Understanding

UNDERSTANDING AND THOUGHTS

 

Freedom is necessary to understand and you are not free from the contents of your mind. You can understand something only intellectually.

Intellectual understanding is not total understanding because it is still a mental process and the mind is in fragments and therefore partial. It is not whole. Only a part of our mind operates when we are thinking about a particular thing. For example, when we are dealing with problems of mathematics or logic, a tiny part of the left brain becomes active and the rest of the mind-brain remains in darkness. There’s no understanding taking place in most part of the brain. So whatever we understand intellectually is almost no understanding.

To understand something deeply and widely, it’s necessary to be free from our mind to see the thing clearly. But we are never free i.e. our mind is never free from thoughts. There are always thoughts arising one after another incessantly. We are helplessly unable to stop them. 

What are thoughts and where do they come from?

Thoughts are reactions or responses of our consciousness to stimuli that enter into our consciousness through our sense organs. These responses are direct thoughts. Indirectly, we start to think when there arise responses to our memories stored in our brain. We have our memories from our knowledge. This knowledge is from our past experiences through our sense organs. Experience denies us clear observation because it’s sensation which is actually a response to stimuli like light, heat, smell, sound etc. Experience may be of a very wide range or extensive but it’s always limited and partial that is experience is never whole or total. Sensation is endless because it’s mechanical and automatic for us, the lazy and sleepy. The desire to experience is, therefore, endless as well. The greater the desire we have, the more the experience we gather. Ambition is sure to breed the sensation of power and capacity. So experience is an enemy of humility which is so much necessary for learning. All experiences are impressions made in our mind-brains and they color and distort every later experience. So no experience can be new nor can any thought be so.  We see something not sensitively but with sensation and give a name to it and that name is the cause of thought. If we observe sensitively with our total energy totally absorbed in the act, from moment to moment without naming or analyzing, there is no thought and therefore no thinker. It’s pure observation. The whole of the mind-brain becomes alert and active.

But the mind-brain never becomes totally alert and active except momentarily during sexual acts. Or else, we are always with our thoughts and our mind is crowded with them. So, when we hear something and try to listen to it with our mind we do so only with a fraction of our energy. We don’t attend to it with all our energy. We lack energy for total listening with all our mind and heart because most of our energy is tied to other thoughts in the mind. Our mind is always chattering and is full of its own noises. Some of our energy attends to them. Therefore whatever we listen from our mad mind is bound to be partial and incomplete. That prevents clear and total understanding. 

What you listen is not as important as how you listen.


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