The three words that will almost certainly change your life - Part 1.

A multidimensional (and revolutionary) approach to true freedom, clarity, and creative awakening.

*Audio version above

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Part 1: The Path of Knowing — How understanding serves, and then limits, our growth.

There are at least two fundamental ways of approaching life.

Both are necessary, but not equally important.

I’ll refer to them here as the path of knowing and the path of unknowing.

The push for certainty

The desire to understand, prove, and predict runs deep in the Western psyche.

We want to know — because knowing feels safe. When we can label and define, we imagine we can also control and shape the outcome of our lives.

During my years leading spiritual communities, I encountered this longing for certainty from at least two directions.

At times, I felt a subtle expectation within myself that I should have answers for the people I served — about God, the world, purpose, suffering, and the meaning of it all. And I also experienced this longing as a kind of hunger in others: the need for a framework that could make sense of their often chaotic or unresolved experiences.

This impulse for understanding and certainty also drives our wider culture.

We chase evidence, systems, and strategies to feel secure. Think of the endless titles that promise “Five steps to this” or “Ten steps to that.”

But often, it’s not genuine understanding we’re after. We just want to understand enough to reinforce whatever certainty gives us comfort.

We see this everywhere. Someone whose identity and security are linked to a certain ideology will often only seek the knowledge that reinforces that position — and resist anything that threatens it. This is what fuels the polarisation and black-and-white thinking that dominate so much of our world today, and are so incredibly divisive and destructive.

Our push for understanding and certainty has, of course, led to enormous advances in science, psychology, and technology — enriching our societies in countless ways. And yet, there’s little evidence that all this knowing has made us more content or whole.

Despite unprecedented access to information: anxiety and alienation persist.

Understanding alone hasn’t delivered the inner peace we crave.

The limits of the known

Part of our challenge is that we’ve come to favour only one part of our intelligence — the discursive faculty that usually depends on what can be seen, explained, and measured.

We trust what we can prove. We rely on the ideas, perspectives, and judgments we’ve accumulated over time and filtered through our value system and reason.

Spiritual and psychological traditions alike remind us, we are multidimensional beings. We have instinctive, emotional, and mental intelligences — the wisdom of the body, the sensitivity of the heart, and the clarity of the mind. Each offers a distinct way of knowing, yet in the early stages of our development, all three tend to operate within the ego’s need for control, belonging, or security. As long as these three centres of intelligence serve the ego, they keep us inside the limits of our conditioned understanding.

That being said, this conscious, rational intelligence — in all its forms — is vital, especially in the first half of life. Our ego needs the familiar to build stability and identity. As Maslow described, these early stages of development — establishing safety, belonging, achievement — are necessary foundations.

But what nourishes us early on eventually becomes too small for who we are becoming. Our “knowing” can only take us so far.

Over time, we construct an entire worldview — a little universe of beliefs, assumptions, and self-concepts that helps us navigate reality. Within that universe, everything seems to make sense, as long as life behaves according to our expectations.

The problem is that life rarely does.

Our egoic dimension doesn’t really know what to do with the people, situations, or value systems that don’t fit within our worldview. It doesn’t know what to do with the deeper desires and unrealised potential that live inside us — the impulses toward freedom, love, and creativity that can’t be explained or controlled.

When we trust too much in our limited version of reality, we inevitably shrink our lives.

We only become aware of — and allow into our orbit — the opportunities, relationships, and experiences that fit within our pre-approved sense of what’s possible, reasonable, or “deserved.”

Our worldview becomes a kind of spiritual echo chamber, where we only hear the frequencies that confirm who we already think we are.

But at some point, life begins to exceed the boundaries of what we can explain.
Or at least, it wants to — it needs to.

We reach for the tools that once gave us confidence — our intellect, our theology, our achievements, our routines — and they suddenly don’t work. The answers we relied on start to feel hollow.

Or we may find ourselves increasingly triggered by the people and situations that fall outside what’s acceptable in our little universe. Our inner tension rises. We fight and resist more.

This growing tension — the sense that our old map no longer fits the terrain — is not a failure of faith or intellect. It’s a sign of our evolution — our ongoing process of becoming.

The invitation is to stop resisting the reality that no longer fits our universe, and gently yield to it. That surrender is the key to the threshold that awaits you.

When knowing stops working

This threshold is what we often call midlife, though it can happen at almost any age.

It’s the moment when the inner scaffolding begins to shake — when the very knowledge that once gave us identity and direction starts to crumble.

Believe me, I know from experience that this can feel deeply unsettling. It can surface a well of grief we didn’t even know we carried. For a time, it can leave us confused, fatigued, and disoriented.

But something essential is happening beneath the surface: the self we constructed through ‘knowing’ and self-will is beginning to break open. And this collapse isn’t a failure — it’s the beginning of an initiation.

At this point of our development, the very strategies that once kept us stable are no longer large enough to hold what’s emerging.

The world of the known has become too small for the soul that’s waking within it.

We are being invited to access a mind larger than our own.

In depth psychology, this marks the movement from ego consciousness to soul consciousness.

In spiritual language, it’s the beginning of surrender — loosening our grip on the worldview we’ve clung to so tightly so that a greater intelligence and life can live through us.

Accessing this dimension of soul isn’t about finding a particular ‘place’ within us, but about entering a different mode of being — one that opens to and receives an intelligence that moves through us, even as it comes from beyond us.

Unless we graduate from the familiar world of our knowing, it becomes the very obstacle to our flourishing and aliveness.

The threshold

If you find yourself disoriented, perhaps unsure who you are or what you believe, you may be closer to freedom than you think.

When the old knowing begins to fail, a deeper intelligence is trying to reach you.

It’s asking you to release your grasp on certainty, to make room for something vaster and more mysterious.

It’s not the end of knowing — it’s the beginning of wisdom.

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Click here for Part 2 — The Way of Unknowing and the three words that will almost certainly change your life.

In the meantime, i’d love to hear any thoughts this reflection may have stirred in you - you can comment below.

— Dan.

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