When I Stopped Needing to Know What Everything Was

Some of the experiences I’ve had through meditation, Kundalini and Reiki have been difficult to explain.

Not difficult to experience.

Difficult to explain.

Something moves internally. Pressure appears in a particular region. The body responds in a way I didn’t consciously initiate.

A Reiki symbol changes something I can clearly feel. An energetic condition becomes recognizable, disappears, and later returns.

Naturally, I wanted to know what these things were.

For years, I looked for answers. I still do.

But somewhere along the way, my relationship with the question changed.

I became surprisingly comfortable saying…

I don’t know.

Finding a name helped

Kundalini was probably one of the first places where this became important.

When those experiences began, having language for what I was encountering mattered enormously.

I could read descriptions and recognize parts of my own experience. I could find other people talking about things that felt familiar.

There were traditions, histories and maps. Suddenly I wasn’t standing in completely unnamed territory.

The word Kundalini helped.

But it didn’t explain everything. I still had to learn what was happening in my experience.

Where was movement occurring? What repeated? What changed? What seemed connected? What didn’t?

The name gave me somewhere to begin…

but I still had to meet the experience myself.

Reiki gave me another map

Years later, Reiki introduced a different framework.

Energy. Attunement. Symbols. Intention. Lineage.

Ways of working deliberately with something I had already spent years experiencing in other contexts.

That was fascinating because parts of the territory felt familiar while the language and structure were different.

I could recognize something through Reiki that reminded me of something I had experienced through meditation.

Kundalini gave me one way of understanding energetic movement. Reiki gave me another way of participating with energy.

Sometimes the frameworks seemed to overlap. Sometimes they didn’t.

That raised a question I hadn’t really considered before.

What if the experience and the explanation of the experience aren’t exactly the same thing?

I began separating what happened from what I thought happened

That distinction became increasingly useful.

There was:

what I experienced

and then:

what I believed might explain it.

For example, I can say with considerable confidence that I experience something I call energy.

I can feel differences. Movement. Pressure. Regions. Changes in intensity.

I can sometimes interact with those experiences deliberately and notice a response.

That is part of my lived experience.

The next question is different.

What is that energy?

There I become much more careful.

I have frameworks I work within. I have ideas. I have interpretations that make more sense to me than others.

But experience alone doesn’t necessarily answer the larger question.

And eventually I realized it didn’t need to.

“I don’t know” became useful

Earlier in my journey, uncertainty could feel like a gap I needed to close.

If something happened, I wanted an explanation.

What caused it? What does it mean? Which framework does it belong to?

Over time, I became more comfortable leaving that space open.

Something happened. I can describe it. I can investigate it. I can see whether it returns.

I can notice what changes when I participate.

And I can still say:

I don’t know exactly what organizes this.

That isn’t the same as giving up on the question.

If anything, it has made me more curious.

Experience first

Eventually I began using a very simple principle:

Experience first.

Before deciding what something is, what actually happened?

Where did I experience it? Did it move? Did anything change in the body? What happened to attention? What happened afterward?

Can I encounter it again? What changes if I participate? What changes if I don’t?

Those questions became increasingly valuable because they didn’t require me to settle the explanation before I had properly observed the experience.

Interpretation could come later.

Sometimes naming too quickly changed what I saw

I noticed something else too.

Once I decided what an experience was, I tended to start looking through that explanation.

If I immediately called something Kundalini, then Kundalini became the lens. If I called it Reiki, I began interpreting it through Reiki.

If I assumed something was emotional, I looked for an emotional explanation.

The name might eventually be completely appropriate.

But naming too early could quietly narrow what I was willing to notice.

Sometimes the most useful first description was almost embarrassingly simple.

There is pressure here. Something is moving. My breathing changed. This region became active. The atmosphere feels different.

That was enough to begin.

I could participate without deciding what I believed

This may have been the more surprising discovery.

I didn’t always need a complete explanation in order to develop a relationship with an experience.

If placing attention somewhere changed what I felt, I could observe that. If a gesture repeatedly altered the experience, I could investigate it.

If a Reiki symbol produced something recognizable, I could work with that. If leaving something alone changed the process, that mattered too.

I didn’t have to settle every metaphysical question first.

I could participate…

and remain uncertain.

Angelic Reiki has brought me back to this again

More recently, I’ve been exploring Angelic Reiki.

It comes with language and explanations that are much more explicit about the spiritual territory involved.

Angelic relationships. Higher vibrational states. Attunement. Different descriptions of what is participating in the healing process.

I find much of it fascinating.

Some of what it points toward feels surprisingly familiar from years of meditation, Kundalini and Reiki.

Other parts are new to me.

So I’m approaching it in much the same way.

Openly. Respectfully. Curiously.

But still:

experience first.

What did I actually experience? What did the tradition tell me was happening? What do I think may have happened? What remains uncertain?

I don’t need those answers to become identical.

Uncertainty didn’t remove the wonder

If anything, I think I once worried that holding things this way would make the experience less meaningful.

It hasn’t.

There are things I’ve experienced internally that still astonish me.

Some are beautiful. Some incredibly strange.

Some have repeated enough that I have developed substantial confidence in my relationship with them.

Not knowing exactly why they happen doesn’t make them less interesting.

Sometimes uncertainty protects the wonder.

I don’t have to turn fascination into certainty in order to take it seriously.

It changed how I talk about these things

This relationship with uncertainty eventually changed my language too.

I became more comfortable saying:

For me… What I noticed was… I experience it as… It seemed to… I don’t know exactly what was happening, but…

Those phrases aren’t disclaimers I add because I’m afraid to make a statement.

They’re often the most accurate language I have.

There is a difference between saying:

This is what I experienced.

and:

This is what reality is.

I have become increasingly interested in protecting that difference.

Arrival Field inherited that distinction

When Arrival Field began taking shape, this became important.

Someone might arrive through meditation. Someone else might understand themselves through nervous-system language.

Another person may work with energy. Reiki. Yoga. Contemplative practice. Or none of those things.

If I require someone to accept my explanation of an experience before they can explore their own, I’ve made the doorway unnecessarily small.

Recognition offers another way in.

What are you noticing?

Before:

What do you believe it is?

That question leaves considerably more room.

It also allows Arrival Field to have its own architecture without pretending that architecture explains every mechanism underneath human internal experience.

I still want answers

None of this means I’ve stopped looking.

Quite the opposite.

I want to understand why certain gestures alter my internal experience. I want to understand energetic movement.

I remain fascinated by what happens through Reiki. I want to know why familiarity changes access.

I am deeply interested in some of the newer experiences appearing in my practice.

There are questions everywhere.

But I no longer feel compelled to resolve every one of them before continuing.

Sometimes a better question appears because I allowed the first one to remain unanswered.

Looking back

There was a time when encountering something unusual immediately produced:

What is this?

That question still appears.

But now it has company.

What happened? Can I recognize it again? What changes it? What happens if I leave it alone? What remains afterward?

Those questions have given me an enormous amount of information over the years.

And strangely, becoming more comfortable with uncertainty has made me feel more—not less—grounded in my own experience.

I know what I experienced. I know what I think about it.

And increasingly, I know the difference between the two.

Perhaps that is why three simple words have become such an important part of my practice:

I don’t know.

Not as a dismissal. Not as an unwillingness to explore. And certainly not as the end of the conversation.

Sometimes…

that’s where the better conversation begins.

— Jason