Darkness

Does Knowledge is darkness?

Knowledge is darkness-Bookish learning doesn't always banish ignorance.

The Upanishads say that the ignorant attend a World of Darkness but the learned enter an even darker world. But isn’t knowledge a lamp that banishes the darkness of ignorance? How can knowledge that dispels ignorance, extolled because the panacea for all ills and Evils, leads one to a world that's darker than the ignorance itself? ? 

The process of acquiring knowledge which illuminates an individual inside

and lets him become conscious of the external reality, begin with sense data. This data, when contextualised, transforms into information, which again turns into knowledge once we skill to use it. But knowledge is bipolar; counting on the context, sometimes one aspect of the knowledge is true and sometimes the opposite. there's no knowledge within the world which isn't dichotomous Experience including knowledge during application results in the germination of discerning wisdom. that's why it's said wisdom dawns as men get older. 

The external world

But what's the Teleological objective of this whole effort of knowing the external world? Why in the least, this process of data acquirement between the topic and object should take place? Simply put, this is often an attempt to become one with the external world. This process of data acquirement would continue until such time, the equilibrium is established. that's to mention, the method begins with a state where the topic and object are two separate realities and transfer of knowledge continues to facilitate state the identity of the objects within the subject. This process ideally would continue to tell there's no object left to understand. 

Every object has innumerable qualities then it might take very large if not Infinite amount of your time before this equilibrium is struck. Anyone who sticks to the present process contending that this process of data acquirement banishes ignorance is ignorant because he's never getting to achieve this process. the matter is that we have a brief and limited span of a lifetime, and they're is required another way, another practise if we were to achieve the equilibrium during this life itself or a minimum of during a definite time-frame in future. And this path isn't the trail of data but the trail of Pratyabhigna, direct experience. 

In his book ‘Tibetan yoga of dreams and sleep’, Tenzing Wangle Rinpoche’s explains with a gorgeous allegory, how knowledge became a hindrance to enlightenment. He says, in Tibet, new leather skins are put within the sun and rubbed with butter to form them softer. When a sentient being entered this world with the hundreds of past sanskaras, it's just like the new skin, tough and hard with narrow views and conceptual rigidity. 

Knowledge is just like the butter, rubbed in through practice, making it soft and pliable. But an equivalent butter, when stored in leather bags for a few years, make the luggage hard as wood and no amount of latest butter can soften them. Someone who spends a few years studying the teaching-acquiring knowledge, intellectualizing an excellent deal of little experience of practice, is like that hardened leather. The teaching can soften the hard skin of ignorance and conditioning, but once they are stored in intellect and not rubbed into the practitioner with practice and warmed with direct experience, the person becomes rigid and hard in his intellectual understanding. Then new teaching won't soften him, won't penetrate and alter him. We must take care to not store the teaching as only conceptual understanding, least that conceptual understanding becomes a block to wisdom. 

Tenzing Wangle Rinpoche further says that many philosophical systems are developed to lead beings to wisdom, but they produce ignorance in their followers hold close a dualistic understanding of reality. this is often unavoidable in any conceptual system, because the conceptual mind itself may be a manifestation of ignorance. 

Breaking the circle

Ignorance has a scope of redemption a minimum of sometime in future, But those believing within the inviolable supremacy of data and adhering to the trail of data acquirement would still trend on the never-ending path infinitely. The Upanishads warn us of the danger of being stuck within the furrows of data and wake us up to interrupt the circle and proceed on the trail of direct experience- one that doesn't depend upon the sense- mind interface between subject and object. 

Osho says, for aeons, people are moving round and round during a circle in a small room, wondering how enormous their room is since, despite many steps for aeons together, they failed to find the end of the room. Suddenly,  amongst them one of those circling morons decides to manoeuvre in a perpendicular direction, breaking the accepted path and lo from there he discovers the door-the entry and exit to the present presumably infinite- sized room- and gets liberated from the space.