Knowledge

Who do we think we are? We’ll never believe it. We can’t actually, because upon investigation, we discover that we don’t actually believe in anything. It’s impossible to believe in something. We’ll see later why this statement is true. But for now, it is helpful for us to see that belief is a mask that hides our true state of affairs. Behind the mask, we either know something or we don’t. Therefore, we either know who we are, or we don’t. And if we know, there’s no need to believe. Belief can only exist where knowledge is absent.

When the correct answer to a math equation is present, it is impossible for any mistake whatsoever to also be present. When it’s daytime, we don’t say it’s nighttime. Two opposing concepts cannot both be simultaneously manifest. Similarly, if we know who we are, it’s impossible to be mistaken about who we are. In math, there are an infinite number of wrong answers to every equation. When we don’t know who we are, we may believe that we are this or that, but it’s possible that, without knowing for certain, we may be infinitely wrong about it! 

Given the choice between knowing something or not knowing something, it’s obvious which we prefer. But even though this is obvious to us, we feel some things are impossible to know, such as “who we are”. We feel this is some great mystery and that “there are some things we aren’t meant to know”. We can’t stand to hear from people who claim to “have it all figured out”. We feel we should just try to be really nice, really humble people and not rock the boat too much. We don’t want to risk losing face, so we keep our self-inquiry to a minimum. We make little effort to understand ourselves and the human experience, hoping that somehow it will all be sorted out for us in the future. 

We hope something amazing will happen to us, not realizing that we are all the time happening to everything. By “happening to everything”, we mean colliding with and influencing everything with which we come into contact. We have heard of the law of “equal and opposite reaction”. When we “collide with” something, we are defining what types of experiences we will have in the future. Our experiences are quite literally the reactions that we cause when we collide with phenomena. When we collide with phenomena, not only are we setting into motion our own futures, we are also “rubbing off” on whatever it is that we collide with. In each collision, there is a “transfer of vibe”. 

We recognize that our most meaningful and inspiring relationships are those that are built on honesty. In addition to “honesty” being a primary tool for self-inquiry, honesty is also a style of “vibe transfer”. When we collide with someone who is honest, our own honesty emerges naturally as a result of simply opening our hearts and minds to the possibility that there’s something we don’t know. As we open our hearts and minds, we deepen our capacity to relate to others. 

If we are fortunate to have been “touched by honesty”, we can ourselves become the “honesty catalyst” for others, igniting a “vibe chain reaction” that results in an explosion of meaningful, beneficial activity. This is one of the reasons why we stress proximity to mentors so much. The more immersed we are in “a vibe”, the more we can learn to generate “that vibe” without relying on an external generator.

Exercising our common sense as much as possible helps us learn the value of honesty. Like knowledge, honesty also makes belief irrelevant. When we are honest, we can admit what we don’t know. There is no position more potent for developing ourselves than being honest about what we don’t know. When we don’t know, we can learn. Holding on to “what we believe”, instead of being honest about what we know or don’t know, prevents us from learning.

Belief as a concept is often confused with hope. When we say we believe in something, what we really are saying is that we hope that it is true. When we say that we believe we are such and such a thing or type of person, we are simply saying that we really hope that others see us that way. To hope that something is true is, in fact, to not know whether that something is true. To hope is to be fundamentally uncertain about something. 

Something that is “fundamentally uncertain” is not also “fundamentally certain”. Another way to define “uncertain” is “not yet certain”, as in “not yet fully manifest”. It is clear to us that something that is not yet fully manifest cannot also be fully manifest. By logical extension, we can conclude that something that is not yet fully manifest is not yet fully existent. Something that does not yet fully exist cannot also fully exist at the same time. Therefore, it is impossible to “believe in something”, because whatever the something is that we are trying to believe in does not exist. To believe is to fantasize. We literally cannot believe in something. 

Every day, we hope our lives go a certain way. We hope our lives are going somewhere good. If we find ourselves in places we don’t like, we hope things will go better. Every day, we hope for certain outcomes, because we assign value to outcomes. But how can an outcome occur without its causes? If we were to know the exact cause that produces the outcome we desire, hope would be irrelevant. Were we to know precisely how to cause better circumstances to come to pass, obviously, there would be no need to hope for them. Were we to know this, we would simply make it happen.

So why don’t we simply make things happen that are meaningful? Why don’t we make things happen that we feel are relevant to our purpose? Why don’t we make things happen that we find deeply inspiring? Why aren’t we actively engaged in building a truly wonderful life every day? It’s because we believe we are already doing that. Yet how can it be the case that if we are already creating the most meaningful life possible that we don’t actually experience living the most meaningful life possible? 

Here again, we have the problem of two opposing concepts fighting for the same space. We are either confused or clear about who we are and why we are here. We cannot be both confused and clear about something. We are not simultaneously confused and clear about the answer to 2+2. Similarly, we cannot sometimes “know who we are” and other times “not know who we are”. To know something is to have integrated something into us that can never be removed from us. Knowledge is the capacity to know – the capacity to bond permanently with phenomena.

We live backwards. In society, we assign value to one another based on a mistaken idea that knowledge can be accumulated. We think knowledge is a commodity. We think knowledge can be learned, rather than asking valuable questions such as, “What does it mean to know something?”. We don’t realize that we are literally made of knowledge, because we haven’t been encouraged to think deeply about what we want in the first place. Were we to think deeply about what we want, we would realize that what we want most is to understand ourselves and our experience, or in classical terms, to know ourselves – to know who we are.

If “to know something” is to have bonded with something, then we return to the initial question, “Who are we?”. Logically it follows that if we are to know ourselves, we must bond with ourselves. But who is this “self” with whom we need to bond, unite, or merge? Aren’t we already ourselves? It’s obvious to us that nothing can become manifest without causes. Therefore, how can we “ourselves” become manifest, how can we exist, without first having originated somehow and somewhere? In our lineage, “where” and “how” point us to “who”.

That which is the basis for or origin of something must, by definition, be a part of that something. When we try to think about who we are, we recognize that we only do so in component parts, that is, we think about one part of ourselves at a time. We think about a part of our present, past, or future, like something that we do, have done, or want to do. We think about something we consider to be a part of ourselves, like our hands or our families. If we are thinking in “parts”, is it also possible we are thinking in “origins”? 

It would be impossible for us to ask who we are without there having been a “how” and “where” to our lives. How and where are questions of origins, questions of roots. When we think about how we’ve come into existence, we have to consider an inconceivable network of strangers meeting, falling in love, and procreating. How deep are those roots? How wide are those origins?

Thinking about where we are is even more mind boggling. Just as our lives as a whole originate in obvious phenomena such as ancestral lines, so too does our moment to moment existence depend on inconceivable realities. For example, if we depend on air, why do we not consider a breath to be a point of origin for us? Where is air, other than all around us? Where does the air come from? Wherever air originates, that “place” must also be like grandparents to us. We are the descendants of air and the source of air.

Recently, some of us reviewed photos sent to us by our families depicting several generation’s worth of relatives. Many of us remarked how similar the likenesses were. The same features are present on our faces now that were also present hundreds of years ago. We know that “genetic material” passes down the line. We cannot help but to take on the characteristics of that in which we have our basis as beings.

If we depend on an animating principle and a motive principle and space itself in order to live, move, and have our being, animation, motion, and space must also be our progenitors. Each decade, scientists discover “more space”, “more planets”, and so on – so much so that it’s incalculable. It also appears that space is expanding. Therefore, if we live inside of our own origin, and that origin is incalculable and ever-expanding, that means what we are “genetically” is also incalculable and ever-expanding. Sounds fun, no? Only when we know it. When we don’t know it, we feel utterly overwhelmed by the sheer immensity of being.