How Do You Know That You Are Going to Die?
The self is known not through perception or inference like worldly knowledge, but by simply being it - all conceptual attempts to know the Self create the very confusion they seek to resolve.
The body knows.
Ahhm…
The body knows.
Yeah, how do you know?
You see the other one.
So, you saw the other one or you heard about it or you saw in a movie or you saw in front of you another. But how do you know you are going to die? You saw others dying, then…
You just think like you are exactly like that.
Good, so not only you need the perception, the seeming perception of another dying, you also need the inference that the same will happen to me. So, two types of knowledge are already included in this. One is your perceptual, and the second is the inferential, your conceptual. And your primitive ideas, including ideas about life and death are just this way, made 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 the 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 your Self in this way. So you can only know your Self without any of these layers of conceptual knowledge or perceptual knowledge. And the thing is that you already know your Self in that way. Nobody is truly confused about themselves. You only cannot know your Self in these ways and that is why the confusion is. Is it too confusing what I am saying? [Smiles] So, you cannot know your Self in the way you know even the concept of death. You know your Self by being your Self. 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 and we struggle.
Key Teachings
- All knowledge of the world is built from perception (what you see/hear) and inference (what you conclude), but you cannot know your Self through these mental modes
- Self-knowledge is immediate and direct - you know your Self by being your Self, not by thinking about it
- The confusion arises not from lacking Self-knowledge, but from trying to fit primal Self-knowledge into conceptual boxes
From: What Do You Intuit About Who You Are? - 29th April 2022