The Unknowable You

You can never know yourself directly. Every means you have of perceiving yourself is always in contrast to a past version of yourself. In other words, you can only think of yourself in retrospect, in hindsight.

The person you are reflecting upon no longer exists. They may look like you, feel like you, think and talk like you but that person is gone. The ‘you’ that is here right now in this very moment is beyond the grasp of your mind and intellect. Similarly, the version of the world and of other people you hold in your mind has already expired. To see into the present is to see without any knowledge of what it is you are witnessing. It is a perspective devoid of any conceptions or abstractions. This perspective is fresh, innocent and vibrantly alive.

The mind can only deal with dead and static images. It uses the limited tools of language and imagery to comprehend the vastness of reality. The English language contains approximately 230,000 words, of which the average person's vocabulary register less than 10%. And yet words, are what we use to define ourselves, other people, our world.

That voice in your head, that thought stream, that incessantly playing background monologue that is the foundation of your entire self-concept - is nothing more than a limited, rudimentary and clumsy combination of a few meaningless words. What you are, is so much vaster, so much more complex, subtle and infinitely more profound than anything language can aspire to. And yet you believe in the words you tell yourself. Yet, you place value upon opinions as if a bunch of sentences could actually capture even a microscopic fragment of your reality.

If a child asked you to construct a model of the entire Universe from 230,000 Lego pieces could you do it? And if you could would you feel satisfied that what you have created adequately represents the reality of what the Universe is for that child? What about if you had to construct a human being out of 230,000 Lego pieces? Would you believe that this would give the child a realistic sense of what it means to be human?

Words are no more than symbols. They represent reality but are not reality. A word is as much reality as a pink ribbon is cancer and as a flag is a nation. Your mind is nothing more than a processor of information. It's only function is to create abstractions which only serve to disconnect you from what is actually happening. The only way to reconnect is to let go of your reliance on your thoughts. Use your mind but don't be used by it. Re-establish yourself as master of the house.

What you truly are is only available to you in this instant. You cannot see it or know it. You can only be it.