Knowing

There is something I don't know that I am supposed to know. I don't know what it is I don't know, and yet am supposed to know, and I feel I look stupid if I seem both not to know it and not know what it is I don't know. Therefore I pretend I know it. This is nerve-racking since I don't know what I must pretend to know. Therefore I pretend to know everthing. I feel you know what I am supposed to know but you can't tell me what it is because you don't know that I don't know what it is. You may know what I don't know, but not that I don't know it, and I can't tell you. So you will have to tell me everything.

--RD Laing "knots" p56.

As a child I knew things I was not supposed to know, and did not know things I should have. I knew this, but for the longest time, did not know who to trust with this awareness. One day when I was 16 I gave this to Max and stood mute as he read it. I knew when he finished reading that he understood. During his last months, he told me everything he felt appropriate, and through his kindness, comprehension was born. I knew more than I thought I did. I just did not trust that my self knew it. Growing as an adult is a reconsiliation of what I have learned experientially, with that knowing self within. Awakening, I think, is less about learning, and more about rediscovering what one was born knowing. Releasing the primal self, bound by social conditioning, that knows no civilized fears, only survival and pleasure and pain.