Knowing

Below is an extract from 'Rolling Thunder' by Doug Boyd, (1974).

"Rolling Thunder had explained at Council Grove that his training was experiential. In his first conversation with me he said that truth cannot be expressed verbally, that it can only be experienced: "You have to live it and be part of it and then you might get to know it." My first step was to learn what Rolling Thunder meant by understanding. Understanding is not the sort of thing my modern, establishment education had me believing it was. Understanding, to what Rolling Thunder calls the establishment mind, is simply a rather low-level dance and shuffle, a kind of churning process by which a number of ideas and concepts are juggled around with the newcomer idea until they all somehow fit together. This fitting provides a feeling of knowing which gratifies the mind. A person simply feels the satisfaction of having all his assumptions fit together, and he says, "I know."

"To Rolling Thunder, knowing is being. His simple description of the arrangement of the universe is that there is a right time and place for everything. That cannot be understood by any process of speech or thought: "It's easy to say but hard to understand. You have to live it to understand it."...he is talking about becoming part of the right time and the right place. To put it another way: first you identify the principle, then you practice it Gradually you understand the principle, that is, you become one with it. When you become one with the principle it responds to your will."