Vedantham : ( 07/11/2012. )

Chapter-2. The Necessity to Understand What Real Knowledge Is : Part-27. This is something very difficult, but unavoidable. You cannot miss it, because all meaning – any meaning that can be anywhere in anything in life – is the meaning of this knowledge, which nobody can gainsay. 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. Otherwise, you will find yourself in a condition where you will be forced by the powers of nature to learn by the instruments of pain, which it can inflict upon you. Education need not necessarily be painful. We learn things by pain also, but why should we learn only by pain? Is there no other way of knowing? Can you not know things by being good and humble and receptive? Do you want to be beaten up and kicked aside, and then learn lessons? If you are not going to be humble and intelligently receptive to the necessity for a true educat...

Chapter-2. The Necessity to Understand What Real Knowledge Is : Part-26. Here is the difficulty before every one of you, and that is why you say, "I understand nothing." How can you understand anything? This is something quite different from what you have thought in your minds. And if you are to be prepared to receive into your brains the meaning behind this type of enquiry, you have to be reborn once again, and forget that you are fathers or sons, mothers or daughters. You are born just now – reborn, just now – and you are ready to receive a new knowledge altogether. "Unless you are reborn, there is no freedom." This is a great saying of Jesus Christ, which has many meanings. He said it in a very lofty sense, but it also means a very important requisite on our part in our daily life.  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 ...

Chapter-2. The Necessity to Understand What Real Knowledge Is : Part-25. We know that after some time we will have lunch; this is also a knowledge. Who can say it is not? And we have one hundred types of knowledge. But do we mean that sankhya, true knowledge, is this kind of knowledge? No. This is information about the phenomena around us. But 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 information that we have gathered...

Chapter-2. The Necessity to Understand What Real Knowledge Is : Part-24. Last time I mentioned that in an ancient Indian system of thinking which spent all its time in the pursuit of knowledge, the Sanskrit word 'sankhya' is used. Sankhya means knowledge, but not knowledge that is merely a means to some material end – not a job-oriented knowledge. Knowledge is more important than jobs because everything, including jobs, is conditioned by the kind or depth of knowledge that has gone into our being. Here, we are also to consider a little as to what knowledge means. What do we mean by knowledge? We say it is very important. We all have some knowledge. Now, is it all right, or is there something more? Every one of us has some knowledge. We know that it is daytime, that it is not night; this is also a knowledge. Swami Krishnananda To be continued   ....

Chapter-2. The Necessity to Understand What Real Knowledge Is : Part-23. Life is not very long. We do not hope to live in this world for ten thousand years. Nobody knows how many days, how many minutes they will live – nothing is known – so how is it possible for us to imagine that we have to live here for some millions of years? And if an understanding of the circumstances of our life in this world is not important to us, what else is going to be important to us? Here, we come to our original discussion that knowledge is supreme. 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. The reaction of the world in respect of ourselves is a response to the way in which we envisage it, understand it, and react to it. Knowledge is supreme. Swami Krishnananda To be continued   ....

Chapter-2. The Necessity to Understand What Real Knowledge Is : Part-22. Now, these are the little things that we would like to consider if life is serious for us. But we feel that life is not a serious thing, that it is only a joke, a play, a game, and it can be lived in any way one likes. "Today I live it in this way, tomorrow I can live in another way. Who is to question me?  I am my own master."  If we are our own master, and nobody can question us, and we know all things, then the world will teach us a lesson that this is not expected of us in the atmosphere of our real relationship with the world, and the world gives a kick. This kick everyone receives – sometimes late in life, sometimes every day in life. We receive various types of kicks, due to which we are placed in a condition of utter sorrow. We are grief-stricken because we are defeated in life. We have understood nothing, and we have gained nothing. Yet, we have to live. We canno...

Chapter-2. The Necessity to Understand What Real Knowledge Is : Part-21. Most of the students these days go to educational institutions with a 'don't care' attitude, and an attitude of having known things already, sometimes more than even the teacher knows; therefore, it becomes a mockery, an utter failure, and a waste of energy, landing everyone in a catastrophe. This is the picture the world is presenting before us every day. It is a failure, a catastrophe, and a hopelessness. Finally we will go with the feeling that the whole of life is a waste, a hopeless pursuit, and nothing is worthwhile here. This happens because the world is opposing us, due to the fact that we are opposing it. Why should we have this character of opposition evinced from the world if we are to live in the world? Either we need not live in the world, or we have to live in the world. If we want to stay in a distant space unconnected with the world, that is a different matt...

Chapter-2. The Necessity to Understand What Real Knowledge Is : Part-20. Thus, a humility born not of hypocrisy, but of a real acceptance of the fact of the mystery and the magnitude of things, is the first quality of a student; and a disciple, a sisya, a chela, a student, is therefore one who has completely handed himself or herself to the rescue of this reservoir of knowledge we call the teacher or the master. But – I repeat what I told you a few minutes before – 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 this 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. Nobody can fill...

Chapter-2. The Necessity to Understand What Real Knowledge Is : Part-19. First of all, the world is very large, very wide. Secondly, it is very deep. Both these factors are important. How will we in a few days, a few months or even a few years of our little life in this world, with this inadequate instrument of our poor understanding, know the width of the world, the vastness of the cosmos, and the depth of things? So, the primary quality of a real student is a humility that is born of the understanding of the magnitude of the truths of things. The world is so deep, vast and magnificent that we are humbled by the very sight of it. Even when we see an elephant, we look very small. We cannot go near it. We feel miserable by the very sight of it. We feel very small before the huge dashing waves of the Atlantic or the Pacific. We are frightened by a huge conflagration or even a cyclonic blow. There are things in the world, even before our eyes, which some...

Chapter-2. The Necessity to Understand What Real Knowledge Is : Part-18. Thus, coming to the main point of what we are intending to study, the essence of the whole enterprise of education is to realise 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, that 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. But why should it be like that? It need not be like that. The world is not a war field in the sense that it is cut into two opposite parties. It is not properly understood. Therefore, great patience is necessary; and a hurried, emotional person, expecting the harvest to grow immediately when ...

Chapter-2. The Necessity to Understand What Real Knowledge Is : Part-17. Now, to imagine that the world is made in some way, and we understand it in some way and, therefore, it should be only that way and nothing else is permitted, is to succumb to the pressure of this deeper unconscious level of ours – which presents only one particular picture at a moment, and other pictures are withdrawn. It will not show us the entire picture of the world at any time and, therefore, we find that it is not easy for us to learn the highest truths of life or the deeper secrets of nature unless we place ourselves under the complete control, care and protection of someone who, like a good doctor or a physician, knows the student or the disciple not merely as he or she appears outside, but as the student is inside. Often we think that we ourselves are the master. A patient cannot treat himself. Otherwise, why should we have hospitals, doctors? Let each one treat himself. Thi...