Include the knower in the known.
One does one's thinking before one knows what one is to think about.
Reading in the third millennium B.C. may therefore have been a matter of hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating the speech from looking at its picture symbols, rather than visual reading of syllables in our sense.
We know to much to command ourselves very far.
We can only know in the nervous system what we have known in behavior first.
The changes in the Catholic Church since Vatican II can certainly be scanned in terms of this long retreat from the sacred which has followed the inception of consciousness into the human species.