Once the ego sees that it only seeks what it already knows, that its desires are conditioned and that its true desire is for permanent security and tranquility, it loses its dynamism to find itself in phenomenal things. Then what is behind the desire, the ego, the mind, is revealed. We are left in wonder and all dispersed activity dissolves in this wonderment.
I am, Jean Klein, compiled and edited by Emma Edwards, Non-Duality Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0-9551762-7-2. Buy from Amazon US, Buy from Amazon UK
Recently, Ramesam and I had an exchange on this issue:
Martin: It has been said that ‘you cannot love a thing unless you know it, and you cannot know a thing unless you love it’ – I cannot remember the source…
Ramesam: Maybe you are hinting at the root “pratyabhijna” (re-cognition) that we all have within us unknown to us . Remember the famous story of the lion cub brought up by a herd of sheep “recognizing” its true nature once it heard the ‘roar’ of a lion unlike the usual bleat of the sheep… Shankara gives some similar explanation in his commentary to the verse 16 in Ch II in Bhagavad-Gita, if my memory serves me right.
[‘What does not exist cannot come into existence, and what does exist cannot cease to exist, but that place where existence and nonexistence meet can be seen by those who see things as they are.’ Bh G, 2.16]
Martin: Exactly! That verse is illuminating. Same as with Socrates – and Plato’s – teaching in that respect (you may know that Socrates was Plato’s mentor – and a model of what a philosopher should be; how he should live).
Plato has the same teaching in his Dialogue Meno. He elicits from a young illiterate, unlearned slave correct answers to mathematical questions put to him. This is ‘anamnesis’ (recollection), a term well known in Western philosophy since Plato. By the way, this is the term for what medical doctors do: asking questions to elicit answers from their patients, which is central to a ‘clinical history’. Similar to the Socratic method, but as applied to a clinical set-up. Socrates’ mother was a midwife, and he called his own method ‘maieutic’: ‘delivery’ – delivering philosophical definitions, rather than babies, in the way to knowledge. The several definitions offered by his interviewees during a particular dialogue never came to a conclusion (aporia), and were rejected one by one; most of Plato’s dialogues end that way (What is Justice? What is knowledge? Can virtue be taught?, etc.)