Getting it off your shoulders is true power
Published in Orient Yourself
Feb 2, 2024 (Medium.com)
Your attention span may not be strong enough to take in what I’m about to share about why attention spans are being hijacked.
But that’s okay. The following is for the select few who realize the so-called knowledge that takes up our headspace is actually dangerous. Because it isn’t knowing, but mere mental stimulation.
Information is the drug, and our attentional balance is the victim. All the while, true wisdom is lost, and our life purpose along with it.
But there is a deep, ancient way out of this mess.
In Indian philosophy, there are three levels of knowledge:
- Hearing-borne-wisdom (shruta-mayi-prajna) which is like remembering facts and theories from an external source
- Reflecting-borne-wisdom (chinta-mayi-prajna) which is like seeing how the knowledge applies to your life
- Experience-borne-wisdom (bhavana-mayi-prajna) which is full realization of the experience that produced the words in the first place
Obviously, the goal is to not just be a brainy intellectual, but to transform the first into the last, with deep practice.
This happens by three steps:
- Hearing: Clearly receiving exactly what is being taught, as it is taught, and then not forgetting it.
- Reflecting: Keeping it in the mind as it is being interrogated, tested, brainstormed, and planned upon.
- Meditation: Applying our insights into daily life after ‘digesting’ the insight, to non-conceptually feel what the words are actually pointing to.
In Vedanta, this process is called nidhi-dhyasana, or placing oneself, meditatively, very close to what is being studied.
In Buddhism, it’s the standard educational process of developing wisdom.
All the Buddha’s teachings are not for intellectual satisfaction, they are signposts pointing to something profound, far beyond written or conceptualized ideas!
Now contrast this process of developing experience with Western education: we seem to think that a sharp mind, strong memory, and elaborate theorization is the be all and end all of learning.
Is it any wonder we’re not producing geniuses en masse, such as India during its classical/ancient era, or Europe during its Renaissance?
In the Information Age, knowledge has become a deadweight – even something toxic overloading your mind, with its insistent flooding of memory, mental depth, and attentional balance.
Stop reading, stop watching, stop consuming.
Fully hear, reflect, and feel/see.
Not what you think you should be working on, but what you know that you need to realize, fast, or else your life will be wasted.
Make knowledge power again by actually applying it with action, rather than letting it rot into toxic inertia.
·Editor for Orient Yourself
Re-thinking human potential with meditation & Indic philosophy.