Self-Knowledge
When you perceive without interpretation you can then sense what it is that is perceiving.
This ‘self-knowledge’ is non-verbal, which is intuitive above – not to signify some fancy psychic phenomenon of insight, but simply to signify that this deeper-knowing is not with the mind or senses. Again, it is difficult to put into words, and if you have not experienced it firsthand it will not really make much sense, but Being simply knows itself, non-conceptually.
If thoughts subside and Being is tasted firsthand, when afterwards thoughts reappear, so does the ego. It’s then all too easy for the ego, which is who we normally take ourselves to be, to co-opt this experience and make the non-conceptual sense of Being into intellectual knowledge. Now in the same way the ego knows the height of Mount Everest or your favourite colour, the ego now knows that the true self is ‘Presence’ or ‘Being’. This is not ‘self-knowledge’. This is ego-knowledge. This is more illusion, a continuation of the imagined ego-self.
Really, self-knowledge is simply Being. It is revealed through Silence, through cessation of the ego. This clears space for the natural knowing to know itself. Prolonged and repeated silence has a clarifying effect that occurs without will or effort, will and effort being the ego.
‘Stillness is your essential nature. What is stillness? The inner space or awareness in which the words on this page are being perceived and become thoughts…You are that awareness disguised as a person’
Once It knows itself, the silence no longer matters: it doesn’t matter if it is quiet or noisy, and thoughts can function unhampered by the ego. Concepts of Being or Presence no longer apply. This is freedom. There is no identification here. Whatever happens is ‘allowed’ to happen, or more accurately, whatever happens simply happens. The Divine manifests itself continually, pouring itself into itself.
