Introduction to |
You didn't understand that statement, because you don't have the knowledge and training required. You wouldn't know that an inflorenscence is a flower cluster and cymose refers to a cluster in which each floral axis terminates in a single flower, unless you had studied botany.
The mere fact that the statement uses English words doesn't mean that you could have understood it--unless you had undergone training and preparation.
You would have had to WANT to study botany and been willing to undergo the rigors of learning about the entire domain of botany to be able to understand that statement.
| "The individual must be free from incorrect thinking before he can start to learn. Our Western would-be disciple has to learn that he cannot bring his assumptions about his own capacity to learn into a field where he does not in fact know what it is that he is trying to learn." 1 |
I've begun this introduction to the Philosphical Essays with an exercise in recognizing when one does not understand and comprehending why one does not understand, to explain the nature of the essays.
In a manner intimated by this exercise, the Philosophical Essays on this Web site come from a domain which requires even more strenuous training, mental and emotional preparation, and intense desire than does the learning of an ordinary scientific field.
You've come to this Introduction with a certain level of understanding and a certain level of being. Those levels are determined by your past experience, the impacts to which you've been exposed, and your ability to use those impacts to bring about self-transformation. The interaction between the experiential impacts and your mind has determined the quality of your personality.
| "People of Western culture put great value on the level of a man's knowledge but they do not value the level of a man's being and are not ashamed of the low level of their own being. They do not even understand what it means. And they do not understand that a man's knowledge depends on the level of his being. "If knowledge gets far ahead of being, it becomes theoretical and abstract and inapplicable to life, or actually harmful. . ." 2 |
Your responses to the exercises in this introduction indicate what level you've attained. For example, your response in the first section of this introduction--in reference to your understanding of the initial statement--attests to one elementary aspect of your current capabilities (that's why you're now in the second section).
As you proceed in this introduction, you'll be evaluated in terms of:
The essays, to which this is an introduction and a screening exercise, are written in an arcane 3 metaphysical language which possesses unusual characteristics:
| "The acquisition or transmission of true knowledge demands great labor and great effort both of him who receives and of him who gives. And those who possess this knowledge are doing everything they can to transmit and communicate it to the greatest possible number of people, to facilitate people's approach to it and enable them to prepare themselves to receive the truth. But knowledge cannot be given by force to anyone." 4 |
As with any specially constructed language, gaining an understanding of this higher philsophical language involves definite prerequisites:
| "In order to approach the Sufi Way, the Seeker must realize that he is, largely, a bundle of what are nowadays called conditionings--fixed ideas and prejudices, automatic responses sometimes which have occurred through the training of others. Man is not as free as he thinks he is. The first step is for the individual to get away from thinking that he understands, and really understand. But man has been taught that he can understand everything by the same process, the process of logic. This teaching has undermined him." 6 |
As we've seen, this unique philosophical language has the effect on unprepared, presumptuous persons of enticing them to presume they understand what they read when they don't actually understand.
| "The important point for the mystic is at first the soul mood in which he approaches that which he feels as the highest, as the answers to the riddles of existence. Just in our day, when only gross physical science is recognized as containing truth, it is difficult to believe that in the highest things we depend upon the keynote of the soul. It is true that knowledge thereby becomes an intimate personal concern. But this is what it really is to the mystic. Tell some one the solution of the riddle of the universe! Give it to him ready-made! The mystic will find it to be nothing but empty sound, if the personality does not meet the solution half-way in the right manner. The solution in itself is nothing; it vanishes if the necessary feeling is not kindled at its contact. A divinity may approach you: it is either everything or nothing. Nothing, if you meet it in the frame of mind with which you confront everyday matters; everything, if you are prepared and attuned to the meeting. What the divinity is in itself is a matter that does not affect you; the important point for you is whether it leaves you as it found you or makes a different man of you. But this depends entirely on yourself. What is brought to you depends upon the reception you prepare for it. You must have been prepared by the education and development of the most intimate forces of your personality so that what the divine is able to evoke may be kindled and released in you. Everything depends upon the way in which you receive what is offered you."
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The Philosophical Essays to which we are referring are based on a highly developed technology. The physical and mental processes of ordinary life provide impacts through which we develop. The essays engage in this process consciously and purposefully, providing specific prescriptions of experience from which the student can learn. Understanding comes through the deliberate arrangement and provocation of the learner's experience by the teacher through his communications.
| "People hear, read, experience things (such as these pieces of information) and they do not digest them. . . People who have not troubled themselves to absorb information from readily available sources and who instead continue asking questions from others . . . do not profit from the answers. The reason is that the effort of looking for the answer and registering it is part of the learning process. To apply for an answer, to get it too easily, almost always results in this individual again failing to disgest the material." 8 |
Most of the essays deal with early stages of spiritual development, a few with more advanced dimensions of evolvement. In the essays dealing with the early stages of development, signals transmitted by the teacher are arranged in such a way as to be registered on the inefficient and probably distorting mechanism of the student's mind. The teacher constructs his communications in such a manner that his ideas penetrate the conditioned mind of the student; he so phrases his effectual signals that they are able to bypass the screen of conditionings and activate the desired response.
The essays contain technical terms which refer to experiences--not mere concepts--which must be "lived through" or "caught." Parts of the essays are composed of meditations and exercises designed to bring the seeker to an understanding of the fact that he is temporarily out of contact with complete reality, even though ordinary life seems to be the totality of reality itself.
| "The notion of a mystery is above all things obnoxious to modern taste; as who will now believe either that there has been any truth of importance known which is not publicly declared, or worth knowing that he cannot understand?" |
Are you able to understand this statement below?
"People may give lip service to an important contention, yet not be permeated with it. The contention must actually operate as a dynamic force within the mind of the student. In many cases, because he is accustomed to being conditioned or trained, the student will accept a contention as a conditioning. The result of this will be that he merely thinks that he has absorbed it, because he responds in a predictable way whenever a certain stimulus of contention is applied to him. Such conditioning, if it has taken place, must be broken before the . . . effect can manifest itself."
Which of these items agree with the above statement?
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3 Arcane: knowable (or known) only by initiates (tested students) of a spiritual tradition
4 P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous
5 Psychagogical: from Greek, psūchź, soul, and agogź, transport to or lead out of; the power to help bring out (give birth to) new elements (ideas, beings) from a person's soul or to bring into (transmit to) a person's soul, elements from a higher level
6 Idries Shah, The Sufis
7 P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous
