Learning to Know (& Poem)

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Guest Post by Dennis Ernst

Each of us develops our own strengths. These come from choices and experience, often over long periods of time. I’ve noticed three types of strengths that one can develop into a living and learning style unique to them.

The Way of Hearing

These are people that are very auditory. They often learn best from listening, their inner guidance often comes in the form of a voice. Even life around them whispers its guidance, which they learn to notice and hear. Often meditations using mantras, sounds, or listening to the words of an inner teacher work well for them.

The Way of Seeing

Another group is more visually attuned. Their attention is very sharp, they learn fast from watching and their dreams and imagination are more along the lines of seeing things. They notice small clues in their daily lives and remember their dreams in a “movie-like” fashion. Guided imagery meditation often works well for them.

The Way of Knowing

There is a third group that seem to lack both auditory and visual strengths, but their strength is knowing. This is a little more difficult for the visual and auditory people to grasp, but it is equally rich. This often gets mixed up with ideas about thinking and intuition, where knowingness seems to originate. For the Knowers, there comes a point where there is no thinking nor intuition, but yet the knowledge or wisdom appears in the moment, and there is never a bit of doubt attached to it. 

The Knower just knows, and what they know is part of what they are. This skill often grows into experiences that reach well beyond the range of language or symbols. This makes it hard to translate back into human language that can be understood by others.

Knowing, has been my own personal strength. In a dream one night, I was asking a teacher why it was that guided imagery exercises were hard for me. Often, when I was in a class preparing for a guided experience, I would just know something about the goal as the instructor was explaining the exercise. I rarely got anything out of the exercise, as I had already receive the insight I needed.

I had noticed too that I very rarely would hear words of a teacher in a guided experience. At first, I wrote this off as being a product of my deafness and just not used to hearing in words. I could hear the inner sounds or music and participate in it, but it wasn’t a source of wisdom and guidance.

My dream teacher pointed out to me that my strength was knowing and that it would take time to develop. I felt much better at that point, and said I would like to become a Knower, even if it took time. The choice was made.

As it is hard to say much about knowing, I’ve written a poem to try to convey a little bit of the ongoing journey that followed.

Learning Knowing 

At first, we think with our minds—
collecting facts like trinkets,
arranging them in patterns
we call understanding.
The intellect, so proud of its constructions,
reaches outward through the senses,
grasping.

We stumble through mazes of our own making,
building castles of concepts
only to watch them dissolve like mist
when touched by deeper currents.
The knowing we seek eludes capture
in the nets of language.

Then comes the blessed unraveling—
doubt arrives not as enemy
but as the necessary storm
that clears away what was never real.
Each certainty questioned,
each belief examined,
until the ground beneath gives way.

In this falling,
a strange liberation.
The tight fist of mind
finally unclenches.

Surrender.

Not defeat, but expansion.
The small self exhales its desperate holdingand something vaster breathes through.

In the spaces between thoughts,
a different kind of perception stirs—
not acquired but recognized,
not learned but remembered.

The body becomes antenna,
receiving vibrations too subtle for thinking.
Intuition flowers from hidden seeds.
Direct knowing bypasses the slow machinery of reason.

Time shifts.
The eternal moment opens.
Past and future collapse into Now—
the only place where Knowing lives.

The universe responds differently now,
synchronicities multiplying like stars.
Life speaks through symbol and resonance.
The veil between observer and observed
thins to transparency.

Light recognizes light within all forms.
The hologram shifts with each recognition.
You are both particle and wave,
vessel and ocean,
the smallest quark and the cosmic dance.

The journey continues without destination,
each awakening revealing new horizons—
infinite depth contained in stunning simplicity.
Yet something has fundamentally changed:

You no longer search for what you already are.
You no longer seek what never left.
The Knower and the Known
embrace in silent communion,
lovers who were never truly separate.

And in this luminous merging,
the Creator’s imagination moves through all things.
Your consciousness— like a holographic fragment
containing the whole—
shimmers with unconditional love.

The light by which the universe
knows its own brilliance
has awakened
to itself
through you.

____________________

Dennis Ernst is a retired Professional Land Surveyor who now devotes his time to sharing the natural beauty he finds on his many treks through photography, blogs, and poetry. Please visit his website, Dennis Ernst Photography, for a glimpse into his fascinating world.