Letting Go

As we all know, the idea that the process of knowing is limited is not in the least bit new. Human beings, a knowing species, has knowingly intuited this since the faculty of knowing first arose.

As far back as we can see, humans have employed various techniques for filling-out and tempering their knowing though the systematic use of ritualistic practices. These practices share one thing in common. They all try to drive the conscious knower toward a non-causal, non-temporal, non-knowing state of awareness. Meditation, chanting, wandering (e.g. walkabout), drumming, casting the coins of the IChing, contemplating the paradox of a Zen Koan, prayer, and singing in church, are all examples of techniques for coming closer to what is called in Zen, the Satori produced by “letting go”. In a sense, all are randomizing techniques that help us to listen for, and hear, the voice of the process.

So I think that the paradox of being human is that the faculty of knowing, which is so crucial to our survival, cannot become profound (e.g. SoPK) when knowing is divorced from the awareness that can only be realized by “letting go”. And “letting go” can can only be achieved in practice — in “doing” and in “acting” (pDsA).

We can say then, that the wonderful and very useful faculty of knowing is in itself, limited, and that the challenge we knowers face is to develop techniques by which we can “know” in better, more useful ways.

The history of humankind can actually be written in terms of the transformations that have occurred in our techniques of knowing. Kuhn called these “paradigmatic” transformations. Shewhart and Deming, among other contemporaneous thinkers, were working towards just such a transformation, in which ubiquitous variation in systematically observed events can be differentiated from events that can be, from an economic standpoint, addressed in terms of assignable causes. Their methodology addresses the limits of knowing directly by, given our aims, providing signaling thresholds by which we can make best guesses between that which can be causally reduced, from an economic standpoint, and that which, all things being equal, must be “let go” —at least until we turn the PDSA wheel around again in a new time and new context.

So what should we make of our “let go” awareness? What is really “out there”? Clearly, we cannot know, but it seems that we can feel it and when we let go, that feeling is something that we share in “common” with other knowers on some empathic level. I do not believe that it is helpful to “assign” qualities of temporal causality to the feeling-awareness we experience in letting go, lest we fall into the trap of “knowing” something that is inherently unknowable.