The Peak Experience
There are two ways that we gain knowledge of our self and world. As adults, our default approach is “memory knowledge.” From childhood on we accumulate experiences, learning from parents, schooling, and culture. We store all this knowledge in our mental file called memory. We draw upon this acquired memory-based knowledge, bounded by the reach and character of our life experience, to understand and navigate the inner and outer day-to-day world.
Although memory-based knowledge provides a quick, consistent, and predictable approach to life, it is limited by the scope of our past experiences. Our past automatically shapes new incoming experience to align with this prior knowledge. In this manner, our life unfolds with predictability. However, we miss the opportunity to explore and experience the many possibilities of life that lie beyond the scope of our personal past.
That brings us to a very different type of knowledge “being knowledge.” Being knowledge refers to the insights and understandings that naturally arise from a still state of being and presence. That foundational state-of-being is a moment-to-moment awareness that does not contain past history. It is an impersonal state-of-being in which the personal self and its content, which is memory based, cannot be found. The knower is a natural and unconditioned awareness absent any previously stored information. It is a unique and precious state-of-being that allows us access to full and clear knowledge and actions that lie beyond the grasp of our acquired memory-based knowledge.
It's like switching channels. One channel is our personal history channel and the other the ground of our being channel. Surely you have experienced the day-to-day personal self and its conditioned take on self and life. It has become our default, taking the place of our spaciousness and whole true self. But it is also likely you have experienced your inner self with its flow in the moment, minus a personal and historical commentary.
Can you remember a time in nature, intimacy, beauty, music, dance or nature when you suddenly felt a sense of flow, complete presence, well-being and wholeness. You likely didn’t notice that your personal self dropped away for a moment, allowing for the revelation of your natural and timeless presence. Soon enough your usual self pulled you back. But for a moment you switched channels and touched the vast well-being of your natural self.
You may have also noticed, in one of those natural and almost imperceptible gaps between two thoughts, that a fresh insight popped up. You might not know where it came from and how it arrived, but you will know that you have touched a profound truth that is not ascribable to or influenced by any memory or learned knowledge. That gap and the ensuing moment of presence and being, however brief it may be, allowed for the being knowledge to spontaneously arise, precise to the circumstance at hand
To access knowledge beyond the limits of memory is a great gift, as it opens vistas and resolves concerns that our ordinary memory based knowledge can only struggle and ruminate about. Having routinely relied on memory knowledge for our lifetime, we must learn how to access, trust, and be guided by being knowledge, the profound intuitive knowing of our inner self? We train ourselves in accessing this knowledge by discovering how we can reveal, with increasing stability, that ever present inner state of pure unconditioned awareness and being. For this we rely on an open awareness meditative practice called meditation without support.
Unlike meditation with support, which relies on a chosen focal point (for example, mantra and mindfulness meditation, breath observation, guided imagery, and so forth,) an awareness-based meditation without support brings our attention to an open and spacious awareness rather than a specific object. Any and all mental activity is allowed to arise in that open presence, but nothing takes our attention from the awareness. We allow all mental appearances (thoughts, feelings, mental images, and sensory experiences) to come and go on their own, as they do, absent our attention or entanglement. The resulting field of open presence and being is the ground in which being knowledge, in its own time, spontaneously arises as creative insights or realizations to offer the truth about self and life.
And you will know that the pure space of awareness, your being, the source of all precise and true knowledge is pervasive, timeless, ever present, and imperishable yet always available to you. It knows you and you know it. We can always dip back into our personal identity to navigate day-to-day life. But, we will know that the truth of our being and being knowledge is the source of a full and abundant life. It is the resolution to all of our searching and all of our questioning
