So, I get these

daily Buddhist meditations on my google hompage, and the one for yesterday was really good: "If only I could throw away the urge to trace my patterns in your heart, I could really see you." - David Brandon (Zen in the Art of Helping). And it fits in with my thesis, oddly enough, not that I'm going to quote it or anything, it doesn't fit that well. But I think whether we take the "your heart" to be metaphorical or more (poetically speaking) literal, one of the messages seems to be that when you presuppose a pattern in the past or when you're looking for yourself in another person's actions, you close off the possibility of any 'real' knowledge, which is maybe why really knowing anything is impossible. If only...