NEGATIVE CAPABILITY

The capability to unlearn - or at the very least to temporarily put to the side and ignore - what one supposedly knows so that one can meet life freshly is a fundamental capacity for innovation and creative participation in life. 

The term 'negative capability' was coined by the English poet John Keats.  In his analysis, William Shakespeare's genius was partially attributable to his exceptional ability to stay with the discomfort and insecurity of not-knowing for much longer than most of us are able to.

As we cultivate negative capability in our own psychology we slowly break the deadening habit of labeling everything.  No longer so sure that that we know what things are, we naturally become more curious and capable of learning.  The unconscious colonization of our experience by our left brain recedes, and the world starts to emerge more freshly in our awareness.  

We spontaneously start to see new possibilities that were previously invisible to us.  

The more we are able to reside in not-knowing, the more space our minds have to roam free and be innovative.

Ultimately those of us who cultivate the inner ability to live intimately with the unknown and the unknowable slowly build a big advantage over those who unconsciously collapse the field of future possibility by foolishly assuming that they mostly know who they are, who others are, and what the world is.

As negative capability deepens in you, it shifts from a capacity that you have - to something that you are:

And slowly, 

slowly...

you being to spontaneously experience yourself as 

This vast ocean of the unknown and the unknowable

- and as such you experience your self actively participating in the continual creative emergence of the life that you take to be yours -