Sunday, September 22, 2013

(Sep 22,2013) Spiritual Message for the Day – The Necessity to Understand What Real Knowledge Is

The Necessity to Understand What Real Knowledge Is
Divine Life Society Publication: Chapter2 What is Knowledge by Swami Krishnananda

Our senses are our friends and are inseparable from us. They are the only instruments we have with which we can know anything. This is called a philosophy of sensationalism. The sensation itself is the meaning of life. Whatever the senses tell us, that is the truth, finally. If the skin feels cold, the world is cold; if it feels hot, the world is hot. We react. We are to know, judge, understand, appreciate, and evaluate things only through the sense organs – the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, touch. Thus, it appears that we have nothing with us worth the while except our sense organs.

But, there must come a time in our life, in everyone’s life, when we will be opened up to a new fact altogether– that the world is not made in such a way as it is reported to the sensations. It is not true that the thing is exactly as it is seen with the eyes, etc. This awakening to the fact that the senses are not the true reporters of the facts of life is a real achievement indeed.

We are misguided by various factors in life, including the impressions created on our mind during childhood. It is not your fault that you do not understand anything. It is a peculiar arrangement of your thoughts, feelings and outlook of life, what you have seen and studied earlier, and also the opinion in general that you are holding in your minds, all of which have weighed heavily on your heads in such a manner that you are inseparable from this opinion and outlook that you are holding. “This is what I have seen, this is what I have learned, this is what I have been told, and therefore it should be only like this. It cannot be in any other way.” A kind of egoism – not necessarily adopted deliberately, but automatically arising due to the impression of these old vibrations thrust upon you by factors mentioned – create a circumstance of non-receptivity to any kind of change in outlook. You do not want to change anything, either outwardly or inwardly, because you get habituated to a particular way of thinking and living.

Man vehemently, inveterately and adamantly sticks to the present condition of what is reported to his senses and particularly to his emotions. The danger is not visible. It has not come to the level of conscious thinking and, therefore, we are not frightened in our daily existence.

A very interesting statement of Buddha, among many other things that he said, is: “A person who really sees through the inner structure of this world will not be able to live here for three minutes. The world, to that person who sees the root of things, would appear like a burning pit of live coal.”

Why is it so? Why do we not feel like that? Our whole personality is a tremendous iceberg which is buried in the ocean of the unconscious, and little of it is on the surface, and so we say we are ‘this’, we are ‘that’. But the total weight of our personality, which is the cause of what we are going to be, will not manifest itself under unfavorable circumstances. Like a seed that is sown on the ground, which will sprout only under given conditions and not always, our total personality will not come to the surface of our experience, except under given conditions.

We live like a simple, humble person, a very good person. But if we are opposed from every side, we will show our strength physically, mentally, and socially. These potencies of what we call the unconscious and the subconscious are the conditioning factors of our present conscious thinking, feeling, reacting, etc. This is the reason why every one of us has one particular view of things.

Thus, the essence of the whole enterprise of education is to realize the necessity to know things as they are, and not as they appear. But we, for reasons already stated, mix up appearance with reality, and vice versa. We insist, through the pressure of our sense organs and our emotions, the things, the world, should be exactly as they appear to us. This is why we have various ideologies and outlooks of life, which not only differ from one another, but even clash with one another; wars can take place because of difference in ideologies.

The egoism, born of an attitude compelled by the power of the sense organs which have a voice of their own, will prevent us from having the attitude of humility. The egoism will persist. We will have a self-importance of our own, and an ideology of our own, which we would not like to be refuted by anybody. "What I think is right, and it must be right." With this attitude, no knowledge can be gained, because our basket is already full and nobody can fill it with anything else. A total egoistic attitude of self-sufficiency is the defeat of all education.

There is nothing of any value in life finally except knowledge, because everything is limited to, restricted by, or conditioned by the way we understand things. Every one of us has some knowledge. Some understand knowledge as merely a means to some material end.

Sankhya, or true knowledge, is not information about phenomena around. It is something which is inseparable from our own existence. Knowledge is not away from our being. Most of the knowledge we have today is a kind of shirt that we put on. The shirt is different from us; we can throw that shirt away, if we like. But this sankhya knowledge is exactly what we 'are', and not what we 'know' in an empirical sense. It is not a professorial, academic knowledge. It is wisdom, enlightenment, insight, entry into the very substance of things as they really are, and not just information that we have gathered.

A reception of Truth into our personality is impossible, unless we are prepared to be reborn into its conditions. Truth will not enter us unless we are prepared to accommodate the conditions of the structure of Truth itself into our being.

Nobody can say "I do not want it" and nobody can say "I do not understand." You have to understand, if you have to live. You can know things not by pain but by being good and humble and receptive, otherwise you will be forced into this condition by the powers of nature, one day or the other.

That Knowledge itself will be the greatest possession and you would not want anything else in this world afterwards. Here, you have to understand what this Knowledge is, in order that Knowledge itself is everything in the world. Such is the importance of these studies. So, I request you to ponder over these issues, and be humble, good children.

Excerpts from:
The Necessity to Understand What Real Knowledge is - Chapter2 What is Knowledge by Swami Krishnananda

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