The Wisdom of Not Knowing: Spiritual Growth & Mystery

Throughout my life, I have had many experiences that I simply could not explain. Some have happened during meditation or ritual, others while visiting ancient places, sitting quietly in nature, or sharing an experience with a group of people. There have been moments of unexpected connection, unusual perceptions, powerful coincidences, synchronicities, and experiences that seemed perfectly clear while they were happening, yet became much more difficult to describe once I tried to put them into words.

I felt a greater need to understand these experiences. Like most of us, I wanted to know what it all meant. With time, however, I have become more comfortable with a very different response: I don’t know. There is something surprisingly freeing about those three words. They leave open the possibility that an experience may be larger than our present ability to explain it.

I have come to see this willingness to remain with the unknown as an important part of spiritual growth and maturity.

Curiosity is important, and Laura and I have spent much of our lives exploring questions about consciousness and human experience. Exploration and discovery are a huge part of our lives. We enjoy learning, asking questions, traveling to ancient places, encountering different traditions, and exploring ideas that challenge how we understand ourselves and the world around us. But there is a difference between curiosity in the service of learning and the need to decide too quickly what a particular experience must mean.

This is especially true when we enter those areas of human experience that sit close to mystery: dreams, intuition, synchronicity, altered states of consciousness, encounters with the sacred, profound experiences in nature, and those unexpected moments when the ordinary world suddenly seems much larger than it did a moment before.

I have learned not to rush to decide what happened. We can observe it, write about it, and notice how it affected us. We can remain curious and open to the possibility that the experience contains more than we need to resolve through the intellect. We can allow it to continue working within us without forcing it into a conclusion.

There is a humility in this kind of not knowing. It acknowledges that our understanding of reality is always incomplete. Human beings have developed extraordinary ways of studying the world, yet every answer seems to reveal another layer of questions. Consciousness itself remains one of those great questions. We experience it every moment of our lives, yet we still do not fully understand what it is.

I have come to see that there is value in allowing mystery to remain mystery, without the need to explain it.

This has become increasingly important to us in our work with Ritual Postures. People sometimes emerge from an experience wanting to know immediately what it meant. A particular image appeared, they felt the presence of something, or they traveled somewhere unexpected in their awareness. At times, several people in the same session report remarkably similar imagery or experiences. Something happened that seems impossible to dismiss, yet equally difficult to explain.

Our natural temptation is to interpret, but sometimes the most respectful response is simply to say, That was interesting. Let’s stay with it. Write it down, remember it, notice what happens afterward, and see whether its meaning changes with time.

I have found that some experiences become clearer years later. There is power in allowing an experience to reveal itself, in its own time and in its own way, without disrupting it through overthinking. Some experiences may continue unfolding long after the moment itself has passed.

Mystery invites us to recognize that there will always be something beyond the edge of what we presently understand. When we stop pursuing an immediate answer, curiosity remains alive and wonder remains possible. We become more interested in listening to what the experience has to teach us. We also give ourselves permission to change our understanding as we learn more.

Genuine spiritual inquiry requires both the courage to ask difficult questions and the humility to admit when we do not know the answers. After all these years of exploring consciousness, ritual, ancient traditions, and human experience, Laura and I have become increasingly comfortable standing in that place.

Not knowing does not close the door. Sometimes, it is what keeps the door open.