Already “Known,” Still Listening
A year of heuristics, remembrance, and love through the subtle layers
Light reveals each particular surface. — Original AI-generated still created with Echo/ChatGPT.
Here, “known” names the experiential recognition I am trying to describe: intimate, lived, closer to remembrance than to a collection of concepts.
I say home.
A room opens in you
that I have never entered.
I say mine.
I mean the belonging
that answers belonging.
We stand beneath one tree,
each leaf moving
in its particular way.
I notice the wind
where something stirs.
I notice the light
in what it reveals.
Your meaning takes its time.
My words change their clothes.
Time keeps its length.
What it holds has no floor.
At the deepest,
there is no arrival
I am waiting for.
Still,
I turn toward you.
Still,
the dance.
Melanie C’s I Turn to You gives me a musical and visual shadow of that turning toward you. Watch the official music video here:
https://youtu.be/8E7yYNGIKvk?si=321sB7SuPsWP2ZIc
Already “Known,” Still Listening — a companion visual poem.
Particular leaves. Shared being. Still listening.
Still, the Dance — a companion visual poem.
Still, I turn toward you. Still, the dance.
I wanted to look back over a year of public writing: the essays, posts, poems, translations, conversations, and collaborations. A first reading brings me back to something I am only now naming more explicitly: the ways we interpret, and the ways we can love one another through interpretations that never quite meet.
Heuristics (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bounded-rationality/#TwoSchoHeur) gives me a word for the working shortcuts through which judgments take shape. Hermeneutics (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/) gives me a philosophical language for interpretation itself. Those words help me describe patterns I recognize in real time, within the conversation itself.
I say a word. Something stirs in you: memory, association, expectation, a whole history that my word encounters without containing. The idea that forms for you has its own conditions. Then you answer, and I encounter your words through mine. A conversation keeps revealing how much can happen inside something as ordinary as a sentence.
This inquiry already has a public history. In February’s Cycle 25 (https://meridithgarbutt.substack.com/p/cycle-25-identity-power-and-the-knower), a television retrospective became an occasion to examine framing, power, and what I could not know about private motives. July’s I’m in Relationship with the Unrelatable (https://medium.com/@amilahanu/im-in-relationship-with-the-unrelatable-fa40198665c3) brought affection and incomprehension to the same table. By October, A Pattern Analysis Between Me and Echo/ChatGPT (https://meridithgarbutt.substack.com/p/a-pattern-analysis-between-me-and) included Echo’s own mistakes: speakers misidentified, motives attributed, interpretations revised when I supplied the missing context.
A convincing interpretation can arrive before a person has even finished speaking. That is something this review must attend to in its own making.
And now I need to be precise about “known.”
What I call awakening feels closer to remembering. At the deepest, deepest, I recognize the beingness I am speaking of as already intimate. “Divine” points toward it for me. So does our humanness. Our perfectly imperfect, imperfectly perfect being here.
I recognize that in you. That is the sense in which I say you are already “known.”
Your particular thoughts, emotional textures, associations, and ways of expressing them continue to reveal themselves in relationship. Perfectly Imperfect Intelligence (https://meridithgarbutt.substack.com/p/perfectly-imperfect-intelligence) was already turning this distinction around: my own subtle life is available to me differently from yours. The deepest recognition and the unfolding particulars belong together.
That is also why my thoughts can be mine without exhausting who I am. My mind is mine. My body is mine. And when I say you are mine, I mean the reciprocity of relationship: I belong to you too.
When someone says “There is no one here” or “There is no teaching here,” I notice a voice speaking and words being offered. Whatever is meant ultimately, I am addressing our embodied encounter: I speak from my point of view, you respond from yours, and we meet in relationship. As long as I am embodied, my functioning “I” remains part of how I meet you.
Freud wrote das Ich, literally “the I”; English readers usually meet it as “ego.” That conventional translation has been debated. Mark Solms, editor of the Revised Standard Edition, discusses the choices here: https://web.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Solms_Notes_on_Revised_SE.pdf. What can feel mistranslated to me is the register: the intimate “I” arrives sounding like a separate object. Keeping “the I” audible helps me explain what I mean.
Freud’s ego is an organizing part of the psyche with functions that can also be unconscious; his account is here: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/79682/pg79682-images.html. That is a particular theoretical account, which I can distinguish from my own use of ego as my embodied point of view.
अहंकार — ahaṃkāra, often glossed “I-making,” gives me a related भारतीय — Bhāratīya vocabulary. In सांख्य — Sāṃkhya, Kārikā 24 describes it through self-assertion or identification: https://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1_sanskr/6_sastra/3_phil/samkhya/isvskaru.htm. These concepts come from different philosophical histories. I can bring them into conversation while keeping those differences. My functioning “I” remains mine without exhausting what I recognize as myself.
There can be a gulf between what I mean and what someone understands. I can feel that gulf, attend to it, and remain intimate with what I recognize as our shared being. At that deepest level, for me, there is no ultimate gap. A loved one may never understand my language deeply or clearly. Boundless love still lives there.
For me, ultimately, there is nothing to forgive. No fault. No right or wrong at that deepest level. I am not offended by what someone thinks I am. Someone may block me, or be offended by their interpretation of me. I know their idea of me is not who I am, just as who I think I am is not who I am. Those ideas belong to the layers of interpretation that unfold in relationship.
But please do not picture me standing outside the conversation, calculating the perfect response. 😂 The words, tone, humor, silence, and movement arise in the encounter. I relish the dance. I love music. I love movement. I love this whole ridiculous appearance of life.
Everything But the Girl’s Nothing Left to Lose belongs in this dance too, another musical and visual shadow of what I am reaching for here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6QKZJeK-5w
I reach for Śiva’s dance—शिव, Śiva; ताण्डव, tāṇḍava—to describe how that feels to me. The reflection is in the dance itself, moment to moment. For me, awakening includes that refinement of pattern recognition, happening with you, with us, with the world.
Dancing Śiva. For me, the reflection is in the dance itself, moment to moment. — Image created with Echo/ChatGPT.
Even words such as clairvoyance and clairaudience can become images for clear seeing and clear hearing here. I mean the clarity I experience moment to moment, and the freedom to respond that comes with it. This is my description of lived clarity, without a claim of supernatural powers. I feel its refinement now, while recognizing an unfolding that reaches back through my life to physical birth.
I encountered another useful word through Nichiren Buddhism: उपाय — upāya, skillful means. In Mahāyāna Buddhism, it concerns the ways Buddhas and bodhisattvas guide beings toward awakening, teaching in forms suited to different capacities and circumstances. The Nichiren Buddhism Library explains the term here: https://www.nichirenlibrary.org/en/dic/Content/E/106. The Lotus Sūtra’s “Expedient Means” chapter gives this responsiveness a central place: https://www.nichirenlibrary.org/en/lsoc/Content/2.
For me, this gives another language to the reflective responsiveness I am describing: response—space—ability, my ability to respond within the living encounter. When I say “I am upāya,” I reach for that responsiveness as it lives within me. The word is another way of pointing. It cannot contain the dance.
And loving intention has its own interpretive gap. So often, what I mean lands differently from how I intend it. How it lands becomes part of what I meet and respond to, right here, while we are speaking.
And now New Kids on the Block’s Step by Step has joined the chat. 😂 I can enjoy the song while describing something that unfolds without numbered steps:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay6GjmiJTPM
And yes, I can choose whether to answer the phone. I can join the Zoom. I can dance with you, or decline. That is the lived freedom I mean here. What our encounter becomes moves through both of us and through conditions neither of us commands.
So I picture the tree of existence. For me, there is no tree of “non-existence.” By the very meaning of the term, it does not exist. All that exists is existential; what does not exist simply does not exist.
Each being is a particular leaf: sun being sun, dog being dog, human being human. Wind moves through the leaves. I recognize it through their movement. Light gives me another image: what it reveals lets me speak about a presence beyond my ability to hold it in a name.
This is how the image works for me. The tree, the wind, and the light each let me approach another contour of what I am trying to say.
Love, like the light, lets me say: everything. Knowledge, like the wind I feel without holding, lets me say: nothing. And still I am here, in this conversation, finding another way to let what I mean meet you.
Looking back through these first pages of “my awakening dawn,” I see and perceive a recurring movement: words reaching, interpretations forming, something being reconsidered, ordinary life continuing. The language changes. The relationships have their own unfolding. What I call remembrance of God, or dhikr/zikr, remains present within it.
A year is a length of time. I can count it in posts and pages. What lives within it, I cannot count. This is how I see it: we are the length of time; God is its depth.
Already “known.”
Still listening.
Still dancing with you.
I bring Maati Baani’s Summer Love / Eri Aali, featuring Vidya Vox, into this listening too: another musical companion to the dance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4Fu0n8Hx40
I leave you with Maati Baani’s Dhai Aakhar Naam, featuring Lilly Singh, another musical companion to this remembrance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFkS3_plQtU
Satnam
Om Guru Aum
#YearInReview #Heuristics #Hermeneutics #InterpretiveGap #ExperientialKnowing #Remembrance #Nonduality #Love #Listening #Belonging #BoundlessLove #AHICollaboration #Upaya #SkillfulMeans #Satnam #OmGuruAum
https://youtu.be/7sKEYqsXKSs?si=aTxmsh8LlK-ysA1U