The idea “know thyself” really means that the person who truly knows himself will realize that self itself is an illusion. That the self is an illusory way of experiencing reality. We cannot see/live reality until we do away with that which impedes us from seeing it as it really is; and this is the ego, or self—either of which are, ultimately, illusions.
So, in this way, Kant, and Spinoza, and the Buddha, were right. The mind of which Kant speaks does exist (as what we call ego), and it is imperative for us to recognize this. But where Kant stopped, what Kant did not address (the nature of what that mind is) is where Spinoza and the Buddha come in. Mind, or ego, does exist, but it exists as an illusion. What Kant showed us is that we cannot begin to address the world—or reality—itself before recognizing that how we see it is in the way and colors everything in our worlds. The Buddha and Spinoza showed us that the only way to see things as they really are is to see the mind and the ego and the self as they really are, which is as illusions. This is why it is so important to see illusions, to not ignore them, but to seek them out, for only by finding the illusions of our conditioned existences can we see the reality of which the illusion is a distortion.
The ultimate illusion seems to be the self. This is what Socrates maybe knew, and what Descartes and Kant helped move forward, (or backward, towards ancient “Eastern” “philosophies” and “religions” which already knew this, at least better than we do these days in this kind of society). This is also why the Euro-American espousing of individuality is counter-productive, for it is on the wrong track. The more we separate ourselves from each other and our environments the further away we get from seeing things as they really are, and the further away we get from being free of our illusion-based prisons, and the prisons of Kant’s metaphysics.
If people really want freedom, therefore, they need to change their understanding of freedom, which is part of what we can learn from Spinoza. For freedom is both being free “from” something and being free “to do” something. They are one and the same, and cannot exist without the other. This is why Americans who espouse the freedom of “individuality” and “personal property” are ignorant, misguided, and hypocritical, for it is these concepts themselves which keep them from being free.
Americans do not really want freedom, for it would mean that they would see the concepts and ideas they hold so dear as the illusions and frauds that they really are. They are scared to do this, they are too weak to do this, they are too selfish to do this. European-American “progress” is, actually, nothing of the sort. It is rather a regression, a cancer of ignorance masked as progressive intelligence that is spreading over the world on the crest of the wave of capitalist and “democratic” economics.
An antidote is found in the doing of the teachings of true Buddhadharma (which starts with, and can essentially be summarized as, “think/see for yourself”), or, said another way, in awakening; but it is not flashy, it does not cater to the egos that stand guard in people, and so they will be reticent to consider it. Such are the wily workings of the ego.
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From my personal notes, 11/15/99.
