Pure Knowing Doesn’t Need a Knower
Pure knowing is not an act of someone grasping something. It is not the product of a subject meeting an object. It is not knowledge stored, processed, or owned. What we call “pure knowing” is an immediacy so complete that the categories of knower and known dissolve before they ever arise.
The mind insists there must be someone behind the recognition, a witness who stands apart. Yet such a witness is already a thought, an echo of division layered upon the seamlessness of awareness. The attempt to locate the knower is like searching for the horizon; you will find only a mirage created by perspective.
What reveals itself is astonishingly simple: knowing shines without support. No owner is required. No identity need arise. It is self-luminous, unmediated, without origin or destination. Thought may try to grasp it, but thought cannot enter here. The moment a “me” claims it, the purity is veiled, dressed in commentary, weighed down by explanation.
This does not deny the human experience of learning, remembering, and perceiving. It only points to the fact that beneath all those movements lies a ground untouched by them. That ground is knowing itself—silent, radiant, and free from the necessity of a knower.
To glimpse this is to taste liberation, not as a reward, not as a possession, but as the natural state that was never absent. What remains is not someone who knows, but knowing itself, unbroken and unclaimed.
Morgan O. Smith
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Morgan O. Smith 