“The Known” IS Freedom

One of K’s famous books and teachings was titled “Freedom from the Known.” But, as with all words, “known” can be a paradox of sorts. Rupert Spira uses the word (pointer) to establish the relationship of Awareness and Experience. Here is a small excerpt from Rupert’s latest Essay/Dialogue published this month in the SAND 2014 Newsletter, “The Nature of Experience.” I found it very compelling and recommend reading the entire essay. Here is the link.  “Our only experiential knowledge of the world is perception – sights, sounds, tastes, textures and smells. In fact, nobody has ever found an independently existing object or world; all that is ever found are perceptions. We cannot therefore even say we have perceptions of the world because that world has never been found. We can only say for sure that we know perceptions. And perceptions are never known independently of Awareness. This is the startling but simple fact of experience that our culture has not yet faced: matter, the dead inert stuff out of which the independently existing universe is supposed to be made, has never been found. Matter is a concept, a valuable concept that is useful as a working model in some situations, but nevertheless a concept. It has never been found. Nor will it ever be found for whatever is found is, by definition, never known independently of Awareness. In fact, even the model of thoughts, sensations and perceptions appearing in Awareness does not stand up to the scrutiny of experience. It is a half way stage that dissolves the belief in the independent reality of matter and mind and establishes the presence and the primacy of Awareness. But once this has been established, not philosophically but in our actual experience, this model too has to be abandoned in favor of one that more accurately reflects the reality of experience. All we know of a thought is the experience of thinking, all we know of a sensation is the experience of sensing, all we know of a sight is the experiencing of seeing, all we know of a sound is the experience of hearing etc. And all that is known of thinking, sensing, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling is the knowing of them. And what is it that knows this knowing? Only something that itself has the capacity to know could know anything. So it is knowing that knows knowing. All that is ever known is pure knowing, knowing and being itself. And that knowing is your self. All that is known is Awareness knowing itself, the self knowing the self. There is only your self – not a self that belongs to any object or person because there are no objects or people as such to which it could belong. This knowing belongs to itself alone. It is itself and knows itself alone. There are no others or objects there, no inside self or outside world. And what is the name we commonly give to this absence of otherness, distance, separation and objectness? It is beauty or love. Beauty is the discovery that objects are not objects; love is the discovery that others are not others.”