Being

Further to the previous post, I’d been thinking about why the basic pair of complementary postulates in the mind is Know and Be Known, instead of anything else. Is this an arbitrary? Could it be something different in another universe?

But, of course!

Know and Be Known are the two essential properties of Life, the one thing that ultimately exists. They add up to BEING.

” … yet always a twoness in that many. And that twoness so near unite to oneness as sense to spirit, yet so as not to confound to unity the very heart and being of God, who is Two in One and One in Two.” – E.R. Eddison, The Mezentian Gate.

The duality of knowing and being known can explain the duality of self and not-self. Why am I sure that I exist? Because I can know (sense, see, feel, understand) things. Why am I sure that those things exist objectively outside me? Because they can be known (sensed, seen, felt, understood).

These are also are the two sides of the communication cycle: that is, receipt point and source point.

In Eddison’s novel The Mezentian Gate, Life has created a universe of experience by dividing itself into Love and Beauty, the knower and the known. Similarly, all our experience in this universe that we inhabit depends on a division into self and not-self. That division opens the door to the possibility of games, aberration and all the states of woe. But if the two were collapsed into one without division there would be no consciousness.

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