Posted 22 September 2024 by Sal
The Bright Sun of Knowing
The saying, ‘know what’s true and truth will set you free’, is not meant as an intellectual, conceptual or dogmatic knowledge. But the word know, in the context of that quote, actually means simply to know yourself, not intellectually or conceptually, but as your own being. Why does this knowing set you free? Because, what you come to know is that who you are, is freedom. This is not knowledge, as in a fixed idea or concept, but a living, immediately present aware knowing/being that has no opposite. It is not an object you know, separate from you; it is who you are, the knowing/being itself. This is the meaning of, ‘I am that I am.’ It is purely subjective knowing/being. ‘I know I’, or, ‘I am I’. You can see the truth of this for yourself now. Notice this for a moment.
I know I am.
This is also clearly stated in two very famous quotes, one in the Bible and one from Indian Vedanta. The Bible says, “Be still and know that I am God.” Still means to, for a moment, stop attending to any of the objects of perception, like thoughts, sensations and emotions, and instead to simply and consciously know I am here. This knowing is not a subject/object knowing but the purely subjective I, knowing myself. In this moment of knowing/being, there is no separate “I” dividing itself from life, God, the world or others. There is simply being. I am That I Am.
The other famous quote, from Vedanta is the word, Satchitananda. Broken into three separate words, Sat is being or existence, Chit is knowing or consciousness, Ananda is peace. So what this points to is I, being, consciously knowing myself as peace. These two famous quotes reveal the same essential message.
The more we live as this essential knowing/being, the less we are divided within ourself and with the world and the more we are united as the whole. Truth, known in this way, unifies. Perhaps you’ll say, ‘ok, big deal, that’s obvious, but what’s the point? What does it mean? How will knowing this obvious truth set me free? By knowing this essential aspect of who you are and realizing its full import, you see that you are free and essentially at peace already. You also realize that which has kept you in delusion and suffering.
To discover our inherent freedom, peace and happiness, we need to come to know two main things. One is to know what is true, by which I mean, to know who you are and always have been essentially, already free and already at peace. This is not difficult to recognize. It is very simple, just something you have overlooked, although it has been the most obvious aspect of who you are your entire life. Because you’ve had your attention only on the objects of perception instead of your essential knowing/being, you have not recognized what has been staring you in the face the whole time.
We all “fall from grace” in this way, by taking a birth of self and identifying who we are essentially with the impressions recorded in our otherwise free and empty mind and body by the experiences we have of culture, family, society, etc. This is a perfectly natural movement of every human being’s life. The good news is that we have never lost our original essential being; it, you, has been here the entire time, just waiting to be known. The “Kingdom of Heaven” is within you.
The Mechanics of Ignorance
The other thing we need to do is to liberate our mind of what is false, by which I mean, that which is not permanent and essential to our being, but is ephemeral and causes delusion and suffering. We have to recognize the impulses in our mind that continually attract our attention, draw us in and fool us again and again into believing the deluding power of ego. It is this and the sense of separation and lack it causes, that creates the seeds of greed, envy, jealousy, lust for power and control, revenge, judgment and punishment, so prevalent and harmful to ourselves and our world.
We need to know the mechanics of ignorance, which means, what ego is and how it works, how we are deluded into believing we are separate. You need to see how this happens in you yourself, thereby keeping you from knowing happiness and peace by continually drawing you away, so to speak, from the very essence of who you are. This does not mean getting rid of anything or transcending anything. It simply means knowing how you are functioning and what causes suffering.
If we identify with any object appearing in our empty mind, we are mis-identifying, we are abandoning our essential free being and , we are cast from the Garden into the world of bondage and suffering. This is the meaning of Original Sin. We take a bite of the fruit from the tree of knowledge and leave our true home and venture into the world of delusion, the false. That knowledge is — I am separate. And, this mis-identification is instantaneous. But it is simply a case of mistaken identity.
Instead of being who we are, at ease and content, we begin to believe we are the content, the impressions in our mind and so, our personal world, the world of division, delusion and suffering, is born. The content we identify with is the lifelong experiences and data in our mind. I am a body, my name is Sal, I am a boy, I am American, I am bad, I am good, I'm a republican, a democrat, I have had these negative experiences, these positive experiences, I believe this, prefer that, am averse to that, regret, remorse, guilt —all of the mental data that creates a character, like a character in a movie. In believing that this mental content, this character is who we are essentially, we, as separate ego/self, are born and we perpetuate a myth called self. But as with any myth, it has no actual substance or truth.
The search for our true self, or our true and rightful home, nirvana or heaven, is a search that brings us back to here and now, to our essential knowing/being, already free from all of that content and at ease and happy. It brings us to truth. This mis-identification and personal world-creating delusion, the false, is simply the functioning of the un-awakened human condition and seems to be the natural and necessary progression of every human’s lifetime.
By coming to know these two aspects, what is true and what is false, you begin moving more with truth and less with delusion. You begin living freedom. It may start off as a small flame, but with devotion to what is true, and valuing less what is false, it will grow into a burning bright sun of knowing. Peace and happiness become more and more your default nature.
