Knower and Known

By Jackson Peterson

The really good news is that you are always the Knower and are never the known.  

The “known” includes:  the body, mind, thoughts, dreams, hallucinations, self-images, the feeling of personal identity as the “I” or “me”, all emotional and mental states, all perceptions, all sensations, all feelings, subtle energy bodies, prana, matter, energy, quantum fields and all universes or in simpler terms;  the Knower is never anything experienced nor the experience itself. 

This is like always being the bright clarity of a mirror, where the unchanging mirror can never be any reflection appearing in it. 

Identification which produces all the vagaries of confused suffering, is when a reflection believing it is the identity of the mirror, appears and is known within the mirror. 

The confused identification wasn’t an aspect of the mirror, but was fully within the thought construct of the separate reflection appearing within the mirror, like a character in a dream felt as “me”.  The dreaming mind wasn’t confused, only its projection of the self in the dream was projected as a confused “misidentified self”. 

Therefore, it can be seen that the Knower (you), never forgot itself nor became identified with any possible “known”. 

Liberation only applies to the imagined dream character who is suffering or the reflection, but liberation has no meaning for the Knower;  who has never been in bondage. 

The dualizing “mental constructs” of “subject/object” can vanish from the mind, but the Knower is permanent and never dies, changes or ceases.  

Identifying oneself as being the permanent Knower:

Is something “knowing” the appearance of the little black letters written here in front of your eyes? If so, that’s the permanent Knower that’s knowing that.

All the appearances of every kind appearing in consciousness are all just thought-constructs generated via the brain and its neural networks as predetermined and unchangeable.