"One ought not to know", he said, "but one ought to be".
I was pondering about this for a while. Suddenly a certainty rose inside me: 'If one can be, then it cannot be overlooked that we will discover that at some stage."
"That is true", he said, 'but this is a different kind of knowing than the knowing that you are so fond of lately. There is a lot of knowing that one can obtain independently of the fact of how one simply is - that is... if the brains are working okay! That kind of knowing can be crammed together in the container of the brains and give us plenty of useful information and pleasure. But there is also a kind of knowing that comes into existence because our 'being' permeates into our consciousness. In this kind of knowing lies a great clarity, which is of a different nature to the intellect. This clarity does not resolve intellectual riddles, nor will the clarity of intellect ever have an answer to the unsayable and the inescapable - what the people mean by the 'eternal questions'. There is no struggle between these two clarities. They are like the sun and the moon. Yes, that's how it is, for even if the moon is at her brightest, she would dim if the sun were not there. No, there never can be a conflict between the clarity of thought and the inner clarity that follows from Being."
"Inner clarity", I said, "sometimes I think that I knew it once - long ago."
Drawn from: Olsen's Foolishness, by Johannes Anker Larsen (1874-1957), Danish author and mystic.
Thank you for sharing this remarkable excerpt from Olsen's Foolishness by Johannes Anker Larsen. The word "know" is just as misunderstood and often misinterpreted as is the word "love." Larsen makes a distinction between the intellectual way knowing of things, facts, concepts, etc. and another type of knowing that comes from "Being." He describes this eloquently as "a kind of knowing that comes into existence because our 'being' permeates our consciousness." In the spectrum of all experiences and all forms of knowing there is the underlying awareness, consciousness, spirit, or simply "being." Thank you Emma for sharing these words by Johannes Anker Larsen.
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