Unknowing – The Essential Condition of Cardiagenesis

Plato called it anamnesis: unforgetting

Dear Friends,

In the hour before light bends over the horizon, scattering prism-like and golden, before dinner with candlelight that echoes the evening sun, before soon the waxing and waning light of the moon, there is this stretch of Earth that receives these two feet, daily the weight of me, and all the others, too, who—in the limen between work and rest, some with a canine friend, some not, while others in their cars drive by on Kimberly, Evelyn, and Charlotte avenues toward home, perhaps to do the same—walk beneath the evening sky. And every day, there is a freshness.

Yesterday, it was a black bear bumbling down a tree, urging in me a direction change, then another, as the bear and I unwittingly went wandering the same way. The day before, it was a stretch of hydrangea blossoms withering on the bush, the withering a ripening, pink into bruised blue. It was the Milky Way of spider webs hovering over the flat juts of junipers, draping a wall of cobbled stone. One or countless spiders had spun a universe in the dark of night, not one web like any other, ever. Before last week’s rain, it was the plump, white grub worms inching en masse in the cracks of concrete, and me, wondering if their parade out of the fragrant corpus of this earth was some sort of signal, a language all their own, I might seek to understand and abide in, mute, as a storm howled hours away at sea.

Daily, this short stretch asks of me to walk intentionally unknowing what is ostensibly the same: the way, the walk, the houses and cars and people and sky, and this body that, given gravity and its stranger attractor, age, has begun to ache. I have been reflecting on unknowing as we, in the Awakening to the Heart course, have come to this essential condition of our work together: entering unknowing to let loose the grip on the faith in knowing as an act of the intellect alone so that we might meet with heartful presence the purity of a moment, a thing, an Other, unfolding infinite mystery. Unknowing, I believe, is the ground of cardiagenesis—the birthing of the human heart in and as the heart of God (by whatever name you choose to give the Absolute. I can no longer not say God, for to bear a personal name is to bear a Heart that unfolds as Love.)

What follows are passages on unknowing, some of which I have written here before; others from my journal, and elsewhere. If there is no hyperlink or footnote, it means I have plucked the passage from my journal.

If just one passage stirs you, may it live in contemplation for days to come.

As always, thank you for meeting me on this page on Sundays, for your steadfast weekly presence that humbles me. And to you who are paid subscribers in this especially uncertain year, 2025, please accept my deepest gratitude. This work—not only these letters and essays, but the courses, retreats, and Gatherings in Silence, and the one-on-one inner-life work in the spirit of Anam Cara—is donation-supported. In this time of financial uncertainty and an age of subscription burnout, know that every contribution matters. If you have the means to make a one-time donation, please consider doing so, with my sincerest gratitude for your financial support that keeps this work alive and unfolding, and makes it accessible to anyone who wishes to participate, regardless of financial means. (Donation link below.)

Ever in gratitude and with love,

Renée

light bursting through dawn before green spills from leaves

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Unknowing – The Essential Condition of Cardiagenesis

The way of unknowing is divine ignorance—ignorance meaning, away from knowing. It is an invitation to rest in the presence of mystery and the immediacy of destiny forthcoming.

With unknowing, we recognize our accumulated knowledge and willingly let it go; willingly step outside the winds of the mind; dwell not in the taken-for-granted but abide in the desire to be awakened to life by life itself.

St. Teresa of Avila wrote this: So the restless little moth of memory has its wings burned, and it can flutter no more. The will must be fully occupied in loving, but does not understand how it loves. If it understands, it does not understand how it understands.¹

. . .

To practice this wayless way is to suspend all we believe we know of a moment, an encounter, an Other; empty ourselves of preconceptions and judgments, prejudices and beliefs, values and preferences; and come (w)holy present to meet What/Who is in our midst. [It is to] let come all the inner feeling such meeting enlivens. This meeting is humbled and (w)holy I–Thou communion.²

We become waking expressions of the universe unfolding.

. . .

Like a poet circumambulating “what a poem knows”³—already, before words, but which, wholly slippery, is beyond words—unknowing lets come what is waiting latent in the field of all possibility: a living mystery, wisdom, another way of being.⁴

Heidegger, who was quite influenced by Meister Eckhart, referred to unknowing as a releasement toward things and an openness to mystery. For Heidegger, galassenheit grants us the possibility of being in the world in a profoundly different way.⁵

Unknowing is an appeal. It is a way of potentiality becoming unimpeded expressive actuality through a body–heart open to what is latent in the perceptual field. It is intimacy with.

We cannot be intimate with if we cannot let go and let come, for to be intimate is to incline toward and let what is actual be, born in our presence of heart.

In pouring ourselves over to intimacy with, what comes toward us is free to disclose Its purity, actively surrendering to Its unfolding.

So precious and tender is our presence with being in its purity.

. . .

To unknow, I let my awareness rest on the heart, let my presence move through the heart. I meet this moment with naked intent, waiting. I must be open, spacious. I must be vulnerable.

In heartful presence, I become intimate with. I am receptive to what comes pouring into the moment, what it stirs in me, perceptually; putting aside ideas, beliefs, desires, expectations, fantasies; neither resisting nor clinging to what comes.

This is how life unfolds and evolves: feeling through the dark inner within of unknowing as a communion process.

. . .

Plato called it anamnesis: unforgetting, recognizing that with the coming into being of the discursive faculties of thought, i.e., the rational mind, an indescribable essence of human being was forgotten. But what is forgotten can be unforgotten.

When we unknow, we unforget what we are. When we unforget what we are, we recall the inner feeling of the lives of today and tomorrow who have bodies like we do. Lives you and I may never meet in the flesh, but of our meeting the purity of being now, we call forth the possibility of.

To unknow, then, is to unforget that we are living flecks of originary stars—primordial being of the Earth that bodies us, the Earth a body borne of the Cosmos, the Cosmos infinite radiance of an indescribable mystery.

To unknow is to say yes to our role in a 14.5 billion+ year cardiagenesis as a pulsing radiance of cosmogenesis—the infinite unfolding of the universe itself from the great flaring forth.

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Gatherings in Silence

The 1st & 3rd Sunday of every month.

NEXT GATHERING: Sunday, October 19, 12–12:30 pm ET

These gatherings are an online sanctuary from the noise of the world and a homecoming to presence.

All are welcome.

If you would like to join and have questions, please email me: reneeeliphd[AT]gmail[DOT]com.

To keep the sanctuary an intimate experience, ‘seats’ are limited. Please email me for the Zoom link.

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Inner-Life Work in the Spirit of Anam Cara

Notes & References

1. in Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, trans. Robert Powell (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2002) pp. 318–319, cf. St. Teresa of Avila. The Life of St. Teresa, trans. J. M. Cohen, London, 1957, pp. 126–127.

2. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Scribner Classics, 1958).

3. Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 117.

4. Renée Eli, “Entering Unknowing amidst the Intertidal,” unpublished manuscript, November 2019.

5. Influenced by Meister Eckhart, Martin Heidegger writes of gallasenheit in Discourse on Thinking (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).