit with my parents a month before her death.  Instead of viewing it as tragic that her baby boy will not know his mother, I recognize the blessing that he has an entire lifetime to experience because she gave him that gift.

Even so, in the midst of all this I think of her family and the loss they must somehow make space for in their lives and sometimes it still doesn’t make any sense.  I find myself having to release the need for it to make sense, or else sink into despair.