Sruti is a spiritual teacher who writes about her experience with an uncommon and painful illness called Interstitial Cystitis. She has been interviewed on the Buddha at the Gas Pump talk show on YouTube about her experience of spiritual awakening in the midst of intense pain.

This ongoing and chronic condition challenged her to stay present with daily pain and to look further inward for answers. In an extreme moment of pain, in which consciousness began to fade, Sruti experienced the erasure of all that clouds over the earliest source of vision.

She watched as one by one the layers of the mind, the body, and feelings disappeared before her. She asks the question: with whose vision are we seeing when the lights are going out? Has this early vision ever known anything at all?

Sruti finds that we can allow what is painful to become a tool to disrupt the ordinary layers of our experience. Underneath these layers we find the unconditional peace that is our constant being in each moment.

Can we investigate the source of ordinary vision - can we find the place of true seeing that is earlier that who we think we are?

The Hidden Value of Not Knowing is both an account of her experience, and a meditation on our earliest source of being: "When we inquire into the hidden value of the unknown, especially in a moment of great pain or great beauty we may not find an answer. We may instead experience an out-of-the-question silence that contains a profound reverence. For true peace in the face of great pain, and for the resolution of its suffering, it is this unquestionable silence we must reveal within ourselves."