You can't know what you don't know.
Or can you?
This phrase has been rattling around in my noggin for weeks now and it's showing its shy face in a few realms of my life. At the Dwarf Planet University, where I've been assisting for 3+ years and I'm currently teaching my first course solo (on Ceres) a concurrent course I'm assisting is on Sedna. Ceres is an unusual dwarf planet story, tied up with Pluto's demotion, as she was "discovered" in 1801, even before Neptune was discovered! I put that word in quotes because I want to draw attention to the fact that these celestial bodies have all-ways been there, so what we humans really discovered was the means to see what has all-ways been there.
And this is part of my point with the title of this post. Just because we can't currently see (or otherwise perceive with our 5 measly senses) a thing, does not mean it does not exist.
Our limitations do not limit the fullness of other beings’ existence.
Except when they do.
Except when our inability to see what's beyond our own sense perceptions causes the destruction of entities. This relates to my last post that touched on fairies, but really the uniting theme here is perception.
Which is also the sense, albeit what we tend to call a 6th sense, aligned with the chakra/energy centre in this Southern Hemisphere's MYOGA Seasons because we are in the dark of winter ‘down under’. We're just coming to the end of First Winter in Ajna Chakra, which many call the 3rd eye but I prefer to call "the strong eye" and describe as a headlamp helping us to see in the dark.
We need to turn that strong eye’s cycloptic gaze inwards to be sure it's aligned with our truth (throat chakra), our compassion (heart chakra), our passion and commitment (naval chakra), our sense of sweet self (sacral chakra), and our groundedness in this life (base chakra), all fed and inspired by the crown chakra’s unity consciousness.
For, without this inner awareness and alignment, our outer two eyes will be steering us in all sorts of devilish directions.
And being such a visual species we are steeply waylaid by those who profit from diverting our attention from the path that's right for us. Now this example is not for everyone as Bill Hicks is rugged, as any dying man would be when he's still trying to wake folks up to what's killing us all (this excerpt is from his last show and he died of pancreatic cancer shortly afterwards). So if you're sensitive to the F word or to rigour, skip to the next video down with Krishnamurti, who's essentially saying the same thing but in a different, gentler way.
In fact, when I first saw Krishnamurti speak, it was in my NYC Harlem apartment on my boyfriend's TV (he'd moved in with it) and I couldn't work out whether Krishnamurti was a man or a woman. I loved and was mesmerized by that genderless spiritual beauty, and it strengthened my resolve to go to India. Although it took me another year-ish, I finally flew the Manhattan coop in 1999 and was fortunate enough to spend 2 years in India.
What he talks about in this video is the general gap in human lives between seeing and action. We think about things and talk about things endlessly; we blog, vlog, tiktok about things ad nauseum, perhaps imagining this is some form of action. And on some level it is. It's a rallying cry to our fellow humans to “look over here”, to first see what-is, often followed by a "call-to-action" to buy something (thus the Bill Hicks link).
Ajna translates to mean Perception. Operating from a balanced Ajna Chakra/Strong Eye Centre arises from not only the under-girded alignment of the chakras below, but also the unification inherent in Sahasrara, the crown chakra above.
We are all one. Separation is an illusion and even a gross and dangerous delusion.
So back to the start. You can't see what you can't see, and therefore don't know.
Until you can.
I find it mind-boggling how scientists have worked out the extent of the universe we don’t know. Don’t we need to know, on some level, what we don’t know in order to measure it’s extent?!? Perhaps the gap lies in belief and trust. Many moderns equate knowing with scientific proof while many spiritual folk equate knowing with simultaneously allying perception (so-called Dark Energy) with embodiment (so-called Dark Matter).
When we're inquiring into the meaning of a new celestial body on the astrological front, we look at the discovery events. What happened when Sedna was "discovered" in 2003? The base for AI, the neural networks, were discovered. This is all the news these days so I'm going to focus on another, in my perception, equally important discovery event for Sedna.
In Chapter 4 of Alan Clay’s book on Sedna, he writes:
“However the big bazooka that came with Sedna’s discovery was the proof that roughly 68% of the universe is something called Dark Energy and 27% is something called Dark Matter. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter, everything you can touch and feel and see - adds up to 5% of the universe.
That’s right, Dark Matter and Dark Energy are all around us; we’re swimming in it, but just like fish can’t see the water, we can’t see most of reality. And isn’t that very similar to the spiritual teachings that tell us that we only perceive a very little of what is actually happening, that we are lost in Maya?
The arrival of Sedna with its huge elliptical orbit is stretching our consciousness to include a new paradigm of reality that is 95% larger than our current view. This is inevitably a higher level of consciousness, so the discovery presages an historic evolutionary change in perception.”
I wrote “so-called” Dark Energy and Matter above because what we name things clearly indicates our perceptions of them. And while “dark” indicates that we are in the dark about these still unknown realms, darkness, blackness, and shadow are also his-storically associated with evil, badness, wrongness and all the things we ought to fear. This unconscious coupling has led to nearly all the genocides you can name.
Each chakra has an element associated with it and as we ascend the ladder from the base to the crown, the elements become more and more subtle. Base chakra Muladhara is Earth, then water, fire, air, space, light and thought. The element of perception for our Strong Eye between the brows is Light.
Rowers are early-risers and in mid-winter on the Brisbane River, that means we only see the sun on the horizon as we’re finishing. What I was struck by yesterday morning was a visual version of what I brought up in this post about alarms, noise pollution and our sensitivity (or lack of it) to sounds. There are so many lights.
Our trusty woman in bow was anxious as her ageing eyes were challenged by the dark and how to discern which lights are which, so she can yell up to me in the stern to adjust the rudder and steer us straight on a curvy waterway. And I don’t blame her in the least. There is so much light out there it’s actually harder to see in the dark. Lights on docks, bridges, moving and anchored boats, buoys, onshore cars and buildings. It’s dizzying.
I had this idea of rowing being a calm activity—out on the water at dawn, with the full moon and stars overhead and the blue phosphorescence in the water beneath…
Yet it seems we don’t trust our ability to see in the dark so we put lights on everything. We don’t feel safe without lights. Look at how painful the lights on new cars are. All these lights for our safety but what’s happening to our vision?
We don’t trust our inner light to guide us in the seeming dark.
In one of the last places I was staying, my host would come into the room I was in and flip the glaring overhead lights on and gleefully exclaim, “Let there be light!” and simultaneously be suspicious of me for seeming to be chopping veggies in the gloom. But I trust my eyes and I find most lights not only unnecessary, but offensive, and, beyond that, disruptive to natural circadian rhythms.
Culturally we seem to have substituted fury for sound and glare for illumination. We have co-opted our abilities to see, hear, and otherwise perceive the world we co-exist in, and ultimately co-create.
Brilliant, Mox. So well articulated. Much love ~ Nalini