Without a Self-image, How Can We Know Freedom?

This question arrived as a private message, but I'm sharing it here because it's a good question—one that probably occurs to many of us—and I think my reply may clarify this.

Hello Robert,
Thank you so much for your posts on Substack and for both of your books, 4T and DONT.
I’ve read 4T twice and am currently reading DONT.

I have a question about a paragraph on page 120 in Chapter 18. When you have a moment, would you kindly consider responding?

“In that moment, something dies, yet it is not ‘myself’ that dies, but only the false images of myself. The ongoing aliveness will still be here, but the self-images, at least for that moment, are not. If one is fortunate, the self-images, having been subjected to that moment of being seen through as illusory, will never return in full force, or may not return at all. And that, I am saying, is freedom.”

My question: You suggest that, for a fortunate individual, the self-images may never return. In such a case, how would that individual recognize or know this as freedom? Doesn’t some form of self-image need to persist—at least minimally—for there to be any knowing or recognition of freedom?

Hi. Good question. Thanks for the close reading of DONT.

No, I would not say that knowing or recognizing requires a self-image.

The confusion arises from equating “knowing” with the idea of someone who knows. But that’s already post hoc (after the fact)—a narrative laid over the seeing. The moment of recognition I describe in that passage is not cognitive in the usual sense. It’s not a concept grasped by a self, but an absence of obstruction—a seeing unclouded by the machinery of image-maintenance.

We don’t need a self-image to recognize a sunset or to hear a birdcall. Sensory experience does not require the narrative overlay of “me seeing” or “me hearing”—it simply arises. It’s only when thought turns inward—What does this mean about me? Who is the one who knows this?—that the self-image reasserts itself.

The confusion lies in this recursion: thought reflects on thought, and in doing so, constructs a subject. But awareness, even of freedom, does not need that construction. Freedom is not known by the self. It appears in the absence of the self-reflective loop.

To say “one knows this as freedom” leans toward reification. More precisely: in the absence of self-image, there is no one who knows freedom—only the absence of captivity. That absence is not recognized by someone. It is simply present, until it is not.

In that sense, freedom is not a state possessed, but the loss of the one who would possess.

Thanks again, and I wish you well.

Good news from my publisher, Clear Mind Press. My new book, The 21st Century Self, which was scheduled for publication by September 1st, will be available much sooner. Perhaps within a few days. I will, of course, announce it here.