**\#️⃣ Tags:** #Wisdom #Presence > **🌱 Planted:** Sun 16 February 2025 --- > [!quote] > The Godhead is never an object of its own knowledge. Just as a knife doesn’t cut itself, fire doesn’t burn itself, light doesn’t illuminate itself. It’s always an endless mystery to itself. — Alan Watts [[The mind can never know reality as it truly is]], so it then follows that we can't truly know ourselves through the mind. The opposite of knowing this way is through direct experience, which is the only way we can truly know reality, and therefore ourselves. Unlike knowing through the intellect, which distances us from what it thinks it knows, direct experience is an immediate, whole and intimate felt sense of knowing. It doesn't stand apart from anything it knows, because it *is* what it knows. In our direct experience, subject-object polarisations collapse and dissolve into a knowing that they are not separate—they are one. When we're in this delicate and intimate space, we can recognise that everything which arises in our experience—perception, emotion, concepts, ideas, beliefs—are both arising from and within [[Presence]] itself. Just like a wave is not separate from the ocean from which it arises. When the mind undergoes this subject-object dissolution, this is known as **dereification**—the undoing of its tendency to take the dynamic, fluid nature of life and solidify it into fixed concepts. For us to truly know reality and therefore know ourselves, we need to not only meet it directly, but **be** it. --- **🈁 See Also:** - [[Never mistake the finger for the moon]] - [[Object Relations]] shows us how [[Self-Concept|Our sense of self unfolds intersubjectively]] through a series of complex interactions and mental representations of our selves and others, but in order for us to truly know who and what we are, we have to experience it directly rather than know about it through mental images. This happens when our [[Developmental Needs]] are met in early development and we’re able to form a healthy, stable and cohesive sense of self.