Vedantham : ( 07/11/2012. )

Chapter-2. The Necessity to Understand What Real Knowledge Is : Part-2. A time comes in everyone's life when one would see and realise that the world is not made in the way it appeared earlier; it is something different. And we begin to learn this lesson sometimes very late in life, not when we are young. Often, the world appears to be a field of adventure by young people. They are very heroic, bold; they climb mountaintops, plunge into ocean waves, and go skiing on icebergs. This is a world of such satisfactions to youth, who see this kind of meaning in the world due to what they are, and not because of what the world is. But this would not be realised so easily. We will not know that our idea of the world is mostly due to what we are, and not due to what the world itself is. Practically everyone will miss this point in the process of living in this world. The world is so clever, we should say, that it will not permit us to go into these secrets.

Chapter-2. The Necessity to Understand What Real Knowledge Is : Part-1. A time comes in everyone's life when one would see and realise that the world is not made in the way it appeared earlier; it is something different. And we begin to learn this lesson sometimes very late in life, not when we are young. Often, the world appears to be a field of adventure by young people. They are very heroic, bold; they climb mountaintops, plunge into ocean waves, and go skiing on icebergs. This is a world of such satisfactions to youth, who see this kind of meaning in the world due to what they are, and not because of what the world is. But this would not be realised so easily. We will not know that our idea of the world is mostly due to what we are, and not due to what the world itself is. Practically everyone will miss this point in the process of living in this world. The world is so clever, we should say, that it will not permit us to go into these secrets. I

Ch-1. The Knowledge Situation. Part-20. The world is not outside us. Now, here is the beginning of our studies in these sessions. Is the world really outside us? In India, we have systems of thinking along these lines, one of them being called the Sankhya philosophy, which spent years and years – ages, perhaps – in trying to understand what this world is made of. What is the stuff of nature, and how am I related to it? The Yoga System, which is the practical application of the knowledge of the reality of life, is based on a doctrine which is the knowledge itself, properly speaking.'Sankhya' is a word that is used in one system of Indian thinking which is engaged in the analysis of the objective world in its relation to the subject of knowledge. All these things that I have mentioned to you just now are a sort of introduction to this great theme before us. What is your relation to the world? How are you connected with it? How is the world connected with you? In w

Ch-1. The Knowledge Situation. Part-19. To expect one thing or another thing from somebody else is to keep that person at arm's length, and we are not really united in our being with that object. The word 'object' that we usually use is indicative of that something with which we have not communed ourselves. It is not a friend. An object cannot be a friend, and a friend is not our object. The world is an object of the physicist, of the scientist, of the psychologist, of the chemist, of even the physician; it has never become our friend. Why should the world treat us as our friend? If we are not going to accept the world as our own, why do we expect the world to treat us as its own? In a way, in a very important sense, the world is our own face reflected in the mirror of space and time. We are seeing our own self when we look at the world through this mirror we call the space-time continuum. When we smile at the world, the world smiles at u

Ch-1. The Knowledge Situation. Part-18. Now, again I am coming to the point. Do not be under the impression that knowledge is a tool, an instrument to give us physical amenities in life – to give us alot of wealth and make us politically or socially important persons. Knowledge is not an instrument; it is the end in itself, because all our adventures in life depend upon the way in which we understand things. And perhaps, when we know a person wholly and become friends of that person one hundred percent, we require nothing from that person. If you are my real friend in the true sense of the term – in the sense that you have understood me wholly, and I know you wholly – we have ceased to be two persons because of the intimacy of our friendship. You will not expect anything from me; I will not expect anything from you. Merely the knowledge of the fact that we are one will be a satisfaction. Friendship is a satisfaction by itself, and not because two friends a

Ch-1. The Knowledge Situation. Part-17. The world does not want us to take it piecemeal. Would you like me to look at you piecemeal? Would you be happy? You would like me to understand you as you are. Then you would be my friend, and I would be your friend. If one day I look at your feet, and the next day I look at your nose, and the third day I try to see something else in you, and I react to you in different ways at different times because I have never seen you properly or wholly at any time, you would be horrified by this kind of attitude. The world is really dissatisfied with us. Nature may be said to be angry with us, as we may be angry with anyone who will not try to understand us and reacts piecemeal in respect of us – day by day changing his attitude towards us, like a chameleon. If we would not brook piecemeal attention from people, why should the world tolerate this kind of attitude from us? The world resents this kind of compartmentalised, piece

Ch-1. The Knowledge Situation. Part-16. Therefore, we can look at the world from a thousand different directions; and the world is infinite in the facets of its presentation. As a beautifully cut crystal or a diamond may have various facets reflecting it in various ways, the world can present, and does present, itself in various ways. But we are unable to adjust our minds to the totality of the universe. We can, as finite individual percipients, behold only one facet of this world at a time, and the other facets are completely cut off from the ken of our perception. But ignorance of the law is no excuse. We cannot say: " I am very sorry. I did not know the world as these things also. I am a psychologist." "I am a physicist. I do not know who Ashoka is," one gentleman told me. What kind of physicist are you? Does it mean that you are totally ignorant of human history? Look at the way we are taught these days. We do not know who Napoleon

Ch-1. The Knowledge Situation. Part-15. We may wrongly imagine, oftentimes, that we live one kind of life and the world is getting on in another way altogether. For instance, these days we have a total bifurcation of physics and psychology. Psychology is the study of the inner nature of man, and physics is the study of the outer nature – as if one has no connection with the other. One can be a very good psychologist knowing nothing of physics, and one can be a very good physicist knowing nothing of one's own self. The compartmentalisation of subjects in our curricula of studies, as if everything is watertight, is, again, very unfortunate. We have no connection of one with the other. Knowledge is a universal process. It is not merely physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics or psychology. These are various outlooks or angles of vision of a single reality before us. From one angle of vision, our knowledge of the world looks like psychology; from anoth

Ch-1. The Knowledge Situation. Part-14. The question is: Is there a way out? To put it in a more concrete form : Is religion to justify itself by the discoveries of reason, through which every other science justifies itself? Are the same methods of investigation, which we apply to sciences and knowledge outside, to be applied to the science of Religion? In my opinion this must be so, and I am also of opinion that the sooner it is done the better. If a religion is destroyed by such investigations, it was then all the time useless, unworthy superstition; and the sooner it goes the better. I am thoroughly convinced that its destruction would be the best thing that could happen. All that is dross will be taken off, no doubt, but the essential parts of religion will emerge triumphant out of this investigation. Not only will it be made scientific — as scientific, at least, as any of the conclusions of physics or chemistry — but will have greater strength, because p

Ch-1. The Knowledge Situation. Part-13. What I tried to mention in these few words is that we have perhaps now come to a stage of our life where we have to think very seriously about things. We cannot merely take life as a kind of game where it is immaterial whether we lose or gain. It is not just a cricket, football or tennis game that we are playing when we are living in this world. There is a greater seriousness about it, and this seriousness has not always been felt by people. Children that we are in the knowledge of the things of the world, we play like children only, and we are satisfied mostly with toys, which the world is ready to give us. The child may like different kinds of toys on different days; it doesn't want the same thing every day. And the world has plenty of toys. It has been feeding people with these things, and the reaction of the human psyche to these provisions of the world is human history. We are now in one period of human history. The hi

Ch-1. The Knowledge Situation. Part-12. Philosophical study – or, for the matter of that, any kind of study – is based on the knowledge situation. This is a very important thing to remember. We should not be under the impression that knowledge is secondary and possession of things is very important. We go with the wind of this misconception that the possession of the material values of life is the only important thing, and knowledge is only an appendage, an accessory, a tool or an instrument assisting us in the possession of material values. This is not so; it is a total misconception. Even our idea of the peculiar or particular necessities of our life is conditioned by the way in which we know things. Why is it that you want this, and I want another thing? How is it that the needs of people differ, and even the needs of the same person differ from time to time? That is because of an adjustment that is automatically made inside the structure of the individual, the percip

Ch-1. The Knowledge Situation. Part-11. The role which the subject of knowledge plays in the act of knowing anything is not in any way unimportant. The knowledge of the world – or the knowledge of anything, for the matter of that – is not entirely dependent on the object of knowledge. The object of knowledge is important, no doubt, but it is not the only important thing, because we are also a participant in this process of knowing the world. All problems are a problem of knowledge, finally. The difference in ideologies and difficulties arisen on account of difference of opinion among people – philosophically, or socially, or otherwise – arise on account of a problem in the knowledge process itself. People do not know things in a uniform manner. I see the world, you see the world, a cat sees the world, a dog sees the world, a politician sees the world, a religious man sees the world, a child sees the world, a genius sees the world. Do we mean to say that eve

Ch-1. The Knowledge Situation. Part-10. A correct understanding of ourself is essential before we try to understand what is outside us. With the so-called scientific outlook prevalent these days, we are likely to again lay overemphasis on external nature rather than the experimenter or the observer, the scientist himself. Is the scientist less important than that which he is observing? And do we not believe that his capacity to observe contributes as much to the conclusions he arrives at as the nature of the object that he is observing? But this is easily missed. We again lay too much emphasis on the reality of externals as if they are all the reality, not knowing that the character of reality that the world presents before us is certainly conditioned by the way in which we are able to receive this knowledge. Swami Krishnananda To be continued  ...