What You Cannot Be Sure Of
Lo que no puedes saber con certeza
A reflection on how everything known about being human appears within awareness, and how questioning our deepest assumptions can open the door to unimaginable freedom.
What You Cannot Be Sure Of
A reflection on how everything known about being human appears within awareness, and how questioning our deepest assumptions can open the door to unimaginable freedom.
This can be known. And once it's known, it is recognized as something that was always this way. That is why it's not described as achieved or attained. It's described as realized, recognized. It is also described as remembered, because it's there already.
Everything known is appearing
I think the best direction is to see what it is to be human. Everything that you know about being human is being known and experienced, so you cannot be only that. Everything I know about being human is being known and experienced. It's appearing. This is a way in which it's pointed to: it's appearing in your awareness.
We can make the experience a distortion, which is "I am a human being that has consciousness inside of it." But the reality of our experience is that there is an empty seeing, an empty knowing, within which a human in a world is appearing. What I'm talking about is a very big leap, an undoing of an interpretation. It can bring up a lot of thought, arguments, and resistance.
The assumption of localized awareness
The idea is that the awareness or consciousness perceiving this experience of being human is not localized. We make an interpretation, an assumption, that it emerges from the body. That happens because of something natural in how this organism develops and evolves, but there is also interpretation. It is the way in which we are educated, with the name and the form. And it is all based on assumptions. There is no proof.
A thought experiment
The way you can play with this, if you want to, knowing that you are a very smart, rational person, is to find ways in which to debunk the beliefs intellectually. For example, I can present to you a thought experiment. Is it possible that you are a creature in another world, with five arms, who has gone into and submerged into a virtual reality so that only your awareness remains and your memory is paused? And in that virtual reality, you appear as a baby and you grow up.
I'm not saying that's the truth. I'm saying you cannot be sure that's not happening. You cannot find any evidence against it. I'm not inventing this myself. This is the basis of many works of fiction and philosophical explorations. The simulation theories of consciousness, the films built on this premise. The point of it is not which version is the truth. The point is to see that you can't really know.
And this is not just for philosophical entertainment. There is actually something really profound when contemplating that. There is a possibility of an unimaginable freedom and peace.