The Most Important Knowledge

Does not your whole life revolve around yourself? It sure seems to. Could there therefore be anything more important to know the nature of the One on whose behalf your thoughts and feelings arise and in whose service your activities and relationships are undertaken? Could you imagine anything more important to know than that? And given that all of our thoughts and feelings arise on behalf of ourself, given that all our activities and relationships are undertaken on behalf of ourself, our recognition of who we are has a profound effect on our thoughts and feelings and our subsequent activities and relationships. So it's not just an interesting intellectual game. It is the most important thing to know in life. To know the nature of that through which everything else is known. Can you suggest something that is more important than that? Would it be possible to know anything for certain about the known without first knowing the nature of the One who knows? Well, I could say that... I know this is perception, but I know that those chairs are brown. It doesn't seem like I have to know the knowing. How do you know those chairs are brown? If your mind was configured just slightly differently, they would appear red or blue or orange. Are the chairs brown or is it in your mind the brown? You see, you're not quite as sure that the chairs are brown as you thought you were. That's the first thing that we discover, that the world that we thought we knew so well, actually we don't know anything about it at all. Because everything we know about it is filtered through the limitations of the mind through which it is known. How do we know that what we perceive as the world is not simply how reality, whatever reality is, appears to our limited point of view and through the limitations of perception? In fact, we can be absolutely certain that it is. So, were it not for one fact, it would not be possible to know anything about the world. All we could know would be about our perceptions. This is what Kant believed. It's not possible to know the nature of the thing in itself because all we are ever aware of are our perceptions of the thing in itself. But he missed a simple but crucial point. He missed the fact that whatever he was as a person emanated from the world, which he said was unknowable. So if he thinks that the world is unknowable and if he understood, as he obviously did, that he as a person emerged from that world, then to say the world is unknowable is tantamount to saying myself is unknowable. And that's what he missed. It's true, it's not possible to know the nature of the world out there because everything we know of that world is filtered through the limitations of perception. But there is one aspect of the world that we do have direct, immediate access to. When I say immediate, I mean not mediated through the senses. And that is our self. We have direct knowledge, not indirect, mediated knowledge. The awareness of being is being's direct knowledge of itself. And he missed that. So he thought that it was not possible to know the reality of the world. But if we, as apparently separate people, emerge from the world, then whatever the reality that we are must be the reality of the world, just as the reality of the wave and the reality of the ocean must be the same thing because the wave is an emanation of the ocean. So to know the nature of the ocean, it's not necessary to study the whole ocean. It's only necessary to study the wave, to study a drop. If you know the nature of a drop, you know the nature of the ocean. There is one aspect of experience that we have direct access to. That is our self. The awareness of being. And so if we make this investigation into the nature of our self, we discover just being. Infinite, ever-present, self-aware being. That's what all the great non-dual traditions say. That what we essentially are, and what the world essentially is, are the same. That's why scientists, sooner or later, will have to, if they want to know the reality of the world, sooner or later they'll have to turn around and recognize the nature of their own minds. That's the only way we can have direct, immediate access to the reality of the world.