Earn Knowledge To Know Life's Secrets

The Pioneer

Once a man walked up to the seashore carrying a pitcher in his hand. The pitcher is there and the sea is there. Is the seawater accessible to the pitcher? It will not be right to say that it is not accessible. But it will be not completely true to say that it is accessible. In fact it is accessible as well as inaccessible. From the point of view of totality it is not accessible; from a partial or limited point of view it is accessible. A pitcher can also diminish the quantity of the seawater in proportion to its capacity.

Similarly, it is difficult to say that religion is accessible to the intellect. But it is also not easy to say that it is not accessible to the intellect. Religion is infinite. To say that it is accessible to the intellect amounts to saying that a pitcher can measure the ocean. Infinite truth can be known only through knowledge.

The intellect represents the limits of our knowledge. Living beings, as such, have merely a trace of knowledge. Those having only one sense are capable of experiencing pleasure and pain. In fact, there is an ascending order of knowledge from beings endowed with only one sense up to those endowed with five senses. In the living world man has the greatest access to knowledge. Many other living beings have the same senses as man does. Among them some have a mind too. But intellect is not present in most beings apart from man. He has the power to take decisions. He has intuition. Through it man comes to see and know even things that are unseen and unknown.

The tradition of investigation is thousands of years old. It results in increasing the limits of knowledge and consequently in reducing the quantum of the unknown. Bullocks were beasts of burden in the past, they are so at present and will continue to be so in the future because they lack intellect. But man has intellect that grows through experience. Experience makes a man skilled. There are instances of people not having any formal engineering degrees but acquiring engineering skills through sheer practical experience and personal effort.

Similarly knowledge too has to be gained or earned. One has to meditate, use his or her intuition and learn from the world to obtain knowledge and through it know the secrets of life.