What Is to Be Known

“Neither existent nor non-existent.” Try explaining that in a tweet.

This is the Gita at its most philosophically daring. The ultimate truth, Krishna says, can’t be neatly filed into your mental categories. It’s not a thing you can point to and say “there it is.” It’s also not nothing. It’s beyond the binary your mind insists on.

We like clean answers. True or false. Yes or no. Exists or doesn’t. Our entire information architecture — from Google search to Wikipedia to ChatGPT — is built on the assumption that questions have answers that fit into words.

But the deepest truths don’t. What is consciousness? Where does love come from? Why is there something rather than nothing? These aren’t questions waiting for better technology to answer them. They’re questions that reveal the limits of the questioning mind itself.

Krishna doesn’t leave you in mystical fog, though. He says this truth is knowable — just not through the usual channels. Not through logic alone, not through experiments alone, not through belief alone. Through a different kind of knowing that the Gita has been building toward throughout these lessons.

The promise is audacious: know this, and you attain immortality. Not the immortality of living forever, but the immortality of understanding that what you truly are was never born and will never die. That’s not a belief. It’s a realization.

Reflect

Where in your life do you force things into neat categories that don’t quite fit? What would it feel like to sit with ambiguity instead of forcing a resolution?