remembering what we already know
This morning I was flipping through dog-eared pages and underlined passages of a favorite text, when I came across the phrase “these are all the more powerful for being wordless.” Probably I underlined it because, as someone who spends a good portion of most days studying, thinking about, and crafting language, I have deep appreciation for the wonder and weightiness of something that can’t quite be put into words...
This particular text was about precognitive awareness ( meaning prior to cognition, a subconscious ‘knowing’ that is deeper than thought or language), but it got me thinking about super-cognitive awareness (that which is beyond linguistic thought). Precognition shapes how we see and interpret the world around us, how we distinguish between what is “me” and what is “other.” Super-cognition is what we see when those boundaries melt away.
…sorry what?
There are truths that live at the root of you, at the root of everything. Putting them into words seems nearly impossible and also unnecessary, they are so ingrained and integral to your being. But without words, they have faded into the background of your awareness.
Think of a time you’ve heard a song or read a paragraph that feels so deeply true you almost can’t believe you’ve never put these words together yourself, that you don’t sing them every single day. There is a moment of near-euphoria in this deep recognition of truth and the sudden ability to express it.
Listen a little closer, though, and you may realize that you do in fact sing these truths every day - in the rhythm of your breath; the way you move when the house is quiet; the wordless, pranic conversation in the space between you and a beloved - at frequencies below and above your day-to-day waking consciousness. By bringing precognitive truths to the forefront of your awareness, you begin to see them become tangible in the world around you, permeating everything. And another layer of difference between what is “me” and what is “other” melts away.
the cycle of understanding: a case study
This process we’re talking about is a cycle of pre-cognition, re-cognition, and super-cognition. We know something, we forget it, we get to know it better. To illustrate, we’ll use the concept of interconnection.
Let’s say that even as a new human, you knew interconnection as truth. You knew it in the way that trees know when to blossom. But because it was a knowing deeper than words (pre-cognition), you sort of forgot it as you grew into language, which required defining and categorizing things. As you developed language, your brain went to work making connections between things based on shared or related descriptors, like a sorting robot at a conveyor belt, collecting big piles of “things you know”; when something came across the conveyor belt for which you didn’t have words or descriptors, your brain had trouble categorizing it, and set it aside from the pile as an anomaly. Even once you learned the word “interconnection” it didn’t quite ring true to you; something didn’t connect to that deep, precognitive truth.
But deep in your bones, there is a (let’s call it a) memory of interconnection, so you continued to crave and seek it, not understanding, in your brilliantly-oblivious grown-up-language brain, that you are already connected, deeply and irrevocably, to everything else.
Put another way, we experience suffering because of this forgetting. Until eventually, we remember.
One day you come across the right words in the right order that cause the right synapses to fire in your brain and zap - ohhh, THAT is interconnection and that is TRUE! Now that you have the right words, you can comprehend and hold ‘interconnection’ in your mind (re-cognition). You read more words, you develop practices, you learn mantra, all to keep reminding yourself of this simple truth. Until, like the phenomenon of semantic satiation - when you say or hear a word so many times that the sound of it no longer has meaning - you can let go of the words and hold the essence of interconnection in your awareness (super-cognition) 🤯. That is, you come to understand interconnection as more expansive than the way you’ve defined it with words. Words have become unnecessary for your understanding… again. You’ve come full circle to learn what you already knew to be true. At last.
learning how to remember
So, how do we begin to recognize and realign with fundamental truths? It helps to know (deeply and enthusiastically) that you don’t know everything already. This may seem obvious, but actually it requires a little bit of un-learning, softening the grip of your (brilliantly oblivious grown-up) linguistic mind. So that when you hear the song or read the words that ring so true, you can let them resonate fully.
Language is dualistic. When we define what a word or a concept ‘is’ we are also separating it from what it ‘is not’ - everything else. We are setting a boundary for the benefit of our comprehension. We also do this in early childhood when we start to identify and separate what is “me” from what is “everything else.” But yoga teaches that everything is interconnected, that any two things are part of the same whole. And science teaches us that any two things are made up of the same essential building blocks - protons, neutrons, electrons, and energy - that make up the universe. So, we have to stretch our definitions a little bit. We have to allow that a word or a concept ‘is’ how we’ve specifically defined it and is also essentially (that is, on an essential level) the same as everything else. Phew, are we having fun yet?
Once you grasp this pattern of knowing, forgetting, and knowing again more fully, you can recognize those little-big zaps of truth and locate yourself in the cycle of understanding. Along with the assumption that you don’t know everything, hold also the faith that you know more than you think.
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p.s. In a way, interconnection is the whole ballgame. If you can open to the possibility that everything is connected in ways you can’t describe with words or ‘prove’ with your rational mind, it’s easier to open to the possibility that what you can see in front of you and describe with words isn’t the whole of reality, that what you’ve learned to define as true isn’t the whole of truth.