Does the Rain of Benevolence Shower on One and All Alike? |
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By: Bhaskar Banerjee Posted: 2007-12-18 23:44:17 |
| Knowing can be of two types. There is one kind of knowledge that is rote, memorized; the other is a live-knowing, known from your lived experiences. No memory is required here. Then what you know is true, authentic knowledge. In the former kind, knowledge is a burden, in which there is every possibility that one can drown; it can never make one weightless. Knowing can be a living experience too, then what you know is not carried on the head like a beast of burden; it makes you glow with light, it makes you so lightweight that it gives you the wings with which you can fly in the skies. Only then are the chains of slavery broken, and the door of eternity opens for you.But to know is very difficult; to accumulate knowledge is easy. That is why the mind chooses the easy, and avoids the difficult. To evade the difficult is to avoid the doors of the impossible. Such a one will then remain deprived of Truth too, because truth is for the utterly daring - gamblers, and not for the shopkeepers. Truth is not a small-time give-and-take business. Gamblers stake their money, the seekers of Truth, their all! One who is not willing to stake his self, will never learn any of the profundities of life.Mysteries are never available cheap; knowledge is easily available in the books, in the scriptures, from the teachers - almost free. But, to be religiously spiritual, and I do not mean here in a conventional sense, you have to pay a heavy price. Those who wager their very lives to know from life, learns all there is to learn in life. Life is our highest teacher. If you do not allow the greatest teacher to teach you, then who else will, or can?The knowledgeable man who thinks that he knows from what he has learnt from the books, theories, scriptures, synagogues, churches, temples and other artificial sources, is in greater danger than the man who is ignorant because he knows that he does not know. At least, this much truth he knows. Rarely can one find a more untrue man than the 'so-called learned'. William Hazlitt has written in his essay On the Ignorance of the Learned - "For the more languages a man can speak, his talent has but sprung the greater leak; ... Yet he that is but able to express no sense at all in several languages, will pass for learneder than he that's known to speak the strongest reason in his own." So also did Alexander Pope say it beautifully in an alliterative quote, "the bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, with loads of learned lumber in his head".Crammed knowledge resides in the head, or, to be more specific, in the throat, and therefore does not reach deeper than the ears of a listener. Experiential knowledge resides in the deep recesses of the heart and when spoken, its truth touches the hearts of an audience. Truth is very dense, concentrated, and if fed forcefully to a non-receptive heart, will only sicken, but not nourish such a person.To be receptive, to be open, to be a receptacle, is extremely difficult no doubt, but they are the very conditions necessary for knowing. The yearning for seeking out truth, the intensity of which can be equated with parched lands where the cracks that appear are like the lips opened on the earth, as if in utter quest and a fervent prayer to the clouds to quench its thirst and, without which it will become barren and dead. Only for such the rains bring additionally, the benevolence that becomes a torrent.Hope that this benevolence will be mine, and yours too, someday.Be Blissful! |
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