The first essay in this series described a knowledge said to be nearer than anything: not an object somewhere in the world, but what knows every object. That raises an obvious question, and the traditions do not avoid it. If the real is so close, why do we not know it? Kabīr asks it of himself. The moon shines in his body, he says, but his blind eyes cannot see it; the drum of eternity sounds within him, but his deaf ears cannot hear it. The musk is in the deer, but it seeks it not within itself, and wanders in quest of grass.11 Kabīr, Songs of Kabir, poem VI, translated by Rabindranath Tagore: “The moon shines in my body, but my blind eyes cannot see it: / The moon is within me, and so is the sun. / The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me; but my deaf ears cannot hear it. So long as man clamours for the _I_ and the _Mine_, his works are as naught: / When all …” Read in context Rabindranath Tagore’s translation.
Every tradition that speaks of unitive knowledge also offers a diagnosis of why it is lacking. The diagnoses use different words, ignorance, forgetting, sin, heedlessness, craving, and they rest on different accounts of what a human being is. But they share a striking structure, and it matters for everything that follows. In every case the obstacle is not that the real is far away. It is something in the one who seeks it.
The simplest diagnosis is a matter of direction. The Kaṭha Upaniṣad says that the self-existent made the senses turn outward, so that a person looks out at the world and not back into the self; only a rare wise one, longing for immortality, turns the eyes inward and sees the self behind (Müller 1884, Kaṭha II.4.1). Nothing is wrong with the senses. They do what they were made to do. The difficulty is that attention follows them, and so we come to take the world of objects for the whole of what there is.
The Daodejing makes the same observation with a sharper edge. The five colours blind the eye, the five notes deafen the ear, the five flavours dull the taste, and the chase maddens the mind.22 Laozi, The Tâo Teh King, chapter 12.1, translated by James Legge: “Colour's five hues from th' eyes their sight will take; / Music's five notes the ears as deaf can make; / The flavours five deprive the mouth of taste; / The chariot course, and the wild hunting waste / Make mad the mind; and objects rare and strange, / Sought for, men's conduct will to evil change.” Read in context James Legge’s verse rendering of chapter 12. The senses are not merely turned outward; overfed, they lose the very capacity they exercise. A mind always reaching for the next sight and the next pleasure has no stillness in which anything deeper could appear.
A second family of diagnoses speaks not of looking away but of forgetting something once known. The Qurʾān tells of a covenant made before history, when God drew the descendants of Adam from their loins and asked them, am I not your Lord? and they answered, yes, we bear witness (Palmer 1880, 7:172). Human life on earth, on this reading, is lived in forgetfulness of that answer. The Sufis called the condition heedlessness (ghaflah), and named its cure remembrance (dhikr). One verse joins the two forgettings in a single line: do not be like those who forgot God, so that he made them forget themselves (Palmer 1880, 59:19).
Plato told a similar story without a covenant. In the Phaedo, Socrates argues that learning is recollection: the soul knew the forms before birth, lost that knowledge in being born, and recovers it, prompted by the senses, in what we call learning.33 Plato, Phaedo, paragraph 245, translated by Benjamin Jowett: “But if the knowledge which we acquired before birth was lost by us at birth, and if afterwards by the use of the senses we recovered what we previously knew, will not the process which we call learning be a recovering of the knowledge which is natural to us, and may not this be rightly termed recollection?” Read in context Socrates on learning as recollection, in Benjamin Jowett’s translation. Plotinus asked the further question: why did souls forget their source at all? His answer was a kind of self-assertion, a wish to belong to themselves; delighting in their own independence, they ran far from their origin and came to think themselves something other than what they are (Plotinus 1917, V.1.1).
Rūmī’s great poem opens with the same story told as music. The reed flute laments because it was cut from the reed bed, and every note it plays is longing for the place it came from (Rūmī 1887, Book I, prologue). Forgetting, in these traditions, is never complete. Something remembers, and the remembering is felt as homesickness.
A third diagnosis, central in India, says that the trouble is not forgetting a lost truth but misreading a present one. Śaṅkara calls it superimposition: we lay the qualities of the body and mind on the self that knows them, and say “I am tired”, “I am this”, as a man at dusk takes a rope for a snake (Śaṅkara 1890, Introduction). The learned call this ignorance (avidyā). It is not a gap in our information. It is a mistake in how we take what we already have, and so no amount of information can cure it.
The Buddhist traditions put ignorance (Pali avijjā) at the head of the chain of dependent origination, the links by which suffering arises, and name three poisons that keep the chain turning: greed, hatred and delusion. The Dhammapada opens by placing the whole problem in the mind. All that we are, it says, is the result of what we have thought (The Buddha 1881, v. 1). For the Buddhists the deepest mistake is not taking the self for the body, as in Śaṅkara, but taking anything at all, the body, the mind, even the self Śaṅkara affirms, as a lasting self to be grasped.
The Christian tradition names the condition sin, and the word is easily misheard as a list of bad deeds. Its contemplatives understood it more deeply: as a turning away from God toward created things, made into substitutes for what only God can give. Augustine opens his Confessions with the sentence that sums up that theology: you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you (Hippo 1838, I.1).
Later in the same book he describes the irony that the other traditions also notice. You were within, he tells God, and I was outside, and there I searched for you; you were with me, but I was not with you (Hippo 1838, X.27). The searcher looks everywhere except where the sought is. Kabīr’s musk deer, Augustine’s restless heart and the Upaniṣad’s outward-looking senses are three images of one predicament.
If the obstacle is so near, why is it so hard to remove? The traditions’ answer is that the forgetting is not only a past event but a present activity, renewed every moment. Blaise Pascal, who was no mystic of the Eastern kind, saw it in the restlessness of ordinary life: nearly all human unhappiness, he wrote, comes from not being able to sit quietly in a room. We seek diversion, he thought, precisely so as not to face the question of what we are.44 Pascal, Pensées, fragment 139 in Brunschvicg’s numbering (136 in Lafuma’s), on “diversion” (divertissement). The look outward of the Upaniṣad is not a single turn of the head. It is a habit, chosen again with every distraction.
There is a subtler difficulty, which the contemplatives knew well. The self that sets out to remember is shaped by the very habits that caused the forgetting. It seeks the real as it seeks everything else: as something to acquire, an object to grasp or an achievement to own. Huineng warned his hearers against looking for the Buddha outside their own nature, as if awakening were a thing elsewhere to be fetched (Huineng 1930, ch. 2). The seeker’s grasping is part of what hides what is sought. This is why the traditions insist that the path cannot be only a matter of effort, though it is never less than that. The effort has to be of a peculiar kind: an effort to stop doing something.
It is also why the forgetting is so comfortable. A life organized around outward things has its satisfactions, and they are real. The traditions do not say that ordinary pleasures and ambitions are worthless. They say that they cannot bear the weight we put on them, and that the restlessness Augustine describes is the sign of a demand no finite thing can meet. The forgetting persists because, most of the time, it works well enough.
One tradition reverses the vocabulary, and the reversal is instructive. For the Daoists of the Zhuangzi, the trouble is not that we have forgotten too much but that we remember too much: rules, distinctions, opinions, the whole apparatus of cleverness. In one story Confucius’s disciple Yan Hui reports his progress. He has forgotten benevolence and righteousness; then the rites and music; and finally he says that he simply sits and forgets. Asked what he means, he says he has let go of his limbs and his sharpness of hearing and sight, left his body and put away his knowledge, and become one with the great pervader. Confucius, in the story, asks to become his pupil (Zhuangzi 1891, ch. 6).
This “sitting and forgetting” is not the opposite of the other traditions’ remembering, only its mirror image. What the Daoist forgets is exactly what the others say hides the real: the outward-turned mind, the self-assertion, the habit of grasping. What the Sufi remembers is exactly what the Daoist uncovers by forgetting. Read together, the two vocabularies make one point. Something has to be let go of, and something has to be recovered, and they are two sides of a single movement.
Set side by side, the diagnoses differ in ways that matter. Ignorance is cured by knowledge; sin calls for repentance and grace; craving is uprooted by practice; forgetting is answered by remembrance. Each cure shapes a different path, and later essays in this series will follow them.
But they agree on three things, and the agreement is the heart of this essay. First, the obstacle is in the knower, not in the distance between the knower and the real. Nothing has to be brought from far away; something in us has to change. Second, the obstacle is not merely a lack but a habit or an act: looking outward, asserting oneself, grasping, turning away. We are not simply missing something; in some sense we are doing something that hides it. Third, because it is something we do, it can be undone. None of these traditions teaches that the human condition is hopeless. Each teaches that the forgetting can be reversed.
It is tempting to read these diagnoses as gloomy: humanity blind, forgetful, fallen, poisoned. The traditions read them the other way. A diagnosis that places the trouble in us also places the cure within reach. If the real were far away, most people would never arrive. If it is nearer than our own breath, then the whole journey may be shorter than we think, though not easier, because the hardest thing to change is the habit of the one who changes.
This is why so many of the traditions describe the path as a return rather than an advance. The prodigal son comes back to a house that was always his. The soul in Plotinus returns to the source it never wholly left. The Sufi remembers a covenant already made. The next essay looks at how that return begins: the turning the Greeks called metanoia, from which this journal takes its name.
Notes
1.Kabīr, Songs of Kabir, poem VI, translated by Rabindranath Tagore: “The moon shines in my body, but my blind eyes cannot see it: / The moon is within me, and so is the sun. / The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me; but my deaf ears cannot hear it. So long as man clamours for the _I_ and the _Mine_, his works are as naught: / When all …” Read in context Rabindranath Tagore’s translation. Back
2.Laozi, The Tâo Teh King, chapter 12.1, translated by James Legge: “Colour's five hues from th' eyes their sight will take; / Music's five notes the ears as deaf can make; / The flavours five deprive the mouth of taste; / The chariot course, and the wild hunting waste / Make mad the mind; and objects rare and strange, / Sought for, men's conduct will to evil change.” Read in context James Legge’s verse rendering of chapter 12. Back
3.Plato, Phaedo, paragraph 245, translated by Benjamin Jowett: “But if the knowledge which we acquired before birth was lost by us at birth, and if afterwards by the use of the senses we recovered what we previously knew, will not the process which we call learning be a recovering of the knowledge which is natural to us, and may not this be rightly termed recollection?” Read in context Socrates on learning as recollection, in Benjamin Jowett’s translation. Back
4.Pascal, Pensées, fragment 139 in Brunschvicg’s numbering (136 in Lafuma’s), on “diversion” (divertissement). Back