What does the "knowing field" know?

What does the "knowing field" know? I'm tackling this revered term in this brief article, or for those of you who like to listen, an audio file. (Click on the image above to go to the audio.)

I hope I don't get in too much trouble for poking into the roots of this term. My dissertation chair for much of my graduate school journey was an expert in human communication. He taught me to be mindful of the consequences of our ways of speaking.

For those of you who prefer to read, here's an transcript, edited for clarity:

This is the second in my series of short videos, hopefully a little provocative and inviting some thoughtful discussion. Today I'd like to take on the topic of the knowing field. 

The knowing field really is an insider's term. It's a bit of jargon that was created to explain our experiences, things that seemed hard to explain to the Western mind of how a clients’ system can be known by representatives.

To understand this, we have to start with language. The knowing field isn't a thing in the world like a mountain or a tree. It's a term that was created to explain this phenomenon: how do representatives know things about a client’s system that they have no obvious way to know? I think it was Albrecht Mahr that came up with this term in a workshop.

We basically made up a name for our experience, as we humans do and have done since we could talk. We often name things to control them, to define them, to shape perception, and to shape our relationship with them. I like to say, language is the original magic. It's the way that we re-create the world in our own image.

It allows us to cut the unfolding, ever changing fabric of life into human-sized pieces that are useful to us. As an example, let's take a tree. When I say tree, most people automatically envision a trunk, branches, leaves, maybe some fruit. The parts of a tree that are useful to humans. But as forest researcher Susanne Simard demonstrated, a tree is a living community of organisms, from soil bacteria and mycelia to animals and pollinators and other trees. Trees even affect their local climate.

Our view of tree is based on what's useful to us as humans. It isn't a reflection of the world as it is. Language is like a transformer. In English in particular, we can turn processes, complex living processes, into nouns and static things. 

Let's take the word, thief, for instance. If somebody is stealing a loaf of bread from a vendor, even there are hungry people at home, we call them a thief. When that person gets home with a loaf of bread for those hungry people, though, they might be called a hero. These words we create are not neutral. They carry judgment, they carry meaning. We create all these roles and relationships and basically create our social worlds with language.

Nouns are not found things, like a mountain or a river or a tree, they carry embedded judgments based on our perception. If we say "sinner" or "saint", the nouns we create freeze the unfolding complexity of a human life into a static thing. Once we convert an unfolding mysterious process into a thing, we can position ourselves in relation to the thing that we made.

I hear people say things like they are going to "consult the knowing field", or "the knowing field showed them" something, as if the knowing field was a person, kind of like our image of God on the Sistine Chapel. This places the field out there as something separate from us, something we operate on and interact with like a person.

We also can reify and make holy the things that we've made through language. We can make the "sacred" knowing field. All kinds of things are possible once we've conjured up a term like this.

What's interesting to me is that when I first encountered constellation work and when I first met Bert Hellinger, he wasn't using the "knowing field." He wasn't using any of these terms. He would talk about the Mystery or the Greater Whole. These are still nouns, but they are less likely to be consulted as if they were an oracle or a psychic because these nouns hint at the vastness and the unknowableness of life. We can all envision a field, but it's a little harder to envision a mystery. It's a little harder to put that into anthropomorphic terms. 

I've been really interested in this idea of a knowing field since I first heard the term. I know of electrical fields and gravitational fields (which are also still mysterious). When I heard the term "knowing field," I wanted to know, what is it? How does it work? Am I using it properly? Once I "know" what it is, i.e., I can call it a knowing field, then I can have a relationship with it. I can have a relationship with a thing I conjured up with language.

I don't think "knowing field" is the most accurate term for the experiences we have in constellation work. In deeply trying to understand what is the knowing field, I kept finding that life is a unity. You are the field. So is everything and everyone else. Life is this unfolding, interconnected, ever changing process that's always in flux. (This is a little unsettling to us mortal humans.)

When we do create a term like the knowing field, we actually separate ourselves from it. We have "humans" and "nature". We can talk about that as if humans were separate from nature. But we are not separate from this unfolding web of life.

The deeper we look, the more we see everything is interconnected. Take a good look at climate change, for instance, if you want to see how interconnected everything is. Other peoples have known this. It's been lost to our modern Western mind, and part of this is due to our language.

English, in particular, is a relentlessly noun-based and very judgmental language. It separates and freezes a lot of processes into fixed form. I can talk about freeing my parakeet from its cage, but then I can say my parakeet has freedom, like freedom is an object. It's an own-able thing, not an unfolding experience.

There are Indigenous languages, for instance, like Mi'kmaq, where you can go all day without using a noun. You can simply speak of life in verbs, in process and unfolding experience. We are not separate, and I think we act that way at our peril, because we are life. 

So we made up this lovely thing, this knowing field, but it's actually a way to deal with not knowing, with the Mystery of life. I think it might be okay to not know, that we don't necessarily need a knowing field. I've never needed either a knowing field or the word energy to explain constellation work sufficiently to get people to participate. I believe we kind of mislead people into thinking that the only way they can experience the deep interconnectedness that we experience in constellations, is by calling up the knowing field. As if we brought it into existence. But it's actually already here. There's only life. 

I would invite us to be careful about what we create with our language and how we stand in relationship to our creations. The vast interconnectedness of all life seems to be a mystery only to the Western mind. So what if we allowed there to be mystery? What if we resisted the urge to create false certainty by making a name for that experience that we treat as a thing? What if we just were comfortable with not knowing? 

I'll be interested to hear what people think, what you say about that.