Seeker’s Thirst For Knowledge
गुरुर्ब्रह्मा गुरुर्विष्णुः गुरुर्देवो महेश्वरः।
गुरुः साक्षात् परं ब्रह्म तस्मै श्री गुरवे नमः॥
Greetings,
You might have come across the phrase 'Who am I?' and may have also met or heard about people who want to discover their true nature, understand the reality of their experiences, and explore their relationship with these experiences. These individuals, who are pursuing these profound questions, may appear quite ordinary, just like you and me. However, what motivates them to seek answers to these deep and elusive questions, questions that others may not even grasp or may overlook?
These individuals who are putting forth all their efforts to seek the truth are called Seekers. There is no difference between a Seeker and a common person except for the curiosity with which a Seeker analyzes all the experiences happening around them. A Seeker never loses the enthusiasm of a child. Instead of accepting life experiences as they are, a Seeker puts a question mark and wants to know why an experience is the way it is. The journey of a Seeker begins with Contemplation, which, in the initial days of their spiritual path, is the only available tool with him. With Contemplation a Seeker tries to understand what is life, why everyone wants happiness but no one can have it for eternity etc. Seeker transforms their life into a laboratory where, by solving a series of questions through mere contemplation, they reach a stage where they gain faith that whatever he knows is mere illusion and so he strives to know the truth. With this continuous effort to uncover the unknown, these Seekers reach their highest form—a state of bliss—where there is nothing more left to be known.
This write-up aims to provide a perspective on how a Seeker places a question mark after every experience and how they analyze it. Furthermore, if you are already on the path of seeking the truth, this article will boost your confidence that you are moving in the right direction, and it will encourage you to continue your journey towards it.
The following paragraphs will show how a Seeker asks questions to himself and then how he uses his life experiences to discover the truth through contemplation.
Question: Is everything I perceive true?
Lets try to take a common experience and contemplate on it.
You might already be familiar with the images below; they are called optical illusions. In the first image, do you know if the long slant lines are parallel or not? Maybe it appears to you that the lines are not parallel, but in reality, these lines are parallel. In this example, our eyes are tricking us and not letting us perceive the truth. Similarly, in the second picture, can you guess which blue circle is bigger? If you haven't seen this before, you will be surprised to know that your eyes can deceive you here as well because both of these blue circles are of same size. With this example, can we conclude that our sensory organs, which seems to be the only way to acquire knowledge, can easily obscure the truth?
Similarly, with the following two images, your eyes will deceive you, making it seem as though the patterns are moving. However, in reality, these movements in these images are still illusions created by the colors of scattered patterns.
A Seeker observes experiences of his life as shown above and comes to the conclusion that the information sent to him by his experiences is not always correct. Based on the above examples, can we say that there might be many incidents happening in your life that you are considering as truths, but in reality, they are just illusions?
Based on the above contemplation, a Seeker doesn't fully believe in the information given by his senses because if your senses can deceive you once, they can do it always, and you would never know it.
Question: Senses can deceive one person but can it also deceive many people at one time?
Let's try to gather information from our lives and contemplate on it.
From common knowledge, we know that humans have five sensory organs: ears, nose, tongue, skin, and eyes. With the help of these, a person understands the world through experiences of sound, smell, taste, touch, and vision. For your mental analysis let's consider two healthy people who were brought up in similar conditions. If you give both of these people spicy food to eat, is it possible that for one person spice in the food can make it enjoyable while the other experiences an unbearable pain? If you let them listen to music at a very low volume, one might hear it easily, while the other might not hear any sound at all. If you ask them to touch a metallic plate left out in the sun, one might feel it unbearably hot, while the other person may find it warm. If you ask them to smell a flower, one might easily detect the fragrance, while the other may hardly perceive any scent. Based on this, can we conclude that sensory organs in different people provide different information?
If you further contemplate this, you can conclude that since experiences related to sound, smell, taste, and touch can vary in their intensity, then even the eyes can perceive colors with different intensities. This would mean that if one person sees a green tree, others might see darker or lighter shades of that green. These two people can discuss the beauty of green trees at length, but in reality, they are talking about different experiences, and they may never realize it.
This contemplation helps a Seeker understand that everyone can be deceived by their senses at the same time, and even if everyone shares the same view, their experiences can be very different, and they may never know.
Question: Are my actions in my control?
We can find answers to this by contemplating thoughts and its results.
For this, you may need to focus your attention on your thoughts. If you've never done this before, it may take a few days of practice before you can achieve it. First, try to find a peaceful place and attempt to observe your thoughts for five minutes. After five minutes, try to recall everything that happened during the last five minutes. You may notice that thoughts were changing at a very high rate, making it difficult to keep up with all of them. You may also observe a bombardment of random thoughts that do not follow any specific pattern. Furthermore, you may realize that after a few minutes, instead of merely observing the thoughts, you become completely involved with them, which may urge you to take certain actions related to specific thoughts. Your involvement with a thought might lead to random imagination about the past or future. This bombardment of thoughts only ceases when you become fully engaged with them and start expressing your thoughts in the form of actions.
Does this imply that all the actions in your life are initiated by your thoughts? What happens to a person who never observes their thoughts? Is their entire life filled with actions that are the result of random thoughts? According to modern science, an average person has 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day. How many of these thoughts do you ever observe and stop or control the actions that stem from them? Since you seldom observe your thoughts, you often end up taking unconscious actions driven by your thoughts, mistakenly believing that these actions originate from your desires. The life of a common person is nothing more than a complex web of actions and their consequences
From this experiment a Seeker knows that due to lack of alertness towards thoughts every action in his life is random.
Question: Do I have a choice of prioritizing one thing over another?
The prioritization of one thing over another is also just a thought, and you can find an answer by contemplating how thoughts come into existence.
Try to focus again on your thoughts and consider if you were to buy shoes, would you have a preference for one brand over another? If your answer is yes, then perhaps you are under the influence of advertising. Advertisement results in accepting others' opinions without consideration; this can be referred to as dogma. These dogmas impact all aspects of your life, such as your choice of career, the car you want to buy, your holiday destinations, or even whom you can or can’t marry. For instance, if you hear good words about a sports car from a famous person for a particular brand, then unknowingly you will be inclined towards that car brand. If someone asks about your favorite car, you may unknowingly mention the same brand. You may also make that car as your aspiration and save money to buy it some day without even thinking whether you genuinely wanted it in the first place. This happens to every common person and influences every aspect of their lives.
A person's personality is an accumulation of others' thoughts over time. A person may believe they are fulfilling their desires, but in reality, they may be living someone else's life.
A Seeker observes this very well and understands that all his desires belong to someone else.
Question: Does my life have any fundamental desires?
Since this is still a thought, you can find an answer to this by contemplating the conditions that give rise to thoughts.
By now you might be thinking that maybe your priority of a food type is influenced by others or geographical conditions but the desire to have food is definitely real. However you can know the reality of this hypothesis again by contemplating the pattern of hunger and learn that even the deepest desires can also be a smartly placed illusion. For example you may feel hunger by just seeing someone eating your favorite food or just by the smell of that food. You may have also observed in your life that during significant or emotionally charged days, such as moments of extreme happiness or profound sadness, you didn't experience hunger for an extended period. Does this not give you a clue that even life’s fundamental desire to have food is not bound by any laws and the conditions around you can easily influence these desire.
A Seeker observes this phenomenon and concludes that while his body is bound by desires, desire itself remains independent of the body.
Based on a above experiments and contemplation, we now understand that a Seeker is well aware that there is no reliable way to obtain accurate information because all his sensory organs can deceive him. He is nothing more than a servant of his desires, and his personality is merely an accumulation of opinions. There are no fundamental desires in life. That's why a Seeker always strives to discover the real truth.
If, by any chance, you have already reached this stage, then you are one of the fortunate few who are moving in the right direction and have tremendous potential to make the best use of their human birth. Based on my experience, the next step for you should be to find the right Guru.
I hope you will find your revered Guru soon. Until then, keep contemplating.
Please leave your thoughts in the comments so I will know which topic to write about next. I'll see you in the next article.
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