Kenopanishad
"The eye does not go there. Nor speech. Nor the mind. We do not know it. We do not understand how anyone can teach it."
Self-knowledge is pulling the rug out from under oneself continuously until there is nothing left to tug on. Here, the teacher obliges the student by pulling the already threadbare rug of understanding out from under them.
Having told the student that the ear, eye, mind, etc. cannot go there, the teacher makes a stark confession. "We do not know it."
Imagine going to the doctor's office and asking for the diagnosis (the truth) about what is happening. Imagine hearing that it is the mind of the mind. And then hearing that the mind cannot go there. And then finally, to top it off, the doctor says, "Moreover, we doctors don't know it."
Similarly, the teacher here has pulled successive rugs of understanding out from under the student. Now with the student having no habit or accessory to move forward with, the teacher says, "We do not know it!"
How is this possible? The teacher must be a fraud! It was mumbo jumbo all along! All the critics were right! The guy finally came clean!
But what exactly is the it that the teacher does not know? Remember that in our previous analysis, we understood the word "there" in almost every instance without exception means a place where our identity is not. It is only in this one instance the word "there" means the very origin of all identity itself. How, then, can it be known in the sense that anything else in the world can be known?
For the mind to know something, here referred to as "it," the mind has to stand in orientation to that which is to be known. This is the classic subject-object dualistic orientation where I want to understand the world, "I" being the subject and "the world" being the object. Almost every kind of knowing that is measured in our medical system is based on this dualistic axis. The microscope lens is the subject, and the cell is the object. The CT scanner is the subject, and the abdomen is the object. The patient's experience is the subject, and the model of anatomy is the object.
But what happens when the subject and object are not only juxtaposed but gradually brought closer and closer together? Like opposing magnets, they will initially resist each other. This is experienced by every meditator in the beginning as the lens of awareness and the object of the lens of awareness (i.e. thought, emotion, perception, sensation) are brought closer together. Eventually, however, after steady alignment, the repulsion switches to an attraction, and the subject and object race towards each other and merge in union.
In a sense, the example of the doctor above reflects the very same situation. A doctor can arrive at a diagnosis, but that diagnosis exists on a dualistic spectrum. The prefix dia- means between, or between two people, whereas -gnosis refers to deep knowledge. Therefore, true diagnosis is a deep knowledge that is between the patient and the doctor. Even this beautiful description still falls along the axis of subject and object. Beyond diagnosis is gnosis itself, which requires the merging of both kinds of knowledge into its source. This would be unknown to the doctor and the patient independently as long as they see themselves strictly in those roles.
What happens when the lens of the microscope is brought down to meet the cell on the slide? Naturally, the properties previously observed that were dependent on the dualistic axis are no longer available. They disappear from our vision, and only a haze remains because the tools that have brought us this far along the dualistic access cannot take us to the vision of unity. It is in this sense that the teacher says we do not know it in the sense we know anything else in the world, and as the student knows anything else in the world. Therefore, naturally, the teacher says that we also don't know how others can teach it.
In other words, the apparent lack of transferability of this knowledge is not because of the defect of the teacher, nor even misunderstanding on the part of the teacher, but because of the nature of the axis of understanding that has been assumed to be true and so far ingrained in the student's mind, patterned so deeply that it has physicalized as the neural grooves of the brain and subject-object orientation that is native to the waking world.
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