Resurgent Culture - Chapter-1.1. Swami Krishnananda

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Sunday, May 16, 2021. 07:26.AM.
Chapter 1: The Goal of Life-1.

*1. What Is Truth?

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We say we live in a world, because we perceive and experience certain phenomena which impinge on our senses and make us feel that we are in an objective environment. This supposed environment in which we appear to be placed is felt by us to be a complex situation that influences not only our individual personalities but also other individuals whose existence we observe intuitionally, as it were. We are aware, by analysis, experiment and observation, that broadly speaking, we have three avenues of knowledge, two of which are in direct relation to our normal world-experience, and one is unknown to most of us. These channels of perception are sense, reason and intuition.

Sense-perception reveals to us that we are in a world from which we are cut off as knowing subjects. The world, again, is separated from us as a non-intelligent principle placed in the context of an object which is differentiated from the knowing subject in that the latter is endowed with a principle which we call intelligence, while the former is apparently bereft of it. And how do we perceive the world through our senses?

Any cautious intellect will be able to understand that the special feature that we observe as characterising anything in the world is change. Change appears to be the order of things. Everything moves, flows is in a state of becoming. We have never seen, nor have we any chance of seeing, anything in this world, that is not subject to some kind of transformation or the other. Even our bodies, our senses, nay, even our own minds exhibit this subjection to the inexorable law of change. In short, we are in a process, not being.

And how do we know that there is change? The obvious answer would be that we see it. But here we have to raise a question, as rational beings who will not be easily satisfied by a dogmatic statement that there is change just because we see it. A truly great person is he who has the patience and the ability to first investigate himself, his power of knowledge and his fitness for judging the nature of things. Are we correct in assessing the value of the phenomena that we observe through our senses? What is the standard of correctness? When we say that everything in the world changes, do we also include ourselves in all that changes? Now, just imagine: can we know that something changes or is in a state of transformation, if we ourselves are a part of this observed flux? Can there be knowledge of change if the knower himself changes with the change? 

The fact that it is possible for us to recognise such a thing as movement or process shows that we somehow find ourselves standing as witnesses of what we observe. For the observer himself cannot be observed, and change itself cannot be its own knower. We say that a river flows, because the bed of the river itself does not flow, and we do not flow with the waters but stand as witnesses on the bank. This is an observation easy of understanding, that we cannot know the distinction between one part of a process and another unless we, as observing intelligences, are able to bring together the two distinguished parts by a link of understanding or consciousness which cannot belong to any one of the parts, and which, yet, has to be equally present to both the parts. The knower is different from the known.

To be continued ...

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