Knowing by Becoming

Over the entrance to the temple of Apollo at Delphi, the Greeks carved two words: know thyself. Most readers take them as practical advice, a call to know one’s strengths and limits. The contemplative traditions have read them more radically. To know oneself, they say, is not to gather information about a person called by one’s name. It is to discover what is doing the knowing, and that discovery, they claim, is the most important knowledge a human being can have, because it changes the one who has it.

This is the first of seven essays on that claim. Together they follow the path the traditions describe: what this knowledge is, why we lack it, how the turning toward it begins, the purification and the practices it requires, the darkness it passes through, and what is found at the end and brought back into ordinary life. This first essay asks the simplest question, and the one most often skipped: what kind of knowledge is meant at all?

Three ways of knowing salt§

Consider three ways of knowing salt. A chemist knows that it is sodium chloride, that it dissolves in water, that it forms cubic crystals. That is knowledge about salt: true statements that could be written down and taught to someone who has never seen it. A cook knows salt differently. She knows its taste, how much a dish wants, how it sharpens sweetness. That is knowledge by acquaintance, and no description fully conveys it; a person who has never tasted salt does not know what the chemist’s sentences leave out.

The Chāndogya Upaniṣad uses salt to point to a third way. A father, Uddālaka, tells his son Śvetaketu to put a lump of salt in water and bring it back in the morning. The son cannot find the salt; it has dissolved. The father tells him to sip from the top of the water, from the middle and from the bottom. Each time it is salty. The salt is there everywhere, the father says, though you do not see it. So too the subtle essence of all things is present everywhere, though unseen; that is the real, that is the self, and that thou art (Müller 1879, Chāndogya 6.13).

The lesson turns on the difference between the second and third kinds of knowing. Śvetaketu can taste the salt, but he cannot hold it up and look at it, because it has become one with the water. The Upaniṣad’s claim is that the deepest reality is like that: not an object anywhere in the world, but what pervades everything, including the one who looks for it. It cannot be found as a thing among things. It can only be known, if at all, in the way the water knows the salt: by being permeated by it, and finally by recognizing that it was never absent.

The knower that cannot be known§

Another Upaniṣad states the difficulty directly. In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, the sage Yājñavalkya tells a questioner that he cannot see the seer of seeing, nor hear the hearer of hearing, nor think the thinker of thinking (Müller 1884, Bṛhadāraṇyaka 3.4.2). Elsewhere he asks his wife Maitreyī the question that sums up the whole problem: by what should one know that by which all this is known? By what should one know the knower? (Müller 1884, Bṛhadāraṇyaka 2.4.14)

The point is not mystical in the vague sense. It is close to a point of logic. Every act of ordinary knowing has a knower and something known. If what we are looking for is the knower itself, it cannot be found as one more known thing, any more than an eye can see itself without a mirror. Whatever we find when we look for the self, a thought, a feeling, an image of ourselves, is already something seen, and therefore not the seer.

The Daoist classic opens with a parallel warning about the ultimate itself. The Way that can be trodden, it says, is not the enduring and unchanging Way; the name that can be named is not the enduring name.¹1 Laozi, The Tâo Teh King, chapter 1.1, translated by James Legge: “The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name.” Read in context The opening of the Tâo Teh King in James Legge’s translation. Whatever the traditions call it, Brahman, the One, God, the Way, they agree that it is not an object that could stand before the mind to be inspected. If it can be known, it must be known in a way that does not turn it into an object.

Like knows like§

Greek philosophy offered a principle that explains how such knowledge might be possible. Knowing, Aristotle observed, is not a mirror passively receiving an image. In knowing, the mind takes on the form of what it knows; the soul is, in a way, all the things it knows.²2 Aristotle, On the Soul III.8 (431b21), our paraphrase. Aristotle adds that the soul receives the form of things without their matter, as wax receives the shape of a seal without its metal. Plato drew the moral consequence: only what is pure can touch what is pure, so the soul that would know the highest things must first become like them (Plato 1892, 67b).

Plotinus put it in an image that later contemplatives never forgot. No eye ever saw the sun without first becoming sunlike, and no soul can see the beautiful without becoming beautiful. Whoever would see God and beauty must first become godlike and beautiful (Plotinus 1917, I.6.9). Knowing and being rise together. The more like the known the knower becomes, the more it can know; and at the limit, where the likeness is complete, knower and known are no longer two.

This is the sense in which the traditions speak of knowledge by becoming. In Plato’s Symposium, Diotima tells Socrates that the lover who has climbed from beautiful bodies to beauty itself will bring forth not images of virtue but true virtue, because he is in touch not with an image but with the reality.³3 Plato, Symposium, paragraph 140, translated by Benjamin Jowett: “'He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who has learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes toward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty (and this, Socrates, is the final cause of all our former toils)--a nature which in the first place is everlasting, not …” Read in context The summit of Diotima’s ladder of love, in Benjamin Jowett’s translation. The vision does not leave the one who sees it unchanged. It makes him what he sees.

A knowledge that changes the knower§

If this is right, unitive knowledge differs from ordinary knowledge in its effects as well as its object. Ordinary knowledge can be had by anyone, whatever their character: a cruel person can master chemistry. The knowledge the contemplatives describe is said to be inseparable from a change in character. The Imitation of Christ puts it with deliberate bluntness: its author would rather feel contrition than be skilful in the definition of it.⁴4 Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, paragraph 1.1.3, translated by William Benham: “What doth it profit thee to enter into deep discussion concerning the Holy Trinity, if thou lack humility, and be thus displeasing to the Trinity? For verily it is not deep words that make a man holy and upright; it is a good life which maketh a man dear to God. I had rather feel contrition than be skilful in …” Read in context From the first chapter of the Imitation, in William Benham’s translation. The point is not that definitions are worthless, but that the knowledge that matters is the one that is lived.

The Sufis loved a saying they attributed to the Prophet: whoever knows himself knows his Lord.⁵5 Arabic man ʿarafa nafsahu faqad ʿarafa rabbahu. Hadith scholars generally do not accept it as a saying of the Prophet, but it was widely quoted by Sufi writers, among them Ibn ʿArabī, as a summary of the path. The Buddhist traditions speak of seeing things as they really are, and hold that such seeing is itself freedom from the craving that binds. In each case knowledge and transformation are one event. That is why every tradition that speaks of this knowledge also speaks of its fruits, and judges claims to it by them. A teacher who claims union with God and is arrogant, grasping or cruel has, by the traditions’ own standards, refuted the claim. By their fruits, the Gospel says, you shall know them.⁶6 Matthew 7:16.

What it is not§

Because the subject invites confusion, it helps to say what unitive knowledge is not, by the traditions’ own accounts.

It is not information. It cannot be passed on as a statement, however true, because a statement is something known, and what is meant is the knowing itself. This is why the traditions are full of warnings about words. He who knows does not speak, says the Daodejing, and he who speaks does not know (Laozi 1891, ch. 56). The warning is not against teaching, which every tradition practises, but against mistaking the map for the territory.

It is not belief. Most paths begin with trust: in a teacher, a scripture, a tradition’s report that the journey is worth making. But trust is the beginning, not the end. The Psalmist does not say “believe that the Lord is good” but “taste and see”.⁷7 Psalm 34:8. The contemplative traditions use the language of taste, sight and touch because they mean something known at first hand.

It is not merely an experience. Vivid states, visions, raptures and feelings of oneness are reported in every tradition, and every tradition treats them with caution. They come and go; they can be counterfeited; they can feed the very self-importance the path is meant to dissolve. John of the Cross, the most exacting of Christian guides, told his readers to set no store by visions at all, even true ones.⁸8 John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, book II, chapter 11. Zen teachers give similar warnings about the vivid states that arise in meditation. What the traditions value is not a passing state but an abiding change in how one knows and lives.

And it is not an escape from the world. Kabīr’s God tells the seeker that he is neither in temple nor in mosque, nor in rites and renunciations, but beside him, to be met in a moment by a true seeker.⁹9 Kabīr, Songs of Kabir, poem I, translated by Rabindranath Tagore: “O servant, where dost thou seek Me? / Lo! I am beside thee. / I am neither in temple nor in mosque: I am neither in Kaaba nor in Kailash: / Neither am I in rites and ceremonies, nor in Yoga and renunciation. / If thou art a true seeker, thou shalt at once see Me: thou shalt meet Me …” Read in context The first of the Songs of Kabīr, in Rabindranath Tagore’s translation. Emerson, crossing a bare common at twilight, finds all mean egotism vanish, and becomes, in his famous phrase, a transparent eyeball, part or particle of God.¹⁰10 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, paragraph 1.4: “To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to …” Read in context From the first chapter of Emerson’s Nature (1836). What is known is not elsewhere. It is here, unrecognized.

One knowledge, or many?§

It would be dishonest to end the definition without admitting a difficulty that will run through this whole series. The traditions agree on the form of this knowledge, that it is knowledge by becoming, which overcomes the separateness of the knower. They do not agree on what is found when that separateness is overcome.

For Advaita Vedānta, the self discovers that it is, and always was, Brahman: the knowledge is identity. For most Christian, Jewish and Islamic contemplatives, and for Vedānta schools such as Madhva’s, the soul is united with God in love and will but remains a creature: the knowledge is communion. For Madhyamaka Buddhism, what is seen is that nothing, including any supposed absolute, has a self-nature at all: the knowledge is of emptiness. These are not three ways of saying the same thing, and we will not pretend that they are. The seventh essay of this series returns to them. For now it is enough to see that the traditions disagree about the destination while describing remarkably similar journeys.

Why it is a path§

If unitive knowledge were information, one could simply be told it. If it were belief, one could simply decide to hold it. Because it is knowledge by becoming, it can only be reached by becoming: by a change in the one who knows. That is why the traditions do not offer a doctrine alone. They offer a way, and they describe its stages with remarkable agreement.

The next essay begins where the traditions begin: with the question of why we do not already know what is said to be so close. Their answers, ignorance, forgetfulness, sin, heedlessness, the restless mind, differ in vocabulary and in theology. But they agree that the obstacle is not distance. It is something in the knower, and it can be undone.