Yes, self-knowledge is as much about one particular brain’s behavior as it is about the behavior of all human brains. Each brain is peculiar and unique, but all human brains are conditioned the same way, i.e., to give my brain the authority to decide/choose what is true, good, and right.
It all begins with taking possession of the brain because the brain can’t be mine until I is believed to exist. Once the brain believes it is subject to something it has imagined (I, God, a demon or an angel), it is subject to belief, which means believing is its problem - not what it believes.
So if the brain can’t discern the difference between what it believes to be true or false and what is self-evidently or demonstrably true or false, it is effectively lost and desperate enough to believe anything.
Can’t the brain ‘keep an open mind’ about radical statements that may be true but haven’t been verified such as: You are the world, you are nothing (not-a-thing), you don’t exist etc , because it believes that the source of these statements is reputable and trustworthy?
Even though its own beliefs / convictions / conditionings are diametrically opposed?
Yes, but how open can it be about its core beliefs, I, me, mine, without undermining everything it is? The conditioned brain is determined to keep the faith.
Is it a ‘determination’ to keep the I, me, mine or that it is helpless to do anything about it even if it sees theoretically that this conditioned belief is radically limiting its potential to “participate in the Immensity”? It can’t ‘do’ anything about it. The ‘desire’ to change IS the conditioning.
So…K. “Change is the denial of change”.
(The brain is always ‘trying’ to change but any ‘change’ is just more of the same?)
So…What is there to ‘get’…that K said, nobody got?
I think that ‘getting it’ is realizing that the ‘whole bundle’ has to go. Lock stock and barrel. Self, thought, can’t help itself , and has to keep searching, trying, digging the hole deeper…it can’t ‘reform’ itself…now everything has to be looked at from the vantage point of simple awareness of what the I, me, mine is doing in any moment. That non-judge mental awareness ‘cares’ what has happened to the brain, the predicament that for whatever reason, it has gotten itself into. To bring as much as possible of it into the light…that the brain can emerge from the
‘conditioned state’, if that’s what it is in.
When everything can “be looked at from the vantage point of simple awareness”, the brain is already on “the other side”, beyond I, me, mine, but our concern is that the brain is stuck here in its prison of self.