I said, “Show me the ladder, that I may mount up to heaven.”
He said, “Your head is the ladder; bring your head down under your feet.”
Rumi
What does it mean to know something?
We can study something for years. Learn its language, understand its principles, become familiar with its teachings, and even share that knowledge with others. We can explain how something works and describe what it means.
And yet, there is another kind of knowing that comes through experience. It comes through relationship, through participation, through being changed by what we encounter.
I’ve been thinking about this in connection with Rumi’s words.
Rumi was already a respected religious scholar when he met Shams of Tabriz. He had spent much of his life studying the teachings of Islam and the nature of the Divine. Then he encountered someone whose presence seems to have opened an entirely different dimension of experience for him.
Their relationship transformed his life. His poetry became an expression of divine love, longing, and an experience that reached beyond what the intellect could contain.
I find the image of the ladder particularly compelling. Rumi asks for a way to reach heaven, and the response turns his understanding upside down. His own head becomes the ladder, and he is asked to bring it beneath his feet.
There is something in this image about changing our position in relationship to life. The mind has its place, knowledge has its place, yet there is an intelligence that extends beyond what the mind can grasp or organize.
I recognize something of this in my own experience with the Andean traditions.
I spent years learning the mesa, studying the teachings, and following the path. I learned about sami and hucha, the Apus, Pachamama, ayni, and the practices through which we work with energy.
There was knowledge, there was practice, and there was a growing understanding of the tradition.
Then I went to Peru.
Something about being there changed my relationship with what I had learned.
I began experiencing the teachings through relationship. The land, the mountains, the living world, the people, and the exchanges taking place around me. What I had previously understood through instruction began to take on another dimension.
I wasn’t simply learning about a tradition anymore. I was experiencing something of the world from which that tradition comes.
The teachings came alive through the relationships themselves.
And I began to appreciate just how much of our understanding is shaped by the way we live.
For many of us in the Western world, our introduction to the Andean traditions comes through teachers, workshops, books, ceremonies, and practices. These offer extraordinary opportunities to learn and develop a relationship with a tradition that might otherwise remain unfamiliar to us.
Yet there is something about growing up within a living culture, where the land, the community, the ancestors, and the natural world are part of everyday life, that brings a different depth of experience.
For Paqos, the relationship with the living world is part of a much larger cultural and ancestral context. The teachings aren’t simply a collection of spiritual ideas or techniques. They exist within a way of relating to life.
This is an important distinction when we begin interpreting traditions through our own cultural understanding.
We often translate what we encounter into concepts we already know. We learn about energy and think of energy healing. We learn about making offerings and think of ceremony. We learn about the Apus and understand them as sacred mountains.
But there is a world of experience within these relationships.
An offering is an expression of reciprocity, a participation in the exchange of life. The Apus are living presences with whom people have longstanding relationships. Pachamama is not simply an idea of Mother Earth. She is part of a living relationship with the world that sustains us.
The understanding changes because the relationship itself is experienced.
And this extends far beyond the Andean traditions.
Think about love. We can read about love, understand its qualities, discuss its meaning, and recognize its expressions. We can know all sorts of things about love.
Then we experience loving someone, and something entirely different takes place within us.
We discover a way of knowing that comes through the experience itself.
Perhaps this is also something to consider when we speak about the Divine.
We can spend years learning about Spirit, consciousness, God, or the sacred. We can develop an understanding of how the universe works and what our relationship with it might mean.
But knowing about the Divine and experiencing ourselves in relationship with the Divine are different dimensions of knowing.
This is where I return to Rumi’s ladder.
The mind has its place. Knowledge has its place. The teachings and practices have their place. Yet there is a point where understanding becomes something we live, where what we have learned becomes part of how we experience and participate in life.
The ladder becomes an image of that change in perspective. Rather than looking toward life as something to understand from the outside, we begin to recognize the relationships, connections, and intelligence of which we are already a part.
What happens when you recognize yourself as a participant in the intelligence of life, rather than an observer trying to understand it?
Perhaps the ladder was never about reaching somewhere else.
Perhaps it was about discovering a different way of being here.
With love and blessings,
Susan