A Day in the Life of...

I was chatting with a dear One about knowing. There are two, perhaps three different kinds of "knowing".

1. The first kind of knowing is completely intellectual, textbook knowledge. You read about an experience someone else has had and believe it to be true, but you've never experienced it personally. This is the most common knowing or knowledge and people mistake it for the other forms of knowledge, when it can sometimes be the least reliable.

2. The second kind of knowing is through experience. You gain knowledge through directly experiencing an event whether you wanted the knowledge or not. This is fairly common as well, yet, the experience can be misinterpreted.

To illustrate the pitfalls of the first and second forms of knowing, I offer the following:

In The Fog of War, I witnessed the following exchange in regard to the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The destroyer had been attacked once, but the senior military and civilian leadership had thought that two attacks on separate days had occurred and that the North Vietnamese leadership had delibrately planned the two attacks on the U.S.S. Maddox. This error in judgement over a minor incident by senior officials led to an escalation of the Vietnamese conflict.

Narrator: "We believe what we want to see."
Robert McNamara: "Yes, belief and seeing are often wrong."

3. The third kind of knowing is the most powerful. I call it knowing from the heart, but it could be called intuitive knowledge. It happens when I reconcile or realize a truth profoundly and deeply - when I reconcile what I know to be true in my head with what I know to be true in my heart. The heart is always wins, but it takes time for me to realize the truth consciously. I may know something to be true intellectually, but I don't feel it in my heart. When I know it to be true in my heart, then it is real to me.

Here is an example of the the third form. During the last year of my marriage, I started to hate my wife. I realized that something was wrong if I hated someone I loved. What was I to do? I elected to separate from her. I tried to explain to my wife that while I still loved her, I couldn't be her husband any more. It didn't seem fair to her to remain her husband because I couldn't fully love her as a husband should. I didn't fully understand what had happened for over a year or more, until I was reading The Power of Now and read the chapter about "Enlightened Relationships". True love has no opposite. However, egoic love can transform into its opposite, egoic hate, in an instant. Therefore, egoic love is false or illusory. It was only then after reading those passages that I fully understood what I had been through. What I had intuitively known, but didn't fully understand or grasp intellectually. Many times though, it seems the opposite, I know it intellectually, but it's not sunk in intuitively, although possibly that's just my mind being stubborn. This experience and other insights from Tolle's books that ring true for me are why I prefer to "go down the Tolle-way" - to be a better human being.