May 6, 2010
- The blindness of permanence -
This comes from a rather scholarly Buddhist Geeks article by John Eberly giving a background on Ramana Maharshi, self-inquiry, and other forms of Indian spirituality. Well worth the read, if you can summon up the focus to follow the ideas through the thick underbrush of language. The above in particular hit me.
For those not inclined to read the article all the way through, this quote, to my mind, states something like: We get confused trying to accumulate facts about things, thinking these “mutable knowledges” as permanent wisdom. Only when we see these as mutable and not the same as the wisdom we mistake it for, are we able to begin to understand wisdom.
Am I arguing that it is useless to gather knowledge? No, we’d be in a pretty dark place without knowledge. The problem is, if we assume some bit of knowledge as being somehow true (ie: as being Wisdom), we stop looking at it. Rather than trying to grasp and hold as much information as we can, it is better to learn how to quickly and accurately perceive information as it flows through our awareness. We gain nothing but blindness by attempting to hold on it (or for that matter, by attempting to push it away as well).
