The Knowing That Comes Before the Words
Chronicles of the Sacred Unseen -6
The Knowing That Comes Before the Words
Notes from the Sacred Unseen
“Some truths we carry before we can name them.”
—Blue Moments
Blue Moments leans poetic. It trusts image, silence, and suggestion. It points toward the beautiful unknown without trying to define it. But here in these essays—Notes from the Sacred Unseen—I want to offer something more direct. Not to explain the mystery away, but to give it texture. To put language around what you've maybe only felt. These are expansions, not explanations. Illuminations, not reductions.
1. Some Knowings Arrive Wordlessly
There are moments in life that seem to arrive already meaningful. Not because we understand them, but because something in us recognizes them.
In Blue Moments, I wrote:
"Some truths we carry before we can name them. We feel them in the silence between thoughts, in the gaze of a stranger, in the stillness that follows a sudden knowing."
These are precognitions. They precede articulation. We don’t reason our way into them. We feel them in the body before the mind can catch up.
It may sound mystical, but it isn't irrational. In fact, it's how most of us actually move through the most important moments of life. Not with logic first, but with a kind of silent affirmation that comes before clarity.
2. Experience Is the Original Language
Let’s call this kind of knowing a precognitive intuition—a truth you grasp before you can explain it.
It’s not irrational. It’s pre-rational.
We’re not talking about superstition or magical thinking. We’re talking about the brain’s natural capacity to synthesize information—body cues, emotional patterns, memory fragments, environmental context—and deliver a conclusion before the conscious mind catches up.
Cognitive scientists call this thin-slicing.
Philosophers call it embodied cognition.
Poets just call it knowing.
That mysterious quiet between thoughts is not nothing.
It’s where pattern recognition, memory, and intuition swirl together—and hand you a wordless answer.
In fact, you might say experience is the original language. Long before words, we were speaking in sighs, touches, reactions, gestures. Even now, infants understand the world by feel before they ever form a sentence.
Language is something we’ve layered on top of life—but it isn’t where life begins. It begins in the ache, the instinct, the glance. In that sense, knowing comes first. Explaining comes second.
3. What You Know Without Knowing
Because you do. Even if the knowing is wordless, silent, or half-formed—it's already there.
You’ve felt the ache of something you couldn’t name.
You’ve walked into a room and known, without explanation, that you were not safe—or that you were home.
You’ve met someone and felt something shift.
You’ve experienced silence that didn’t feel empty.
These are all ways knowing arrives first.
Even Scripture gives us language for this. In Mark 8, Jesus heals a blind man in two stages. After the first touch, the man says: "I see people, but they look like trees walking around." Not fully healed. Not fully blind. Something in-between.
That in-between space is where many of us live. We start to see. We just don’t know what we’re looking at yet.
4. Even Downton Abbey Gets It
I recently watched Downton Abbey for the first time. Beneath all the corsets and inheritance drama, it’s really a study in how reason, tradition, and emotion collide.
Lord Grantham marries Cora for money—a strategic decision to save the estate. It begins in logic and duty. But over time, it becomes love. What starts as a transaction matures into something tender, sacred even.
Other characters play this out more dramatically:
Sybil and Branson fall in love across class lines—love defying tradition.
Mary and Matthew dance the slow waltz of near misses and delayed confessions—love not quite fitting into the expected frame.
Anna and Bates endure injustice, grief, and the weight of unspoken loyalty.
These relationships aren’t logical. But they are responsive and in dialogue at an elemental level. They emerge in the substrate that undergirds social convention and tradition.
5. Reality Responds
In Blue Moments I wrote:
“You already know: That we are not as separate as we seem. That the world is more alive than we've been told. That reality responds."
Reality doesn’t always respond with clarity. Or comfort. Or exactly what we asked for.
In fact, sometimes, it resists us. But sometimes—impossibly, gently, unmistakably—it gives us what we need.
Like the blind man slowly recovering sight.
Like the stranger’s gaze that lingers just long enough.
Like a line in a book you weren’t looking for.
We often want thunder. But truth tends to arrive in whispers.
So here’s the invitation:
Notice what you already know. Even if you can't explain it yet.
Because the knowing is already happening.
Even now.
This essay is part of the series "Chronicles of the Sacred Unseen.” To receive future reflections, subscribe or share with someone quietly listening.
Blue Moments is available exclusively at alexandermcmanus.com