What is a knowable? It’s any experience, outer or inner, that can be observed and known through our sensory organs or mental capacity. Our sensory system is oriented to “physical” experiences that appear as outer events. Our inner capacity for observation is oriented towards thoughts, feelings, and images that appear as mental events. In both instances, what makes these outer and inner experiences knowable is that we are endowed with an overarching awareness that can observe, relate to, and communicate about them.
In contrast, there are also unknowables. What is an unknowable? These are experiences that cannot be observed or comprehended through our sensory system or mental awareness. They can only be known to the individual through direct experience. Examples of unknowables include soul, spirit, pure awareness, love, God, and reality itself. We are not given the human equipment to perceive or comprehend these experiences, as is possible with sensory or mental experiences. However, we can experience them directly. But, any attempt to observe, analyze, categorize, or label these experiences will fail.
A special comment is called for here when it comes to the category of “reality.” Let’s take a simple example. We see or observe a tree. How does that happen and are we actually seeing the real tree? Light waves are emitted from the tree and are perceived by our eyes. These rays travel through space, our cornea, and lens, leaving an impression on our retina. That is then turned into an electrical current that flows along the optic nerve to the visual brain centers where this current is magically formulated into an image that’s then experienced in our mind. That image is not the outer object that was the initial source of our visual experience. We experience a modified version of what is actually “out there.” We cannot know the tree “out there” as it truly is in itself. We are not given the mind/body equipment to comprehend unvarnished and unmodified reality, although we believe and act as if we can.
So even an ordinary knowable experience is not reality as it actually is. But, we can know a facsimile of outer and inner appearances that approximates what actually is. We each have a myriad of daily experiences, outer and inner that we observe and witness. Although they are at best a facsimile, they are close enough approximations of reality to function and serve human life.
There are important distinctions between knowable and unknowable experiences. The former are transient. They come and go in relationship to causes, conditions, and circumstances. Consider a rainbow. It arises dependent on light, diffraction, moisture, the human eye, labeling and consciousness. If one of these factors drops out there is no longer a rainbow. All knowable experiences are dependent on causes, conditions, and circumstances. When these change the experience changes, thus their impermanency. We call these relative, conventional, or conditional truths.
To the contrary all unknowables are experienced as true, unchanging, timeless, and permanent. We know it because we know it. That knowing is not an observation but rather a spontaneous expression of the experience itself. The knowing and the knower are one, a non-dual state. For example, when the innermost self is glimpsed in meditation, it’s experienced as a fundamental truth, our essential nature. That experiential ultimate reality is always present whether experienced the next moment, or not. Thar unchanging nature is holistic, and unitary. We call these ultimate or final truths.
Knowable phenomenon, inner and outer, can be measured, described, understood, and function in day-to-day life. Unknowables are the background basic foundation of life. Although we cannot measure or know these experiences through cognition, we can know them through their perfume. Their perfume is their calling card. Those who touch these states-of-being express a deeply held conviction of the truths they convey, experience a profound serenity that surpasses understanding, a wholeness and oneness, selfless love, happiness without a reason or cause, profound clarity, inner wisdom, and a boundless and unconditioned freedom.
We cannot know these “perfumes” of the unknowables through our sensory or mental apparatus. Consider love. What we call love, in its many knowable forms, is not the ultimate love of a selfless oneness and connectedness. That can only be experienced directly, touched in a moment of awakening. Once experientially known it informs and supersedes all other conventional and personal ideas of love. As is said, when the perfect comes the partial will pass away. That is the way of the perfume of the unknowable.
Perhaps we can say that there are two worlds available to us. There is the ever-changing ordinary world of sensory and mental experiences that we observe and know and the unchanging non-ordinary world of foundational truth and unity that we cannot know, but can directly experience. For most of us the first is what we know as life with its pleasures and sufferings. Those who have touched or been touched by the great truths of life, the unknowables, perceive ordinary human experience as functional but limited and contracted.
To experience knowables all that is required is to be born and individuate according to cultural norms. To experience the unknowable mystery requires devotion and a contemplative life. The actual revelation or awakening is not developmental. It occurs spontaneously, in an instant. It is not based on practice and learning. What contemplative practice offers is to clean up the noisy room of our day-to-day life, increasing the probabilities that we will unexpectedly be touched by the grace of the great mystery, which paradoxically is always and everywhere present, and recognize its ultimate and unchanging truth. Even if the glimpse may be brief, it will inform and transform our ordinary life into a sacred one.
My words here can only point to the unknowable yet experiential mystery of life, that more to life that drives the spiritual seeker. When we touch it there is a profound knowing, but it is neither from our mental or sensory faculties. Yet we surely know it, with great certainty, as a foundational truth. That knowing is inseparable from what is known. And that truth will have the transformative force of inner authority.