(Colleagues: Here are some summer notes from my inner/outer research on the effect of long-term mediation on differentiation of self.)
I am interested in a state of awareness described by ancient texts, and translated as “knowingness”. My colleague and fellow meditation researcher Mark Roberts, and increasingly I, at times, experience a clear, concentrated, abstract sense of knowingness.
Here is how Roberts describes it: “Knowingness is when the Self is both the subject and object. It is different from the knowing of the intellect or senses. Knowingness is when we are both the knower and the known in the experience. We begin to identify with Being. Being becomes an object that is known.”
Family Experience from 2020:
“Today, as I sat on the screen porch enjoying my family guests, my sister, brother-in-law, his mom, and my nieces, I felt it knowingness. I felt very happy to sense it. It was like the background screen of the movie of this family gathering shimmered into awareness.
I noticed that my adored brother-in-law looked unhappy. I think he was terribly worried about his mother getting Covid. His mother was not worried. Despite my deep love for him, his mood didn’t penetrate mine. I think I would have been captured by his mood in the past. I adore him, and he recently got mad at me about something. It seemed differentiated that his mood didn’t penetrate mine. In the past, his frustration with me would have primed me to personalize his mood there on the porch.
At another moment I felt this inner knowingness beaming out from within me toward one of my nieces. It felt related to love, but more fundamental than love. I was laughing a lot out there on the porch. I felt the laughter gently rising from inside me. I think this is what they call bliss, something more like eudaimonic happiness. My laughter was stimulated by the loving dialogue, yes, but there was a deeper quality to it. It seemed connected to an abstract enjoyment of existing. There is a self-sufficiency in this that is striking to me. Perhaps knowingness is intrinsic to wonder and stable happiness. This seems related to basic self.
Yes, I was able to resonate with the self-sufficiency you describe so beautifully in this article. I love this article! It is a reminder to me to stay in touch with beingness as I go about. I am forgetful what with one thing or the other. But in the experience of beingness, all, even the suffering, is accepted, even appreciated. I agree it is related to differentiation, an aspect of it not very fully articulated, and I look forward to your further elucidation.
Thanks Laurie. Some of my mentors describe the emergence of the autonomic presence of knowingness, even during sleep, when conscious control is resting. Imagine.
Knowingness would be a good word for what I experience more often as i grow older. It comes when I am with my family in a way that sees them as their separate selves, with their own lives, with the ability to go on with life after I am gone. All is well, and there is nothing I need to do. It is a freedom from the doingness that has driven my life.
Erik,
I remember thinking about the relationship of subjective experience to the state of one’s relationships as an undergraduate and thinking I’d like to make that a focus of my efforts – and I think that had to do with the permeable ego boundaries that resulted in my absorbing the emotional reactivity, originally in my family of origin. And of course I landed in the land of Bowen theory maybe 6 years later as it made sense to me as a set of ideas that addressed that and what might be done about it. 3-4 years after that I had the experience after some major efforts culminating in an emotional episode, primarily between my and my parents but which involved managing my relationship with my husband as well. It culminated in a vivd moment that seems akin to what you describe. It was so free and so connected all at the same time. Thanks for posting. Laura