Knowledge v. Knowing

In some ways, the Buddhist path can be frustrating. Especially in the modern United States, the primary ethos is to take action, no matter the circumstances.

He doesn’t put the point this way, but for Ajahn Sumedho, awakening is not a matter of any achievement or activity on our part, even though he spent a year alone in a meditation hut in Thailand as a young man and is still a Buddhist monk 60 years later. By American standards, that might qualify as doing nothing, but he spent a lot of time meditating in those 61 years.

Meditation is sort of acting by not acting. The goal, except there is no goal, is to grasp knowing. Not knowledge. Knowledge is the result of knowing. Maybe the core frustration in Buddhism is realizing/appreciating that the knowing faculty, pure consciousness, the deathless, nirvana, call it what you will, cannot be an object of knowledge.

Objects of knowledge are just that, objects. They are separate from us, independently existing, what we call things.

The knowing faculty is the infinite emptiness that lies behind our usual, daily awareness that is how we come to know anything in the usual sense.

Especially for over educated types like me, but perhaps for most people, the idea of foregoing all knowledge is terrifying. Why would I do that?