10 Sep Though all our knowledge other than ‘I am’ is thus an imaginary and false appearance, how does it appear to us to be real?
True knowledge is not a state that we can newly attain, because it always exists as our own essential and fundamental consciousness, ‘I am’, which we never even for a moment cease to know. What prevents us from experiencing it as it really is, is only the false knowledge that we have superimposed upon it. What do we mean when we speak of ‘false knowledge’ or ‘wrong knowledge’? Except our basic knowledge ‘I am’, everything that we know is only a thought that arises in our mind, a form of knowledge that is inherently dualistic, involving as it does three seemingly distinct components, ourself as the knowing subject, something other than ourself as the object known, and linking these two a separate act of knowing. That is, when we feel ‘I know such-and-such’, this knowledge involves a knowing consciousness or subject called ‘I’, a known thing or object called ‘such-and-such’, and an action or process of doing called ‘knowing’. These three components constitute the basic triad of which every form of objective knowledge is composed. In this basic triad of objective knowledge, the verb ‘know’ may be replaced by some other verb, such as ‘perceive’, ‘see’, ‘hear’, ‘taste’, ‘experience’, ‘think’, ‘feel’, ‘believe’ or ‘understand’, but still this triad remains as the basic structure of every form of knowledge or experience other than our essential and fundamental knowledge, which is our knowledge of our own being, ‘I am’. Since our fundamental knowledge ‘I am’ is non-dual, it does not involve any distinction between the consciousness that knows and itself that it knows, nor does it involve any separate act of knowing, because consciousness naturally knows itself simply by being itself, and not by doing anything.
Why do we say that all knowledge involving this triad is a false or wrong knowledge? Firstly, we say so because each component of this triad is a thought that we form in our mind by our power of imagination. Without our power of imagination, our power to form thoughts, we could not experience any knowledge other than ‘I am’. Thus every knowledge other than ‘I am’ is essentially imaginary. Even the idea that our knowledge of the external world is formed in our mind not only by our power of imagination, but also in response to actual external stimuli, is a thought that we form in our mind by our power of imagination. No reason or proof exists that can justify our belief that any of our knowledge actually corresponds to something outside our mind. All we know, and all we ever can know, is known only within our mind. Even the seemingly external world that we know through our five senses exists for us only within our mind, just as the world we know in a dream exists only within our mind.
Secondly, we say so because each component of this triad is a transitory appearance. Though the knowing subject, ‘I’, is relatively constant, in contrast to the objects known by it and its actions of knowing them, which are thoughts that are constantly changing, rising and then subsiding in our mind, each one being replaced the next moment by another, even this ‘I’, the subject who knows this constantly changing flow of thoughts, is transitory, rising only in waking and dream, and subsiding in deep sleep. This subject who thinks and knows all other thoughts is our mind, our limited adjunct-bound consciousness that knows itself not merely as ‘I am’ but as ‘I am this body’. Since this subject, all the objects known by it, and all its successively repeated actions of knowing those objects, are thus merely transitory appearances, they cannot be real, because though they appear to be real at one time, they cease to appear real at another time. Their seeming reality is therefore just a false appearance, an illusory apparition formed in our mind by our power of imagination.
Though all our knowledge other than ‘I am’ is thus an imaginary and false appearance, how does it appear to us to be real? Whatever we know appears to us to be real while we are knowing it. Even the world that we experience in dream, and the body which we then take to be ‘I’, appear to us to be real so long as we are experiencing that dream. There is therefore something that makes all our current knowledge appear to be real. What is that something?
Every knowledge, we have seen, consists of three components, the first and basic one being the knowing subject, ‘I’. This subject is a compound consciousness formed by the superimposition of an imaginary adjunct, ‘this body’, upon the real consciousness ‘I am’. Thus underlying every knowledge is the true knowledge ‘I am’, and it is this true knowledge or consciousness that gives a seeming reality to every knowledge that we experience.
How exactly is the reality of our basic knowledge ‘I am’ thus seemingly transferred to all the other knowledge that we currently superimpose upon it, even though that other knowledge is false? All our other knowledge is known only by our mind, which is the knowing subject, and which comes into existence only by imagining itself to be a body. Before imagining and knowing any other thing, our mind first imagines a body to be itself. That is, it confuses a body, which is a product of its imagination, with ‘I am’, which is its real and basic knowledge. Since ‘I am’ is real, and since our mind mistakes that imaginary body to be ‘I am’, it cannot but feel that body to be real. Whether the body that it now imagines to be itself happens to be this body of the waking state or some other body in dream, our mind always feels that its current body is real. Since that current body is one among the many objects of the world that it is currently experiencing, our mind cannot but feel that all the other objects that it is currently experiencing are as real as the body that it now mistakes to be itself. In other words, since we mistake certain products of our imagination to be ourself and therefore real, we cannot avoid mistaking all the other products of our imagination to be equally real.
However, though our basic knowledge or consciousness ‘I am’ alone is real, and though all the other things that appear to be real borrow their seeming reality only from this consciousness, which is their underlying base and support, we are so accustomed to overlooking this consciousness and attending only to the objects or thoughts that we form in our mind by our power of imagination, that those objects and our act of knowing them appear in the distorted perspective of our mind to be more real than the fundamental consciousness that underlies them. The only reason why we suffer from this distorted perspective is that we are so enthralled by our experience of duality or otherness, believing that we can obtain real happiness only from things other than ourself, that throughout our states of mental activity, which we call waking and dream, we spend all our time attending only to such other things, and we consequently ignore or overlook our underlying consciousness ‘I am’.
This distorted perspective of our mind is what makes it so difficult for us to accept that our consciousness ‘I am’ alone is real, and that everything else is just an imagination or apparition. Whereas in our distorted perspective all our knowledge of this world appears to be solid, substantial, obvious and irrefutable, our underlying consciousness ‘I am’ appears in comparison to be something insubstantial and ethereal, something that we cannot quite know with the same degree of precision and certainty.
Happiness and The Art of Being
Michael James
Image: https://www.google.gr/search?q=true+knowledge+false+knowledge&biw=1366&bih=662&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=0ahUKEwiv9d7NlKvQAhXGWiwKHYh0DbEQ_AUIBigB#tbm=isch&q=true+knowledge+&imgdii=2YVBWQ3UkCkEIM%3A%3B2YVBWQ3UkCkEIM%3A%3Bhceda93ykX5VIM%3A&imgrc=2YVBWQ3UkCkEIM%3A
