Different Ways of Knowing Make Us Wiser
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ORTHOGONAL ROTATION IN CONSCIOUSNESS
Different Ways of Knowing Make Us Wiser Jon Kabat-Zinn 1
# Jon Kabat-Zinn 2020
Today like every other day We wake up empty and scared. Don’t open the door of your study And begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel And kiss the earth. Rumi Across the span of nine hundred years, Rumi is evoking reverence for the moment and how easily it can be missed if, in the face of our endemic discomfort and disease, we persist out of habit in opening the door of our study and begin reading (and thinking) when we might, alternatively, “take down a musical instrument,” the closest at hand being our own living body, and let the beauty we love, if we can be in touch with it, reveal itself in the many different ways we might carry ourselves in this moment, here and now. This is nothing less than an exhortation to practice being truly in touch with what is most fundamental, most important, and a nod to there being no singular one right way to go about it. Reverence arises when faced with the incomprehensible. And by incomprehensible, I don’t mean that something cannot be understood. I mean that whatever it is that we are attending to can be understood in many different ways. And yet, when all is said and done and we have come to the end of all our thoughts, no matter how brilliant, imaginative, and informed; Excerpted from Mindfulness for All: The Wisdom to Transform the World by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Copyright © 2019 Jon Kabat-Zinn. Published by Hachette Books. All Rights Reserved. * Jon Kabat-Zinn [email protected] 1
Center for Mindfulness, University of Massachusetts Medical School, 55 Lake Avenue North, Worcester, MA 01605, USA
all our logic no matter how grounded in reason; and all our studies, there is a residue of feeling that goes beyond thought altogether, as when transported by some marvelous strains of music, or when struck by the artistry of a great painting, or the miracle of a chrysalis, or of a beam of sunlight through redwoods. A feeling of awe arises that transcends mere explanation. The actuality—whatever it is—hovers in the mystery of its undeniable phenomenological presence in relationship to our senses, including the non-conceptual, apprehending, knowing mind. I am speaking of the mystery of the very existence of an event or object, its “isness” as a phenomenon, its links with all other phenomena, all that has ever been, its numinous and luminous isness. In the case of a work of art, even the artist can’t really articulate fully how it came about. We don’t have words for such numinous and luminous feelings and often forget how prevalent they are in our experience. We can easily become inured to them and cease noticing that we even have such feelings or are capable of having them, so caught up we can be in a certain way of knowing to the exclusion of others. We can lose the reverence even when the wonder is incontrovertibly before us in every moment, in nature, in animals and plants, in mo
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