No. 1 “Know Thyself” (Sparked by Kalen's article, Lines of Reality and Assemblage Point)
What is knowledge? A good question to ask before believing that you actually understand “Know Thyself”!
Knowledge is not thought. And it is not something you can keep or capture in a sentence, in a book or in a memory. To know is to 'Know Directly', this instant, without the mediation of time, form or thought. In fact there is nothing one can know, apart from oneself. But 'oneself' is not an object that can be known, it is the attention that knows.
Knowledge, unlike information, cannot be collected. And yet it can 'accumulate'. Its 'accumulation' is the very same thing as the shedding of duality and multiplicity (this is Smith's area, Neo's shadow self). The Man of Knowledge is the man who is One. Neo was not the One, until he knew himself as One. But the Oracle could never tell him this, as she would have created a concept, a thought, an ideal, something beyond the totality of the present moment, and would have thus precluded the realization of One.
Like all of us Neo could never reconcile his world without reconciling himself.
In being One, a human being is everything, for he is no-thing. He is possibilities and choice, and their transformation into one another.
To 'Know Thyself' is to be a mystery to oneself; to know oneself as mystery.
To 'Know Thyself' is to shed one's solidity. The truth does not set us free, for there is no truth before freedom. To know truth one must be free of what obscures it.
In Journey to Ixtlan Don Juan tells Carlos, “You are too real.” We invest so much energy into 'keeping it together', and yet there is nothing to keep together. What if we risk letting it fall apart and attend to what remains? Then we might realize that we are none other than the Attention that knows.
To Know Thyself means to 'Be Attention'.
(Oracle, Matrix Revolutions); “Remember what you were like when you first walked through my door? Jittery as a June bug... and now, just look at you! You sure did surprise me Neo, and you still do.”
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