Soup bowls and bowls of soup

All study of words, concepts, ideas - be they from the mouths or writings of your neighbor, your guru, your philosopher-teacher, or your saviour-god - is the attempt by your own consciousness to conceive of itself, to know itself, utilizing the same thing that gives rise to it in the first place - the thoughts swimming around therein. It's like legs trying to conceive of walking, while being legless, or eyes trying to conceive of red, while being totally blind from birth.

The mind, the conscious part of the brain, gives rise to thoughts, and whether those thoughts arrive from external sources - email lists, books, or other humans - or internally - from memories, which were originally external, or just after-thoughts about them - is irrelevant. Once the mind is in it's automatic-running operation, the thoughts being produced therein have about as much chance of conceiving of the mind, as the legs or eyes do in their futile quest mentioned above.

The soup can't know the bowl, the soup is soup. Take the soup out of the bowl, and there's nothing with which to conceive of the bowl. That's why, not realizing this, everybody seeks external soup to fill their bowl, so that they can swim in the soup while believing they are "coming to greater understanding of soup." Well maybe they are, but B.F.D. Soup is not the bowl, and knowing more about the soup (the bible, the teaching, the words from your dead hero/saint/guru) is not what consciousness is attempting to do, it's what the fictional pseudo-hero it setup to be frontman (strawman) believes it is attempting to do.