The Hallucination of Knower and Known
La alucinación del conocedor y lo conocido
A student asks the teacher to describe what is meant by "intimacy" in the context of direct experience, prompting an exploration of how thought creates the illusion of a separate knower and a known.
The Hallucination of Knower and Known
A student asks the teacher to describe what is meant by "intimacy" in the context of direct experience, prompting an exploration of how thought creates the illusion of a separate knower and a known.
I know, or at least I think I know, what you're pointing at when you say "intimacy," but I would love to hear how you would describe what you mean by that.
It is a bit like talking about what can only barely be described. Intimacy is a kind of knowing, relating, and experiencing where what you're knowing is so close that there isn't a knower and a known.
The knower as hallucination
It's really impossible to describe, but the experience of a knower and a known is actually a kind of hallucination. It is something that happens with thought, and it's a hallucination because a part of us chooses to believe that it's real.
For example, I look behind this screen and I see a pillow. My laptop is in the bedroom on the bed. I see a pillow, and there is a thought "pillow" and a thought "I." But the "I" is a thought that is really subtle, just an image. The difference for me, before and after, is that before, that was the only way to know the pillow.
The image of the "I," you mean?
The image of the pillow and the image of the "I."