How Do You Know That You Are Going to Die? 22nd Apr 2019
Saar (Essence)
Ananta explains that while worldly knowledge relies on perception and inference, the Self cannot be known through these limited means. He points to a primal self-knowledge that exists prior to all concepts and sensory experiences.
You cannot know yourself through conceptual or perceptual knowledge; you know yourself by being yourself.
The idea of death is a mixture of sensory observation and mental inference, not your true nature.
Primal self-knowledge cannot be fit into a conceptual box.
contemplative
Transcript
This transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.
Let's take an example. So suppose you consider yourself to be—suppose you consider yourself to be this body, this body-man, yeah? Then how do you know that you are going to die? Yeah, how do you know that? So you saw a dead one? Are you worried about it? Or you saw in some movie, or you saw in front of you another? But how do you know? You saw others die, good. So not only do you need the perception of the—seeming perception of another dying—you also need the inference that the same will happen to me.
So both two types of knowledge are already included in this. One is your perceptual, you see, and second is the inferential, your concept, you see. And your primitive ideas including about life and death—this will wind up of these two types of ideas. Something that you saw, observed sensorially, or something that you heard conceptually, or a mixture of both of these. So the idea that 'I am going to die' is made up of both our experience—perceptual experience of this world—and a possibility to infer, 'Yes, this will also happen to me.'
Now the thing is that we got used to knowing everything in this way, but you cannot know yourself in this way. So you think, 'Can we know ourselves without any of these gears of conceptual knowledge or perceptual knowledge?' And the thing with that is you already know yourself in that way. Nobody is truly confused about themselves. You really cannot know yourselves in these ways, and that is why the confusion is. Is it too confusing?
So you cannot know yourself in the way we even know the concept of death. You know yourself by being yourself. But prior to even being, your very original nature is self-knowledge. But when you try to fit that primal self-knowledge into a conceptual box, it is not possible. It's limited.