What is Knowledge

by Swami Krishnananda

It is a well known fact that in the practice of yoga, maintaining oneself in a position is pre-eminently important. The maintaining of a required position is sometimes called asana. You all perform asanas, or yoga exercises. These exercises are positions maintained by you and, in a very significant sense, the whole of yoga may be said to be the maintenance of a specific position.

This word ‘position’ has to be understood in a very comprehensive sense. It has a vast implication, and it covers practically everything that is required of you – though, in common parlance, people understand by ‘position’ only a particular posture of the physical body. Though the posture of the physical body is a requisite position and it is essential in yoga, yet this understanding of the posture or position in yoga as a physical exercise does not include all its suggestions and meanings because you will certainly agree that your life consists of more than just what happens to your body. The incidents concurrent with the bodily position and the occurrences commensurate with bodily activity – or, for the matter of that, anything related merely to the physical body bereft of any other relation – cannot be said to include everything that you are. Nobody believes: ‘I am only the body; there is nothing else in me’. If there is something in you other than the body, then yoga posture is not exhausted merely by physical exercise; but it could be said to be a complete system of yoga if you are only the body, and there is nothing else in you.

Now, what is it that you are made of? That substance, that stuff, that peculiar something that you are or you are made of is what is to be kept in position, in a state of balance. You have heard it said that yoga is a state of balance – but what sort of balance? With what are you setting yourself in balance? Though this is not difficult to understand, it is not easy to grasp at one stroke.

One may imagine that to know one’s own self is the easiest thing, because one’s own self is the nearest thing to oneself, one’s own self is completely under one’s control, and nothing in the world can be easier than to know one’s own self. But, nothing can be more difficult. As I pointed out the other day, the nearer an object comes to you, the more difficult it becomes to understand it. You hold opinions of a particular type in an external relation you maintain with things outside, but you find that such a relation cannot be maintained when the object becomes a proximate something, such that at a particular moment, you may not find it possible to see any difference or any distinction between yourself and that which you try to know or understand; and you are trying to know your own self, to understand what you yourself are.

The understanding has the necessity to keep an object before its eye in order to understand, and you cannot understand unless there is something which is to be understood. If there is nothing that you can understand or nothing is there to be understood, the very meaning of understanding is ruled out. What are you going to understand when you are trying to understand yourself? Where is the object? And which is the subject there? When I see an object, I say, “I see this. I know this table, this desk, this person, this something that is in front of me”; but I am not in front of me, so I cannot make such statements in regard to my own self. I cannot say, “I am seeing myself”; nor can I say, “I am touching myself”. These statements, which usually apply to persons and things outside, do not apply to our own self.

Hence, this understanding may not be adequate for the purpose of understanding your own self. All knowledge fails when it becomes a means to the knowledge of one’s own self, though it becomes a great success when it is a weapon to know what is not itself. There is this peculiar difficulty which is easy to miss, because of the fact that the only thing that we miss in our daily occupations is our own self. We have everything in the world except ourselves. We lose ourselves first in order that we may gain others. The gaining of another is not possible unless you lose yourself first, and it is up to you to know whether it is worthwhile to lose your own self in order that you may gain something. If you have already lost yourself, who are you to gain something else? What sort of ‘you’ can possess another thing, inasmuch as you have already lost yourself? The object that you possess will also be a substanceless, balloon-like emptiness, because the possessor thereof himself has become empty due to the loss of personality. This was a great question which Draupadi posed in the court of the Kauravas: “How can Yudhishthira lose me, inasmuch as he has already lost himself?” To this question no answer can be given, and nobody gave an answer. Likewise, how is it possible for anyone to possess anything in the world after having lost oneself totally? The object that is possessed also will be an ephemeral appearance which has no content or substance.

These ideas will make you cogitate a little bit on the difficulty that you are facing in this great adventure you call ‘acquiring knowledge’. It is not an easy thing. You may stand on your head for years, but you will not succeed because there is a basic problem that is ingrained in our own existence. Existence itself is a kind of evil, in a very highly philosophical sense, and this is perhaps the quintessence of Buddha’s message: “Existence itself is an evil. You have to be rid of existence.” In a different way, Schopenhauer said the same thing: “Existence is evil. Be rid of it.”

What sort of existence is evil? This is not clear to us. The enigmatic term ‘existence’ can cut like a double-edged sword; it can take us both this way and that way. And the existence that we attribute to our own selves in our operations in daily life is mostly an artificially concocted related existence, not a substantive in the proper sense of the term. A thing that stands merely because it is related to something else, really does not stand by itself. Most of our relationships are the very values of our life. What we consider as worthwhile and valuable in life is that which has been produced out of a kind of relationship that we establish with something else – a contact that there is between ourselves and others. There is, for instance, political importance, economic importance, social importance, or any kind of value that you attribute to your own self in relation to something else – which means to say, inasmuch as you are subservient to something else by means of your hanging on to it by relation, the values that you obtain in this world are also hollow. They are not substantives; they cannot stand on themselves. Thus, mankind today may be said to be living a totally artificial life which is bereft of any significance – bereft of significance because of the fact that it seems to be hanging on something else for its substance. Therefore, we say the world is relative, and not absolute.

Inasmuch as one thing is hanging on the other, and ‘that’ thing is influencing ‘this’ – things seem to be standing in a position by mutual relationship. We cannot say that things are standing by themselves. The planets and the other heavenly bodies that seem to be hanging in space are maintaining their position due to the orbit which they have been forced to chalk out by means of a mutual cohesive influence maintained by what is called a cosmic gravitational pull. As I mentioned the other day, the bicycle maintains a position only when it is moving; if it is not moving, it will fall down. In this way, it appears that our satisfaction with any kind of stability in our life here is based on a kind of relationship which itself is relative. Thus, an absolute value is non-existent in this world, and we cannot know things as they really are by any amount of outward relation.

It has been felt that we have no relation to our own selves, and we must, at least, be supposed to exist in a relationless manner: “I have no relation to my own self.” In this sense one may say that one’s own self is a non-relational substantive. This is a point that is made out by deep thinkers and philosophers, and due to this feeling of theirs, they concluded that nothing in the world can be known as it is in itself unless one knows one’s own self – because to try to know anything else first without a knowledge of one’s own self would be to be contented merely with what is relative and not absolute. By ‘relative’, we mean that which is not at all valuable in itself – it is valuable only because it is connected to something else. The father is important because the son is a big judge or a collector; the son is important because of a relation with a vaster organisation to which he belongs; a person is important because he has some money in the treasury. Something or other is there which keeps the person in a state of imbalance with his own self. Imbalance is that condition where we do not stand by our own selves, and hang on something else for our existence. This is not possible, because while on the one hand we are asking for permanent satisfaction, we seek this permanent satisfaction by means of an impermanent relationship that is the only thing possible in this world.

All relations are impermanent. Why they are impermanent is a very difficult theme, into which we need not enter just now. It is enough for the time being to know that it is impossible for anyone to know things as they really are unless there is a means of knowing things as they really are. Nothing that is perceptible or cognitional – nothing that is related to mere sensory activity or even mental operation – can be considered as a proper means here in this objective, because all these instruments of knowledge that we have, the mind included, maintain a sort of knowledge position in respect of things by a mediate connection that they establish between themselves and the object. It is not an immediate relationship; it is a mediate relationship. An outward link is created in order that an object may be known in terms of this link, so that what is known is not the object as it is in itself, but only a feature that is coloured by the character or the nature of the means or the link that is between oneself and the object.

What is the solution, finally? Know yourself first, and then you will know how to know other things. But, as I mentioned at the outset, how would you know yourself?  To know anything, the knowledge has to stand as the subject of another object. You are not the object of knowledge of yourself, because you are the subject of knowledge. You are the knower. If you are the knower, how will you know yourself? If you can grasp some sense out of this peculiar position – that you have to know yourself, in spite of your not being an object of yourself – you would know what yoga is.

However, here comes the meaning of what I started saying: yoga is the maintenance of a position. And all that I told you now in a few words is a preparatory introduction to what ‘position’ can mean in yoga. It is the position that ‘you’ maintain, and you have to know what ‘you’ are in order that you may maintain the requisite position in yoga.

You may be content with saying, “I am only what the photographic camera can see in me”; and you know what it sees. But, on a little analysis of your own position during leisure hours, you will realise that you have values in your own self; and your physical features, which alone are seen in a photograph, cannot be regarded as exhausting the characters of yourself. Do you know that even if the body is robust, healthy, and perhaps happy, you can be unhappy for other reasons? When you say “I am unhappy”, you do not mean the body is unhappy. It may be strong like an elephant, and yet the person may be unhappy for a reason which is not easy to know because if one could know why one is unhappy, one need not be unhappy at all. One would throw out all the factors that cause unhappiness if this could be possible. But this is not easily available. The causative factors of unhappiness are not easily available to anyone because they sit on the very brain of the person and, therefore, the very thinking process is conditioned by these factors that cause unhappiness. Thus, you find that the maintenance of yoga posture, finally, in the sense of the yoga system, is a hard thing to do. This is why people had to work through the sweat of their brow for years and years to understand what all this finally means.

The thing that ‘you’ are cannot be merely the body. Even a person with a little common sense will know this. I just mentioned casually, through the analogy of happiness and unhappiness, that the bodily happiness need not be your happiness, and the bodily unhappiness need not be your unhappiness. Even if surgeons cut off limbs of the body, which cannot be regarded as happiness of the body, a person can still be happy; and a person can be in a condition of a total ruin, for other internal reasons, even if the body is perfectly healthy.

Thus, our life is more internal than external. Our external life appears to be a very great thing for us because of the fact that the internal factors do not intrude much. It is something like our feeling very happy and satisfied merely because our creditors do not show their faces. A debtor may be happy as long as the creditor does not show his face, but when he shows his face, immediately the debtor’s face falls, and the reason for his unhappiness is very clear. The outward show of joy vanishes in a moment when internal factors displace themselves and create an imbalance in the system.