Salvadore Poe clearly distinguishes between thinking, understanding, and knowing, noting that they operate on completely different levels of experience:
knowing
Knowing (Pure Knowing / Essential Mind)
- Synonymous with Direct Being: Pure knowing is not an intellectual activity, a collection of information, or a state to attain; it is synonymous with being itself (Satchitananda / pure subjective consciousness).
- Wordless and Self-Luminous: It requires no thoughts, concepts, words, or objects to be aware of itself—it is completely self-evident and self-illuminating.
- The “Vast Unknown”: While understanding relies on “the known,” pure knowing rests as the “vast unknown”—free from mental constructs, definitions, or personal stories.
- True Living Intelligence: Essential mind is empty, timeless, eternal, and represents the true living intelligence of life prior to any added cultural or personal impressions.
thinking
Thinking (The Thought-Based Mind)
- Robotic and Mechanical: Thoughts are non-sentient, mechanical replays of recorded data, past impressions, and sensory memories.
- Creates the Illusion of “I”: Thoughts almost always revolve around a self-referential narrative (“me,” my problems, my past, my future). When pure being attaches to these thoughts, the “rising I” or “phantom self” is born.
- Ephemeral Waves: Thoughts are merely temporary, fleeting movements—like waves appearing on the surface of the ocean—that come and go without altering the true substance of being.
understanding
Understanding (The Mind’s Attempt to Know)
- Cannot Deliver Freedom: Intellectual or philosophical understanding cannot lead to liberation because it only reifies the “understander”. Freedom is the “peace that passes understanding”—it doesn’t satisfy the questioner with a verbal answer, but ends the questioner entirely.
- Clinging to “The Known”: Understanding is the mind’s effort to define, explain, categorize, or figure out life. It seeks explanations (such as karma, destiny, or spiritual mechanisms) to gain a mental sense of security.
- The Need to Understand IS the Ego: Poe emphasizes that the need to understand is not something the ego possesses; rather, the need to understand is what the ego actually is in that moment. The rising “I” uses concepts and philosophical data to maintain its own existence.
