Dear Friends:

We use the word "knoweldge" very loosely in common language.

Here is something of what I "know":

I know life and consciousness.

Through life and consciousness I know that I perceive a multitude of different sensations for which I have many names: soft, hard, smooth, rough, light, dark, blue, red, quiet, loud, short, long, painful, pleasant, etc.

I know that I group many of these sensations together under various names: you, me, society, sky, tree, computer, book, word, thought, feeling.

There is much complexity in this knowing, and it includes experiences that I group together under names like love, fear, suffering, joy, anxiety, and peace.

I know that I have names for two broad categories of experience - inner and outer. I know that sometimes, as in the moment of experiences I call "visions," "dreams" or "deja vu," I can't distinguish much if any difference between inner and outer. It is often only after the experience that I am able to place it one of those categories. Through knowing all the "internal" processes that happen in conjenction with "external" events, and vice versa, I have come to also know that these categories are convenient abstractions, each so interconnected with the other as to be nothing more than slightly different perspectives of an inseperable unity.

Within this unity I know that I experience "others," speaking with them and reading what they have written. When they tell me of what they experience, I know that I form judgments about the degree to which I trust that what they say is accurate. At this point I know that I am no longer just knowing, but now I am also on a continuum of belief/disbelief, which itself involves a contiuum of understanding/misunderstanding.

I know that a huge amount of the thoughts and feelings I experience are on this continuum of belief/disbelief. I know that sometimes my experience and judgment of something on this continuum is so trusting and assured that I call it "knowledge" out of convenience.

I know that I do not truly "know" much about a physical person I call Jesus that I believe lived some 2000 years ago. One thing I certainly know - and this is getting into the knowledge I call "gnosis" - the Spirit that I experience through his story and his words is the same Spirit of life and consciousness that is the beginning of everything else I know and believe. Because I know that Spirit, I know the infinite love and wisdom that I believe he spoke about. There are times in meditation and prayer when I experience that Spirit as a Holy Other with whom I am deeply in love and feel deeply loved by It. But beyond that, there are also times when "I" am so lost in that Spirit that there simply is nothing else. For this reason, I know that what I experience as a separate "me" (separate from the Spirit of all life and consciousness) is itself something akin to a convenient abstraction.

There is much more about Jesus and the Spirit that I desire to experience and understand, but that's what I know.

Peace,
Griffin