Illusion of Knowledge

 

Photo Credit: Zen Thinking

Illusion of Knowledge

Most of us have minds which is like a disturbed bee hive – buzzing with bees all the time! Man lives in tension, anxiety and worries with all these buzzing thoughts! To recognise and know life our mind needs to become like a calm and silent ripple-less lake. When the mind is unhealthy or sick that is when consciousness disappears and only the buzzing of thoughts remains, from morning till evening we live in a crowd of thoughts.

The trick is not to keep collecting bouquets of thoughts in the first place – if you go on collecting bouquets there is no scope for the mind to become quiet! In nature when we don’t want leaves to grow on a tree, we stop watering the roots, once we do that, after a few days we notice that the leaves dry and fall off the tree. Similarly, if we understand how we water the roots of our thoughts, we will be able to stop it.

So, how do we water out thoughts? Thoughts are nothing but a collection of other people’s thoughts acquired from books, google, and various other modern sources of information acquired through ‘education’ from kindergarten to university! Knowledge is something which lies deep within us, something which all of us are born with but do not have access to, due to the overload of useless information which we have collected. This knowledge comes to the fore once we remove all the obstacles. Compare a pond and a well and you will understand the difference. A pond is a collection of water which does not flow, it does not have a source of independent water, it dries up in summer and refills in winter. The pond tries to retain and collect water, whereas the well has an underground source of water which keeps feeding the well. The well loves giving its water because it thinks this is not ‘mine’ it comes from the streams which are connected to the ocean.

All troubles in the world have arisen because people thought they were protecting their ‘knowledge’ – the crusades, all wars, all the problems on earth have their roots somewhere or other in so called knowledge, which is actually pseudo-knowledge. In life there are some truths which can be known only by the self, they cannot be known through books or through scriptures. The truth of the soul or the truth of the universe can only be known by the self - there is no other way. Man is caught in a universal deception. And when everybody is caught in the same deception, it becomes difficult to see. You have to find out if the clothes of knowledge - which you have thought of as clothes - are really clothes, or are you standing naked in invisible clothes? You have to test each of your thoughts according to this criterion - "Do I know it?" If you do not know, then be ready to go to hell rather than go on holding on to this pseudo-knowledge.

If you have the courage to be ignorant, and have the courage to accept that you are ignorant, then you can start on the path towards becoming free from the maze of your thoughts - otherwise you cannot even begin. So, one thing needs to be understood: we are very ignorant, we don't know anything. And whatever we seem to know is absolutely false, borrowed and stale. It is like a pond, it is not like a well. If one wants to create a well in one's life then it is very necessary to be free from the illusion of the pond.

Reference: Osho talks