Maha Yoga - Ignorance #1 (by Who)

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Ignorance

 

(taken from MAHA YOGA, by WHO)

 

THE SAGE ALONE can rightly diagnose our ills and prescribe the right remedy; he alone can unravel the tangled skein of right and wrong knowledge which fills our minds.The first thing that the Sages tell us is that the cause of allour sufferings is in ourselves alone, not outside. The Buddha is reported to have said: “You suffer from yourselves alone; no one compels you.” The Sage of Arunachala says the same thing ; in answer to a question whether there is something radically wrong in the world-scheme itself, he said: “The world is all right as it is; it is we that are to blame, because of our own mistaken way of thinking; what we have to do is to trace the initial error that is at the back of our minds and pluck it out; then it will be all right.” This finding and plucking out of our fundamental error is the only radical cure there is; all other remedies are only palliatives; the utmost that can be said for them is that in their own way they help to lead us on to the right remedy. The religious faiths and practices that divide the world are of value only to this extent. Often they only enthral and weaken the mind and thus postpone the day of deliverance.

In fact from this point of view a sincere and earnest sceptic may be far better off than the bigoted believer — the kind of believer that has not the sense to see that all these religions are for humanity, not humanity for the religions;

such a one holds his beliefs, not lightly and tentatively, as something that may

possibly be falsified by the actual experience of the Truth — to which it is only a means—but as the veritable Truth itself. The so-called sceptic is in truth no sceptic if he believes that there is something which is true, and that it alone matters; it is safe to say that he that is devoted to the truth is the best of all devotees. No believer is worthy of regard if he fails to perceive that truth is all in all, and that beliefs should be held sacred for the sake of the truth alone, and not otherwise. Such a one is in a much worse position than the honest and earnest sceptic, because in the first place he is very unlikely to take up the inquiry that is sketched in these chapters. In the second place, if he goes to a living Sage and seeks guidance from him, he is very likely to misunderstand what the Sage might tell him; for this reason it happens that Sages as a rule do not give out all the teachings they have in them to all questioners alike; they withhold the deeper truths from those whose minds are unopened; for a truth that is misunderstood is more fatal than sheer ignorance.

 

Whoever, therefore, is willing to be fully instructed by a Sage must be prepared to put aside his own beliefs; he must not be fanatically attached to any creed. The open-minded disciple who has little or no book-knowledge is thus in a better position than the learned ones with minds enslaved by their creeds. With open minds, then, we go to the Sage and ask him why we are in bondage to desires and fears. He replies that it is so, because we do not know ourselves aright — that we think ourselves to be something that we are not. At the first thought it may appear that this answer is doubly wrong.

We are unable to see how a right knowledge of ourselves can be necessary to the business of life; we want to know how to bend this world to our wills, or as the next best thing, how to adjust ourselves to the world, so that we may be able to make the best of the world, bad as it is. We do not see how knowing ourselves aright can be of any help to us in all this. In the second place we are fully persuaded that we do know ourselves all right. We believe that knowledge is of great value and seek to know the truth about everything that we might possibly come across in life; we are even so fanatical in this that we want to make the acquisition of knowledge compulsory for all. And all this knowledge concerns the world — not ourselves. In the course of centuries every single nation or group of nations had piled up vast heaps of knowledge —history, geography, astronomy, chemistry, physics, ethics,theology, biology, sociology, and even what goes by the proud name of philosophy or metaphysics. If all this be knowledge, then along with the piling up of these heaps of it there must have been a steady increase of human happiness.But this is not the case. It may be claimed that increase of knowledge has given us a greater mastery over the blind forces of Nature, and that this is all to the good. But it is not so. For this mastery has been placed by an untoward fate in the hands of a few, and the greater this mastery becomes, the deeper is the degradationand despair into which the masses sink. And the sense of the irunrelieved misery cannot but poison the cup of happiness —or seeming happiness — for those among the fortunate few who are not wholly self-centred. The millennium, which the scientists of a now forgotten age prophesied, is now farther off than ever. In fact science has now brought the world to a state in which the very life of the human race is being seriously

threatened. No; it is sheer wickedness — unworthy of onethat aspires to a pure and untainted happiness — to contend that all this knowledge has been to the good. And this should lead us to suspect that this is no knowledge at all. We may at least suspect that happiness is not to be had through this kind of knowledge. The teaching of the Sages confirms this suspicion. The Sage of Arunachala goes even so far as to characterise all this knowledge as ignorance.Once a young man fresh from his university — one who had studied science as his special subject — came to the Sage and asked him about the “blank wall of ignorance” which faces the scientist in his quest of the ultimate truth of the universe; investigating the infinitely small, he was just able to guess at the existence and behaviour of certain mysterious entities called electrons, protons, positrons and neutrons, but could not get at them and know them at first hand, not to speak of finding the one ultimate substance, the cause of all; on the other hand in his researches into the infinitely large he could not get beyondt he nebulae or star — dust, supposed to be the raw material of creation; nor could he discover the secret of the fundamentals of all objectivity, namely time and space.The Sage replied that questioning the outside world can never lead to anything but ignorance; he said that when one seeks to know anything other than himself, without caring to know the truth of himself, the knowledge he obtains cannot possibly be right knowledge.

 

This might seem to us a very strange reason fordiscrediting all human knowledge at one stroke. But a little dispassionate thinking will make it clear that the Sage is right.In the first place, as seen above, this knowledge is already suspect, because it has failed to promote human happiness

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