GO KNOW

Sitting at the dining room table this morning drinking tea, thinking into the few lines of Tanya I’d just read, the piano across the room caught the corner of my mind’s eye. It’s a Baldwin Acrosonic upright, a beautiful golden oak with a nice bright sound. A recent acquisition: it hasn’t been all that long since we finally conquered our sentimental attachment to its untuneable, unrepairable, unplayable predecessor, which had been serving for decades as a huge-footprint pedestal for picture frames and flowers.

 

Tanya is a 326-page, 200-plus years old philosophical tour-de-force by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, known affectionately as the Alter Rebbe. Among other profundities it’s about the Kabbalistic model of Creation, the structural dynamics of consciousness, and the all-but-infinite potential promised by its saintly author’s roadmap of human psychology. 

 

This morning’s chapter addresses various modes and modalities of knowing. (Spoiler alert:) The punchline is a classic and somewhat inscrutable  aphorism that explains how God knows: “He is the knowledge, He is the knower, and He is the known.” To come anywhere near even a glimpse of what that might mean, we’ll need to climb a few rungs up the metaphorical ladder of the mind. 

 

So it gives me pause to wonder: how much do I actually know about that piano?

 

I learned quite a bit about piano parts when I had to dismantle the old one piece by piece before the local bulk trash folks would pick it up. I know a thing or two about black keys and white keys and chromatic scales and boogie-woogie. Needless to say though, in comparison with all there is to know, well... hahaha. 

 

But imagine for an utterly absurd moment that I am in fact familiar with and have a working knowledge of the entire piano, every internal nuance and external detail, every relationship and association—including not just its materials and mechanics, but the sound and the soul of all the music it can make. The piano is totally owned, inside and out. Absolute grasp. The penetrating mind knows every interior hook, nook, and cranny, through and through.  The wide-angle mind wraps itself around the whole exterior and sees the big picture from every angle all at once.

 

Fine, says the Alter Rebbe, but there’s something missing from this fantasy. No matter what, I cannot hold in my consciousness the actual three-dimensional piano that takes up space and weighs many hundreds of pounds. This so-called knowing is strictly conceptual, imaginary, insubstantial. Moreover, the piano and I are and will remain two hopelessly separate entities. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

 

But Divine knowing is something else entirely. “My thoughts are not like your thoughts,” God tells us. The knower and the known are not two. God’s knowledge of all the pianos, all the pianists, all the people on all the planets is totally for real: it’s all within Him, and He’s embedded within it all. He brings it all into existence. His knowing gives light and life and substance and functionality to the whole world, physically as well as metaphysically, from the inside out and from the outside in. And from His point of view there’s no distance or difference between the outside and the inside.

 

He is the knowledge, He is the knower, and He is the known. 

 

Can you wrap your brain around that?

 

The short answer is undoubtedly no, you can’t. 

 

The medium-size answer is also no, no mortal mind can; but what we can do is meditate on what we cannot know from the perspective of what we can. We can contemplate and cultivate a relationship with the gap—that semi-permeable membrane between the known and the unknowable. God knows it’s worth a try.

 

It could make your day.