How Do We Know?

When things don’t go the way we’d hoped in our lives we often wonder, “What was I thinking?!” It is both the curse and the blessing of being a writer that I can actually go back and find out exactly what I was thinking and feeling- because I wrote it down!

So I recently pulled out the journals I’d written during the first year of my relationship with my now ex-husband. Please understand me: I was not trying to determine if I could have avoided the pain of separation by not going into the marriage. Nor was I looking for a foolproof way to only make risk-free choices in the future. I am a human being, and I am old enough not to waste energy trying to be something else.

I did want to learn as much as I could- for myself and those I work with- about how we know what we (think/feel we) know and what determines whether or not we are true to or abandon our own deepest knowing. I wanted to know if I’d seen what was coming and ignored it, or if I hadn’t foreseen it at all. It was hard to know what to hope for- the former would mean that I’d gone unconscious and ignored what I knew, and the later could mean I just hadn’t been very aware, or that, as is always the case- a great deal is unknowable.

And, as these things can pretty much be predicted to go, it turned out it was a little of all three, although the thing that surprised me most was how much of what had been hard and ultimately made continuing together impossible, was there in those early journals. Alongside the record of the heady ecstasy of falling in love and my intermittent flashes that we might not share as many core values as I’d hoped, were my rationalizations for ignoring inner misgivings- arguments that dismissed my uneasiness as understandable nerves (I had been down this road before), that I was too picky and needed to learn to stretch emotionally, to trust more deeply, to accept the other as he was and let go of my attachment to things being a certain way. (Sadly, I did not extend the argument for acceptance to myself and what mattered most to me.)

Reading the journals raised a couple of important questions: How do we know what we think or feel we know? How do we know if the sense of a seemingly clear “Yes!” or “No!” is the voice of intuitive-instinctual wisdom or if it’s what Jungians would call one of our “complexes”- clusters of emotionally charged and emphatically clear aspects of our unconscious, usually clustered around old wounds. How can we tell when we are tapping into the trustworthy instinctual-intuitive wisdom of psyche (soul-heart knowing) and when we are being driven by the emotionally skewed perspective of unconscious and unhealed wounds?

I do not have any foolproof checklist, but I have found a few clues, indicators that might help us discern when we may be “off” about what we think/feel we know:

• Instinctual-intuitive knowing comes most clearly when we are aware of the body-self, because it is the wisdom of embodied soul. So, if in doubt: do something that pulls awareness into the body-self (go for a walk, lie down on the earth. do some yoga breathing and postures, dance.) And if you don’t know what brings you into your body-self awareness- experiment, find out. In contrast complex-ridden certainties tend to take us away from body-awareness, are heady- often presented as rational arguments in circumstances where logos it is not particularly useful (for example, when considering personal preferences and what has real feeling value for us.)

• Instinctual-intuitive knowing tends to be relatively simple, straightforward and instantaneous- a quiet and clear “yes” or “no.” Justifications for complex-ridden decisions tend to be convoluted and complicated (and often very entertaining!) only revealing the “right” choice at the end of lengthy argument (if only with ourselves.)

• Instinctual-intuitive knowing does not need to be justified. I know it because I know it. Questioned it does not become defensive or self-justifying. In contrast complex-driven decisions tend to become highly charged when challenged by inner or outer voices, and an air of self-righteous justification arises quickly and emphatically.

• Instinctual-intuitive knowing does not claim to know things it cannot know- like future outcomes or divine purpose. It is most often based on a sense of knowing the next step of the journey. Period. Complex-riddled decisions often claim to know what we cannot know: that our decision is being guided by if not dictated by a divine purpose or a “higher” power; that the outcome will be pain-free and wonderful on all levels for everyone involved. These kinds of claims ought to make our antennae tingle!

• Complex-driven decisions tend to push for speed to avoid imagined disaster. When this sense of I-must-choose-fast rises it’s a pretty safe bet that the choice being made is at least in part being driven by old fears and wounds. So, buy some time. Tell anyone else involved, or yourself, you’ll sleep on it, journal about it, dream with it. Take a beat. Give the quieter instinctual-intuitive wisdom a chance to find you.

You see the pattern, the flavour difference between the two? We each have to find our way of discerning between these two. It may take a lifetime to sense with consistency and will no doubt never be one hundred percent clear. But the taste of the two is decidedly different because they each serve a different master: one serves the soul’s agenda of expansion into and offering the world more of who and what we are; the other serves the agenda of the often frightened smaller self, seeking safety and the perpetuation of an illusion of sovereignty and control.

If we want to make our choices from the place of the soul’s priorities we have to develop the ability to discern the difference between the knowing of psyche/soul and the knowing that arises from old survival strategies. It’s a work in progress. It’s why we are here. And we do this, not to avoid pain or challenges, but to weave the one bright thread that is ours- the one that mirrors essence in the particular shape of the man or woman we are- into the collective tapestry of this shared dream.