The Necessity to Understand What Real
Knowledge Is
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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