All tumescent patterns are to keep us from the one who knows. The underlying sensation of tumescence is agitation and an attention that will not land. It will not move in accord with the rhythms of nature. Instead of penetrating the spot, it becomes scattered and overwhelmed. It takes on one of three qualities, which may present as hovering, pressure, or drive. We can also refer to these qualities as dissipated, fixed, or hyper-volatile. Each is the result of a pattern of thought the tumescent mind habituated as a means to survive, effectively obscuring the deeper part of us that knows. It is the equivalent in consciousness of fight (fixed/pressure), flight (drive/hyper-volatility), or freeze (hovering/dissipation).
The mind comes to use one of these traits irrespective of circumstance, when either one or both of the other two are not fully developed. Knowing the truth does not mean we know everything. When we land in the truth it means knowing what we know and what we don’t know. Each of the types respond differently to not knowing.
When we are guided by the Erotic mind, as a hovering type, we know what we know and what we don’t know. There is no confusion between the two. Hovering consciousness is quite balanced in this way—we don’t have an attachment to knowing or not knowing, so in the Erotic form we can admit what we know and what we don’t know. We are willing to sit in the unknowing state.
Where we get stuck is in welcoming this unknowing state too much, tipping over into the powerlessness of thinking we can’t know—dissipating power and resources. So, we dissociate and avoid landing in the truth by pretending we can’t. However, once the tumescence that would clarify any confusion around this is penetrated, we don’t have the pride that gets in the way of admitting what we don’t know.
On the other hand, when we are operating from pressure, we feel we should always know, and we give ourselves no space for not-knowing. We try to force ourselves to know things that can’t be known, or pretend to know things we don’t, or withdraw so we don’t have to admit we don’t know.
When we are in drive, we believe we can know, but we are too willful to land into the not-knowing side of truth. Our intense energy will drive into the unknown, demanding it become known. When hovering lands in truth, it is a balanced truth. When pressure lands in truth, it is a deep truth. When drive lands in truth, it is a liberating truth.
