Beyond the Wall of Knowledge

An intelligent mind realizes its own limitation, and it’s a beautiful thing when it does.

When you stop holding on to all of the knowledge, then you start to enter a different state of being. You start to move into a different dimension. You move into a dimension where experience inside gets very quiet. The mind may still be there chatting in the background, or it might not, but consciousness is no longer bothering itself with the mind. You don’t need to stop it. Your awareness just goes right past that wall of knowledge and moves into a very quiet state.

In this quietness, you realize that you don’t know anything simply because you aren’t looking back to the mind for its acquired knowledge. This quietness is a mystery to the mind. It is something unknown. As you go into depth, you literally go into a deeper experience of what seems to be a great mystery. Now the mind might come in and want to know what’s going on and start to define everything, but that’s not going to bring any more depth. The mystery just keeps opening to itself if you let it -- if you let go of control.

As acquired knowledge is left behind, what is found is that you have left your familiar sense of self behind. That self only existed in the accumulation of knowledge and experience. Something very interesting happens when you leave it all behind, because you are literally leaving your memory behind. You leave behind who you thought you were, whoever you thought your parents were, and everything else you thought and believed. Yesterday is gone. Then a very interesting thing starts to be noticed; you can leave all of that behind and still you *are* -- you are right here and right now. So what you are becomes even more mysterious.

When you realize that you can leave every self-definition behind and still you *are*, then you begin to see that these thoughts must not be what you are. In other words, who are you when you are not thinking yourself into existence? [...]

In that moment of recognition, you have already begun to move beyond the wall of accumulated knowledge. Then, if you don’t redefine this moment or rebox it in some concept, rethinking yourself into existence, your true state of being starts to present itself.

--Adyashanti, From "Emptiness Dancing"