Recognition is the convergence of knowing and being.
There is a fundamental duality that underlies our everyday understanding of ourselves. This duality is a distinction that separates our intuitive knowing capacity, our awareness, from our seemingly similar but different knowledge of our existence.
If you didn’t exist would it be possible to know anything?
Conversly, if you didn’t have the capacity to know would existence even be possible?
If there were no one around to know anything would anything at all exist?
The point here is that knowing and being, or knowledge and existence, go hand in hand. You can’t have one without the other.
Someone might point out that rocks and dirt for instance are not aware, but something is aware of them…what is that? There must be awareness, something which knows for existence to be perceived. This doesn’t necessarily mean the object itself must be aware. Awareness isn’t local anyway…if reality is One! Therefore we can step back from this question of inanimate objects and recognize that existence is the content of the knowing of awareness.
Awareness is one whether it’s the awareness of apparently conscious people, animals, plant life, or even rocks. But this is not the way we usually conceive of awareness. We’ve misunderstood the nature of Awareness and therefore ourselves.
The misunderstanding goes something like this: “I’m aware and I know that I exist, but that isn’t enough. I need to know what existence is, and who I am. So, when I think about it I can see that I am this person who exists in this world at this particular time. No one is like me, I am special, unique, separate; I’m my own person.”
We might call this misunderstanding, this basic duality, simply individuality. In other words we are not content with the pure, infinite, free, knowing of our being. We can’t be happy in the wide open spaciousness of indistinct knowingness. We are aware, we know, but we feel we must know something.
So it is, that based completely on this fundamental duality we split the unitary Oneness of knowing and being into a separate, divided, lacking, limited, finite, local point of consciousness called I. We think one thought “I am” and are not satisfied so we become something. This duality creates thingness, an I who knows things.
When we put ourselves to the task of recognition, the investigation of Awareness, we are really approaching this most basic of distinctions. We begin with a world apart from us; that’s not hard to take as not us – neti, neti. We then move to the body, then the senses, and finally the mental sphere. We see that we are none of these things, what we truly are must be that which remains.
The remainder is this basic intuition that we exist and know that we exist. This is what we mean when we simply say “I am” without attaching any what to the sentence. Beyond any specific knowledge we simply are and with the utmost deep conviction we know this to be true!
The final frontier that separates us from the recognition of, and the abiding in our true nature is this first duality. This distinction gives birth to every other distinction. I humbly implore you to seriously consider what’s being shared here. Investigate this little distinction between knowing and being. It seems so indiscriminate, we’ve always overlooked it. We’ve assumed it to be true right? Because you know, everything else depends on it!
It’s similar to a complex math problem. If you get one small calculation wrong at the beginning the answer in the end will always be wrong. By dividing our infinite nature into a limited point of awareness everything that can come after is by necessity limited. In the end we are left with infinite of distinctions, which never adds up to One. It’s always I separate from you.
But when the first duality is seen to be the last duality there remains only one course: to allow the convergence of your innate knowingness and beingness. You recognize what you are apart from what, who, when, and where. You see the ever present Oneness that constitutes the unity of knowledge and existence as a direct and immediate experience. Through recognition there is only the identification with what you truly are, none of this or that….simply and only the Awareness that it all happens in. That’s what you are.
Tat Tvam Asi – Thou Art That
