Yes, but it was always practical, necessary knowledge until it became psychological knowledge. We’ve made the transition from necessary thought to superfluous thought. That is, we’re
less concerned with actual survival than with virtual survival. We’d rather our self-image survive than our actuality because so much of what is actual is artificial. So much on earth is man-made that we are made-up, too.
**That seems to be a different issue than what the question is asking.
Self-knowledge isn’t “knowledge about myself”. It’s awareness of what the mind does to protect and promote the interests of what it believes to be true.
A belief is an emotional investment in something questionable or false, and self-knowledge is awareness of and attention to the mind’s dependency on beliefs.
A way to consider ‘psychological knowledge’ is as the personal and inherited accumulation of experience, belief, information, etc., around an illusory center,‘me’ or a ‘self-image’ or the ‘ego’. Self knowledge is the awareness of this limited complex or ‘false reality’. It is, as I see it, a sort of ‘prison’ of the mind…or a web where the struggle to escape only serves to strengthen the illusion that it is indeed reality.
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Does not psychological knowledge determine what is perceived? Are we not imaging an awareness that is other than the content of our consciousness?
I think we all can agree that conditioned thought is the de facto means of perception. Conditioned thought being all the psychological knowledge I think of as “me”.
What then is meant by self-knowledge? Is ‘self-knowledge’ possible as long as psychological knowledge is present? Side-stepping our personal reality in order to observe it? What is doing the side-stepping? Is it not more conditioned thought? As long as conditioning is present it seems to me we are going to be looking through conditioning, however adroitly we think we are looking. There is no choice in the matter. Our actual lives are a testament to that.
I would say Emile that it is awareness itself. Separate from the conditioned reactions of judgement, comparisons, condemnations,etc. JK poetically described it beautifully as “the flight of the eagle, leaving no trace”…
It is a movement with no resistance to ‘what is’. For me there is another description of this state of ‘seeing’ or observation that attempts to put it into words: “Man hath not where to lay his head”.
As I see it, it is our neglected ‘birthright’.
There’s no “side-stepping” in self-knowledge because, despite the illusory self, the actuality of what’s happening is undeniable in the moment, and the moment is all there is.
If it’s true that, “As long as conditioning is present… we are going to be looking through conditioning, however adroitly we think we are looking”, we must literally look through our conditioning to see it for what it is.
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