The Mystery of Steps to Knowledge

I’ve been involved with Steps to Knowledge for a long time—about 32 years. And I don’t do Steps all the time, but I’m currently doing Steps again, Steps Continuation Training. So I’m seeing here that how much there really is to be discovered in going through these Steps. 

So I’d like to begin by just saying that the mystery of Steps is simple; the Steps are simple, plain and deep. They’re simple, plain and deep. That makes it very translatable, by the way. There’s not a lot of esoteric words used here or highly intellectual words or broad and vague descriptions. Things are pretty plain, simple and deep. And by deep, I mean you may not really understand what’s being said, but somehow you can read it and have some notion of it. 

So this is really, in time, to make the wisdom of Steps, which is beyond its words, more accessible to us, and also to teach us the importance of becoming more like Knowledge ourselves: simple, deep, maybe even plain, but maybe not. 

So the journey in Steps to Knowledge, I feel, is occurring at three different levels which overlap with each other. And I say this fully acknowledging that Steps may work in many other levels that I’m not even aware of, because we can’t fully fathom the mystery. That’s why when you intellectualize the mystery, you’re losing the mystery. So. 

So the first is, the purpose of Steps, is to refocus your thinking, your ideas, your worldly mind. Steps does not build up your intellect or build up an identity around your intellect. Doesn’t make you intellectually more grand, more expansive, more articulate, more elegant, more impressive because it’s here to make you more simple, more deep. 

So Steps does not build up your intellect, yet it challenges your intellect, often very dramatically, while at the same time it stimulates the experience of Knowledge within you. Because the truth is, we’re all overdone with our intellect, which is the smaller part of us, much smaller. And we don’t know much about the deeper and greater part of us, which is what Steps to Knowledge is here to engage us with and to prepare us for.

Steps prepares us to recognize and follow the expressions of Knowledge within ourselves. These expressions can come in many different ways: thoughts, images, emotions, feelings; may come through insight, may come through activity, may come through being motionless or happening when you’re in motion. Many different ways. 

Yet Knowledge cannot emerge in a mind that is not conducive to its expression. So if you’re armored against anything like this happening, or you have strong doubts or fears of anything happening from the inside—because you don’t really know what’s on the inside; big mystery on the inside—then Knowledge really cannot emerge because you’re not really open to its expressions. 

The personality can only know itself superficially. So if all you know of yourself is your personality, you can only know yourself superficially. So to say, “I know myself”, and to use that casually is pretty superficial. Okay, you know your behaviors and your tendencies, your likes and all this stuff. We’re talking about something much bigger here, people. So the idea of knowing yourself here has to be kept very relative to where you are in this journey that you’re taking towards the source and center of your life. 

So here Knowledge, Steps to Knowledge, through the words that it uses, the language that it uses, the image that it portrays, is teaching your mind to think in alignment with Knowledge. Your personal mind will never be Knowledge. But it can be a servant of Knowledge and a vehicle of expression for Knowledge, which is its ultimate purpose and greatest value. 

But these two aspects of yourself have to be in a certain degree of resonance and alignment. If your personality is way over here and Knowledge is way over here, well, it’s going to be quite a journey to find your meeting point—your rendezvous—together. It takes time to do that. 

That’s why there’s Steps to Knowledge, and that’s why there are many Steps. And that’s why we do them over and over again as well, to give us the time to build this primary and primal connection. So this leads you to finally become integrated with yourself—the marriage of two minds: the mind you think with, and the deeper mind of Knowledge within you. 

The next thing that Steps to Knowledge emphasizes, is to teach you how to manage your personal mind, your worldly mind. If you don’t manage your mind, it’s going to manage you, which it usually does, sometimes very unconsciously. Your mind and your body are meant to be vehicles of Knowledge in the world; they are not who you are. That’s a big jump for many people to accept that. “My body is me, my mind is me, my thoughts are me, my beliefs are me; it’s who I am, it’s how I am.” Yeah, for a few years on planet Earth. Okay. That’s not who you are. 

Steps to Knowledge is about who you are, not as an idea or a belief or a definition, but as a living life force within you. Knowledge is a river of intention within you. It’s all about movement, seeking to move through you, to move your life to where it really needs to go. And it all seems very strange and foreign and who is that and what is that and I don’t know that. But this is all the orientation process that you’re involved in. 

So the mind makes a very magnificent servant, vehicle for Knowledge, but it makes a very poor guide, and certainly a very poor God. 

So Steps teaches us how to constructively and compassionately use our minds, not like a tyrant, not like a fool, to begin to direct the mind and to manage the mind and just become aware of where the mind is. Later in my training I was given this practice of always knowing where your mind is going. Well, I thought, “Well, that’s not too hard.” Pretty hard. And I didn’t think about it for a few more days. I thought about it again, “Oh yes, where’s my mind going? I have no idea where it’s been. Where is it going? Why is it going there? What’s influencing it? Am I just operating like a machine on automatic, going through the motions of life? I don’t even know where I am or what I’m doing or what I’m thinking.” Huge gap here to be filled. 

So to learn how, to learn to become aware of—start with the awareness of—where your mind is going, you can’t manage it if you don’t know where it’s going or what it’s doing. So even that becomes a long-term process of reorientation to your inner life, which Steps to Knowledge is partially about. 

The third thing it teaches you is how to engage with and recognize the deeper nature of Knowledge within you. This is not something you can identify through definitions or ideology. We have simple ways of talking about it, which is fine. The mind needs something to work with, of course. But we’re dealing with something that is deep, the deep well within us. And very few people have been into that deep well. Most people are afraid to go there, this deep, dark “I don’t know what’s down there.” Or they think it’s evil, or they think it’s full of all of their sins and suffering and regrets and the devil. “I don’t want to go down there. Stay up on the surface where I know where things are and I think I know what I am doing, even though I don’t know what I’m doing.” 

So Steps calls upon and incites Knowledge within us. It’s like stimulating. And when we begin to think and align with Knowledge, then the portal to Knowledge begins to gradually open and your perhaps little experiences of Knowledge begin to emerge. 

One of the ways you know if Knowledge is emerging within you is to keep your study journal because at any moment you may think you’re going nowhere and you made no progress. In fact, I hear people say that with great concern. You read your journal from six months ago, you’ll see that you’re somewhere else. It’ll prove it to you. It’s your words. It’s you. But day to day, moment to moment we can’t tell if we’re making progress or not. It’s not possible. 

And the other thing about Steps to Knowledge that I realized several years ago, with Steps to Knowledge, it’s interesting because it’s doing two things at once. It’s—and I hope I can express this in words in the way I want to— ultimately you want the center of your authority to go from your personal mind, which is largely the product of culture and family and your past experience, into the center of Knowledge within yourself. . It’s deflating your sense of false security and false importance and all the things that you think make you special or unique or give you some kind of stature in the world. It’s kind of slowly deflating that while it’s building something else in you. 

Like one Step will say, you know, “I do not know what I want.” Wow, don’t even know what you want? Then it will say several Steps later, “You’re here for a greater purpose.” One is acknowledging the real state of ignorance that you’ve been living in. The other is building up the well of certainty within you. See that? It does it very subtly. It doesn’t slap your face. It doesn’t shout at you. It just gradually begins this shifting process. 

Because ultimately you want the center of your authority to go from your personal mind, which is largely the product of culture and family and your past experience, into the center of Knowledge within yourself. That’s a huge transition. You still look the same. You’re still called by the same name. I’m not going to give you some special spiritual name. I wouldn’t do that. But that is like going full circle within yourself. 

So the Steps are like little increments on the clock that are moving you through that great transition within yourself. 

Steps to Knowledge builds self-awareness but not self-preoccupation—builds self-awareness, but not self-preoccupation. In fact, it’s here to break the habit of self-preoccupation, which is a fixation on yourself, your feelings, what you want, what you think everything is, your ideas, how people view you. It’s trying to break that cycle but in a very gentle way. 

Steps to Knowledge also in its own gradual way teaches you the difference between real experience and everything else that’s unimportant—what really matters versus the artifact of your life. Artifact means meaningless stuff. It’s like what’s the signal and what’s the noise? Within yourself, can you hear a real signal from within yourself or do you just hear noise? What matters? What doesn’t matter?

We give great meaning to things that don’t matter and very little awareness or attention to those things that do matter. So as a result, we feel like we don’t matter because we identify with things that don’t matter. And when we see how shallow and false they are, we begin to see how shallow and false we are in alignment with them. 

So clearly, what you align yourself with in life makes a big difference on how you’re going to experience your life. 

So Steps teaches you by engaging with your life, but in a new kind of way—your life and your environment in a new kind of way. It doesn’t give you all the teaching in words. Do this. Don’t do that. I mean, there’s some of that through the course of the entire New Message, of course, but it’s not just giving you a script. It’s creating a shift that’s both conscious on your part—you do your part, you become a student of Knowledge, you try to engage in these practices and apply them in your life; it does the bigger part, which is the activation of Knowledge within you, which is shifting the poles, the polar center of your life off the shallow foundation of your personality into the depth of who you really are, which is Knowledge within you. 

Steps also wants you to use your past beneficially because your past holds the key to how you’ve experienced Knowledge before, how it seems to manifest within you or express itself within you. And it also teaches you about your mistakes because I know we hate looking at our mistakes, but the truth is our mistakes are the well of wisdom within us. More wisdom will be gained from your errors than ever from your successes. More real decisions to change your thinking or behavior will largely come out of making mistakes, sometimes even painful ones. So mistakes are important. You do not want to repeat them. It’s okay you made them, you just do not want to repeat them. To not repeat them, you have to be able to evaluate them objectively and learn what wisdom they taught you that you can use and that would be beneficial to you to help you engage with others in life more successfully. 

So I say mistakes is the bedrock of wisdom. People who are very wise have utilized their mistakes to the fullest, not to pretend they don’t exist or to use them to blame other people or to play the victim card, which is really pathetic, but to say, “What must I learn from this so I will never do it again so it can help me be more present and more wise in my engagement with life and others?” 

So here Steps in its own way, without slapping you in the face, without shouting at you, is making you more like itself. Because even though your personal mind is not going to become Knowledge, if it can resonate with Knowledge and become a vehicle for Knowledge, then you have really begun to integrate within yourself without becoming self-obsessive. Because the more you’re engaged with Knowledge, the more it’s moving you beyond your self-preoccupation. Because you’re in the world not to work out your problems. You’re in the world to find your way, follow your way and do here what you came here to do. 

You know, being on planet Earth is not a therapy center; it’s not a hospital. You have to do some real work, some real therapy on yourself or with the help of others. But that is not what you’re here to do fundamentally. 

So self-preoccupation is a real problem, and I see it a lot. I see people only thinking about themselves, talking about themselves, obsessed with their little problems; not really doing very much to move off that plate, off that position. So movement is very important. 

Knowledge is here to move your life. It’s not here to validate where you are and who you think you are and what you want. It’s here to move your life. It’s big on action, small on talk. Moving your life may not be actually physically moving; for many people in the world that’s just not possible. But it’s a real shift in movement within you and how you experience yourself and others and how you engage with others, how you express yourself and what you express within yourself. 

So when you become more like Knowledge, you become more wise, more simple, less complex and more deep. So you have a capacity for experiencing love, relationship, recognition, compassion, forgiveness, empathy, concern, suffering. Suffering. You know the channel that suffering exists in is the channel that Knowledge will express itself through. So to understand your suffering is pretty important because it will show you where your life is amiss and what you may need to do to fix that suffering. 

When you build this capacity for Knowledge, you become really free of the mental illness that affects everyone living in Separation. I find it useful to consider everyone as mentally ill. Then you can be compassionate with them. Of course, they’re mentally ill, they don’t know what they’re doing. They have nothing to guide them that’s real. They’re going on whatever looks good or wherever they think someone told them to do or think they should do. What could be more chaotic than that? It’s like you’re a ship at sea without a rudder, without a compass, without a map, just following the next ship in front of you. So to be free from mental illness is coming back to terms with your life, who you are, and laying the foundation for what comes next. 

So the first part of studenthood—and I think I mentioned this last evening—is really about coming to terms with where you are now, how you got there, the wisdom and the change and the mistakes and the journey you’ve taken. Because I feel it’s very important if you’re going to know where you really are in the moment is to know where you’ve been. You’ve got to know your own history. And it’s got to be known objectively, not just, you know, “I just don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to look at it. I don’t want to go there again.” 

To know where you are, you have to know where you’ve been. Otherwise, how do you know the trajectory of your life? Living for the moment alone is like, okay if you want to be a flea, I guess you can do that. But you’re not a flea. 

So a study of your past is really helpful. It doesn’t have to dominate your life, but it is part of coming to terms with where you are and how you formed and what shaped you. The mistakes of others have shaped you. Your mistakes have shaped you. The world around you has shaped you. Of course, you don’t know who you are because you’re a product of all those things, largely. And yet there’s something in you that yearns to bring…that knows that is really not who you are. 

So the Fire of Knowledge is burning within you, a candle that cannot be extinguished. And that is what has brought you here. So if you say, “Well, I don’t really know what this Knowledge thing is he’s talking about”, I say  Knowledge brought you here. And if you look back, you can begin to see, “Well gee, maybe Knowledge got me out of that situation or that relationship, or maybe Knowledge kind of convinced me not to do that thing I was thinking of doing.” See what I’m saying? 

The evidence of Knowledge in your life is embedded in your experience and in the decisions you’ve made—either good decisions or bad decisions—and what happened as a result. So in this sense, Knowledge has to prove itself to you through your experience. So you can have a grand ideology about Knowledge and the New Message, but you’re still standing at the bottom of the mountain, taking notes. I want to get you up on this mountain. I want you to take this journey. 

This is a refinement process. It’s a process of releasing things. In fact, in the pursuit of intellectual brilliance, every day something is added. In the pursuit of Knowledge, every day something is released. 

So I’d like to end with this slide which I think is very compelling. Good. This is from Wisdom Volume 1, chapter [19] on Fulfillment:

When you are experiencing Knowledge, you are not aware of yourself, but you are profoundly aware of things around you.”

Now that’s mysterious. You can think you understand it, but it’s mysterious. 

So the emphasis is not on getting to know yourself better for the rest of your life. I mean, the self you’re getting to know is like a temporary thing. Your opportunity of being in the world is not about getting to know yourself personally. That would be a wasted life.

When you are experiencing Knowledge, you are not aware of yourself, but you are profoundly aware of things around you.” 

There’s a beautiful quote from the Tao Te Ching I’ve always really thought about says, “Life is like a man crossing a winter stream.” Life is like a man crossing the winter stream. If you’ve ever crossed a winter stream, you know you sure don’t want to fall in. 

Thank you all. May the blessing be with you. Stay with the journey. It’s working. If you work for it, it will work for you.