You'll only know once you know

[PolyPeter]

Hi everyone

@Leo Gura's recent point (blog entry) about science is right, and I love where it goes if you follow it all the way, because it goes to God, and it gently dissolves a move a lot of us here keep reaching for, myself included.

The point: "science is humble" is not a scientific statement. There's no experiment that returns "science is honest." You can't use science to check science's own honesty, because that check would need to be trusted too, and the only thing vouching for it is more science. The system can't step outside itself to vouch for itself. He's right. Science crowned itself.

Now follow it all the way, because it doesn't stop at science. This is a property of any framework at all.

No system certifies its own ground from the inside.

When a framework tries to fully capture what makes its own capturing possible, it can only climb one more level and meet the same wall, point at some outside framework and just move the problem there, or quietly drop the line between what it represents and what lets it represent and stop being a framework.

So the same blade that dethrones science touches this forum, this post, and yes, Leo's blog. "Consciousness is God," said as a sentence, is a representation, and no representation certifies its own ground. No sentence about God is the last word, including this one. That sounds like a loss. It's the opposite, and once you see it a lot of tension drops away.

Here's the distinction I think we skip. There's a ceiling you reach by climbing: the most all-encompassing frame the chain of frameworks keeps converging toward. Call it the top of the climb. And there's what the whole climb appears within, which isn't on the ladder and isn't its top rung.

By climbing I don't mean going anywhere, and I don't mean learning more facts inside the view you already have. I mean one specific move, done over and over: taking the framework you were looking through and turning it into something you're looking at.
 

Most of our "Infinity = God" talk fuses these. Infinite resolution, infinite divisibility, the biggest container, that's the top of the climb. Real and true, but still an object the system points at.

God, if the word means anything past "a bigger object," is what the pointing happens inside of. The ladder points at it. Pointing isn't holding.
 

Right now you're seeing the world through a set of assumptions you can't see, the way a fish doesn't see water because it has never once been out of it. The climb is what happens when something lets you see your water.

What you were standing inside becomes an object in front of you, and you're now standing in a wider frame that can spot where the old one breaks. Then that wider frame becomes your new invisible water, until it too gets turned into an object from one wider still.

Each rung is a frame that can hold the one below it as an object and judge its limits. The top of the climb is just where that move keeps converging: the widest frame you can reach by always making the last one into an object.

You can't argue anyone into it, and it has nothing to do with them being asleep or hypnotized. Words only ever hand you objects, and what we're pointing at was never one. Direct knowing doesn't transfer in words, not because the other person's awakening is lacking, but because words are representation and this isn't.

Think of salt. You can describe its taste to someone who's never tasted it for the rest of your life and none of it crosses over. The day it's on their tongue they know instantly, and not one word did the carrying. If you tell them "you'll get it the moment you taste it," that's not you being smug, it's just true. But if you use "you just haven't tasted it" to wave off every honest question they ask, you've taken something true and turned it into a wall. Same sentence, completely different act.

The one move we keep reaching for, and shouldn't. "You don't see it because you're in the spell." Said to end a conversation, it's the one thing this whole argument forbids, because it sneaks verification into the one channel where only arguments are allowed and uses it to win. From the outside it's identical to any true believer who can't be moved by anything.

It makes direct knowing look exactly like blind belief, which is the last thing any of us who've actually seen something would want.

Take the line everyone mocks, "you'll only know once you know." Said as a way to win an argument, it's a wall. Said as structure, it's just honest: the knowing was never a proposition anyone could hand you, the way salt was never a description anyone could hand you. The catch is that the cop-out and the honest version sound word for word the same. What separates them is the work done first, walking the other person all the way to the edge where words genuinely run out, instead of dropping the curtain early because you got cornered. The work carries no one across, nothing does, but it leaves you both standing at the spot where language stops, in the open. That's how you honor a question instead of shutting it down.

The crown doesn't belong to science. It also doesn't belong to the best sentence at the top of our own ladder, mine included. It belongs to what the ladder is standing in, and that's exactly why none of us, no matter how deep we've gone, gets to pick it up and carry it around as ours.

But I won't be a coward about that edge.

Walking you to it and then going quiet, like the two of us are equally in the dark, would be its own small lie.

We're not equally in the dark. I went off the edge and came back, which is the only reason I'm here typing this instead of dissolved.

So, plainly, as a report and not a proof, because the argument above already showed no report can be the proof: the edge is not a polite nowhere where we all nod at the mystery. What's past it is more real than this screen, more real than anything you could point at. And the shock isn't that it's far away, or holy in some distant sense. The shock is that it turned out to be you. Not your body, not your story, not even the one looking out from behind your eyes.

What you are, under all of it, is what lets experience appear at all. God was never above the ladder, and never an eye looking down it. God is what allows any of this to show up in the first place, the looking and the looker included. I can't hand you that, but I can tell you it's there, the most radical fact there is, and the only way over that edge is to go yourself.

Edited June 13 by PolyPeter