Understanding
Excerpt from UNDERSTANDING
GURURAJ ANANDA YOGI: Why do we human beings want to understand themselves? The reason why human beings want to understand themselves is because unconsciously they feel themselves to be ignorant. They feel they dwell in nescience. They want to understand why they need to understand. But where does understanding take place? That is the real question. People try to understand things with their minds, and most of the things that they try to understand are of no value at all. Take a water jug for example. Why is it going to help you to know how the clay was processed in order to make a jug? Is it going to help you? It only helps you if you understand how to use the jug to pour your water. Most understanding comes from ignorance. Where does ignorance come from? Ignorance comes from having no self-knowledge. When a person does not know himself, then conflicts are created. If a person wants to understand himself, one has to get rid of the conflicts. The two opposing forces, expansion and contraction, create that ignorance. We try hard to get rid of the ignorance for the purpose of finding happiness. That is why we want to understand ourselves. Most of the time the lack of understanding is projected to things outside. For example, let’s say that your uncle doesn’t love you. Now, you want to understand why your uncle doesn’t love you because you feel inside you that he should love you. You think that there might be something wrong with you, so that your uncle does not love you. You try to understand everything around you in this manner. But the greatest understanding is to understand oneself; an understanding in which everything else is understood. As the Upanishads say,
“What is that, by the knowing of which, everything else is known?“
So the main duty or goal of life is first to understand one’s self. Where does this understanding come from? It does not come from analysis, because one question will produce three questions, three questions will produce six questions, and six twelve, ad infinitum. So instead of gaining understanding, you are lessening understanding, because all these various questions that follow each other create more and more confusion. But the man who understands himself is a man who is not confused. He is totally fused within himself; infused, and not confused. You know the old injunction, “Man know thyself.” The steps to understand yourself is to dive deep within, leaving the mind apart, and to experience that innerness which is brought to the fore of the conscious mind. Then you go beyond understanding and you land up in the land of knowing.
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