Study and Not Knowing
Q: The Forest Path encourages us to embrace not knowing and to stop seeking. These ideas can feel a bit contradictory for someone on a learning path. How do you reconcile these concepts with another principle I’ve heard you speak about: “study”. You call the ceremony space a “classroom.” How can you “study” without “seeking”? How can you want to learn something, while also embracing the great mystery?
It is a paradox isn’t it? Between seeking and not seeking, between knowing and not knowing. We can accumulate endless amounts of information and knowledge under our belt; it might get us accolades and respect in the world, but it does not give us that which goes beyond the world and it does not help us to feel at home in the world. It does not settle us into the calm, contented rest that we long for. There is a Zen saying that goes, “Possessing much knowledge is like having a thousand-foot fishing line with a hook, but the fish is always an inch beyond the hook.”
The Yogasutra of Patanjali says, "Abhyasa vairagyabhyam tan nirodhah," which means the fluctuations and disturbances of the mind are calmed by practice and non-attachment. I like to say the practice is letting go. The encouragement is to never give up, while, at the same time, always letting go. Practice and study are engaged; they are consistent, what I call constant contemplation. To be involved in the remembrance of the divine at all times, to remember that all is the Divine, that things are not separate and are not things at all but merely named this thing or that thing.
To do this in the beginning, one needs a type of practice. It might be prayer, postures, prostration, pranayam, poetry, lectio divina, or sacred reading, etc. Such practices cultivate the air of inspiration, to be in-spirit, to be somewhat enchanted. I say somewhat enchanted because really it is a disenchantment from the confusions of egocentricity. So I will say the practice is that which brings one into the contemplative and unitive realm, the embodied harmony of wisdom. Once there, practice falls away.
This can be confused in our Western approaches. So often we commandeer these ideas for our own purposes and forget their heart essence. For example, last week I was in California and my friend took me to a type of yoga asana class that included weights. It was a wonderful workout; I enjoyed it. I am unsure, however, if they should really call it yoga because, to me, the yogic practice, even that of postures, must always carry contemplation. It must lead one towards the waters of wisdom and away from everything that distracts one from reality. It moves one toward stillness, into the sublime, into the mystic.
At first, for most of us, practice is needed to be in a state of constant contemplation. And it is a type of seeking, for sure, but it is the seeking that is found in every step of the way, rather than just at the top of the mountain. Have you heard the saying that the wisdom you find at the top of the mountain is the wisdom you take with you? It is like that. It is found here and now and nowhere else. What the seeker discovers is not new; rather, it is unveiled, already there, waiting for the right light to see through the obscuration. In the practice, we say—and it should be contemplated deeply—that the path, the destination, and the practice, which is the vehicle to move on the path, are all one and the same.
Spiritual practice is often hijacked with a Western colonial mindset that says there is something we must get out of it, there is somewhere we must get to, there is some result or improvement that should be aspired to and desired. That is not it, however. Sure, there are some wonderful attributes and results that emerge from the practice, but it is not a means to an end. It is an end in and of itself that merges with the beginning for us to discover we have never left. To discover nothing is left out.
Imagine looking through a beautiful stained-glass window, its colours giving hues to the world beyond. On one side it is red, on another it is blue, sometimes it mixes with the green. You see the colours, but they only blur the outside and allude to the fragments and shape of the mosaic on the stained glass. Then you notice a latch and slide the stained glass to reveal an ordinary window where you can see outside much more clearly, free from the coloured glass and imagery. A certain clarity arises. As you step closer, the glass becomes clearer, revealing shapes and shadows with more definition. Then, you notice glass between you and the outside. You lift that latch and open the window—no lens, no barrier, nothing between you and the world.
Sometimes in the West, we are busy constructing the glass, the frame, and the colouration so as to become something, to become someone, to become unique. We do this so much that we don't see we are trapped behind the glass in a way that takes us further from reality and the naked seeing that is one of the most holy visions we can have.
Vairagya means dispassion; it means not holding so tightly to the goal or the ideas of external outcomes, but cultivating an inner equanimity through having arrived each moment. The practice is holding things lightly, and we practise so that it becomes effortless, so that it becomes natural. You don't need to renounce the world; instead, it opens you to freely embrace the world as it is, with all its movement, all its suffering, all its confusion, and then to not add to it, but recognise its fullness.
My children started a new school this week, and I have been so impressed with the education system, at least in this part of the world, at least in our neighbourhood, and how it has evolved and how it caters to the individual rather than trying to fit them into a certain-sized box. It gives me hope for the resuscitation of education in the true meaning of the word—to educe, to bring forth what is latent and already there within the individual. That is wisdom: to teach a child the joy of learning, of discovery; to teach them to find out who they are. Then we are not necessarily wisdom seekers, but wisdom discoverers. That is why I tend to use the word realisation. If you stay a spiritual seeker, your hook is always an inch from the fish. You are always looking from behind the stained glass. Rather than compiling knowledge on top of ourselves, here the study is the discipline to bring forth what is already there and you can do that right now, where you are.
The ceremonial study is vast too, I know. That is the vehicle; there are many vehicles. If we practise with presence, then the practice becomes presence. It doesn’t matter how many songs you have, or what instruments you play, or if you take part in the musical service, or add in another way. These arts are what we use to induce ourselves into the heart of wisdom. We say in the ceremony that those who have practised shine. That means we see those who are working out the unnecessary aspects of their psyche and working on the ones that serve and that is when one begins to learn and foster their place, not by simply staying in it or hiding in it but by being of service to others.
Excerpt from Walking the Forest Path: Volume 1, available in early 2025.
