What is Knowledge

by Swami Krishnananda

Now we are on the border of certain vital issues in the practice of yoga, and everything that we have considered up to this time is a sort of preparation for the quintessential essence of the whole matter. The control of the senses is the principal issue involved here. It is said everywhere, in practically all the religions in the world, that the senses have to be restrained, and should not be given a long rope. They should not be permitted to act wildly, according to their own whims and fancies.

Why should the senses be controlled? What is wrong with them? We know very well that the senses are our great friends that bring us immense satisfaction in the form of enjoyments of every kind. All our joys are sensory, sensuous. If life is a happiness, for all practical purposes it appears that this happiness comes through the sense organs. Thus, life would be meaningless if the senses were not to be operative in their own fashion.

Now we are being told the opposite, as if we are not to exist at all in the world, when it is said that the senses are to be restrained. The restraint of the senses would imply the diminution of all happiness in life, inasmuch as for us there is no happiness minus sense activity. This is a problem of the common man, and man in general.

The necessity to restrain the senses arises due to a fundamental feature which is characteristic of the universe as a whole. We have heard again and again that, finally, it is impossible to consider the universe as an object of the senses. The world around us is not really ‘around’ us. The world that we see is really not something that is ‘seen’, but is a little different from what it appears to us. The world is not an object of the senses; and if the world is not an object of the senses, and if the senses cannot think of the world except as an object, there is something seriously wrong with the senses – which would also mean, consequently, there is something seriously wrong with our idea that happiness is only sensory. One consequence follows from an accepted premise.

Is the world – or the universe, so to say – an object of the senses? Is it an object at all in any sense of the term? The structure of the universe as a completeness in itself, permitting no externality whatsoever, would not permit us to wrench ourselves from any kind of vital relationship with it and look at it as if it is a stranger in front of us. What we call earthly, worldly involvement, which is often called the bondage of samsara – this earth earthy existence, this turmoil and sorrow of life – is said to be ultimately traceable to the event of the inward segregation of the perceiving, knowing subject from that which it considers as its object. For us, the world is the object, and every object is part of the world; and, in a way, we may say there is only one object in front of us – namely, the world – whatever be the variety that it contains.

There is no need to repeat the reasons why the world cannot be and should not be considered as an object of consciousness. This has been said again and again, and we need not reiterate this point. If the involvement of ourselves as seeing, knowing, perceiving subjects in the very fact of the existence of the world or the universe cannot permit us to regard ourselves as totally isolated from the world, then the senses are not a good means of knowing the world as it is in itself. The world is not capable of being known correctly by the employment of the sense organs. This would bring us to the point as to why it has been held again and again that the world of sensory perception is relative and phenomenal, and it is not absolute, not noumenal. What we see with our eyes or sense with any other sense organ is a phenomenal world; it is not the real world. Hence, the joys of the phenomenal world are also phenomenal. They are not real joys.

The phenomenality, or the relative character of the world or the universe, becomes apparent due to the consequence that follows from a sensory interpretation of the universe. The interpretation of the object by means of the instrument of even the mind, much less the senses, is not a proper attitude either of the mind or of the senses in regard to the object. Nothing can be known by placing it as a total outsider to the consciousness that intends to know it. Knowledge, or the knowledge process, is a crucial issue in profounder studies in our educational career. This profundity involved in the very process of knowing anything is the secret of philosophical analysis and conclusions.

We take for granted that everything is clear to us the moment something is presented before our eyes; but it is not so clear. The presentation of an object – call it the world or the universe, if you so like – before our consciousness in the process of sensory perception is conditioned by invisible operations which go by the name of the space and the time factors. Space and time refuse to be regarded as objects of the senses. They somehow connive to remain independent of our idea of the object of knowledge, and secretly they manoeuvre a misconstruing of everything by the perceiving subject by interfering with every type of knowing – knowing in any way whatsoever. Space and time interfere with us inwardly as well as outwardly – perpetually, continually, unremittingly. But the interference of these principles, space and time, in our knowledge process is so subtle and invisible in every way that we cannot know that they are interfering with us at all. When we look at a thing while wearing spectacles, we are not conscious that there are spectacles on our eyes because if we begin to see the spectacles, we cannot see the object. We should not be aware that there are spectacles on our eyes – we should not look at the spectacles or the glasses that we are wearing – in order that the objects can be seen. If we begin to see the glasses, we will not see any object. Therefore, the spectacles should remain invisible conditioning factors in order that the perception may appear satisfactory and clear. Similarly, if we begin to cognise or perceive space and time themselves, we will be in a different world altogether.

Hence, the senses working together with the mind, and even with the intellect, do not present to us a correct picture of things as they really are. As philosophers tell us, things in themselves are never seen and never known; they cannot be perceived. What do we perceive? We perceive only a whitewash or a colour that is painted over that which really is, by the brush of the space and time factors. So, we see only a painting or a whitewash or a colourwash, but not that which is behind this painting or veneer that is smeared over its surface. But inasmuch as only the outer conditioning factors become the real objects of our perception or mental cognition, we mistake phenomenality for reality, relativity for absoluteness, temporality for eternity, and even pain for pleasure.

We regard a real sorrow as a joy. It is to be considered as a sorrow, because we are duped into the belief that our understanding in regard to its object is entirely untarnished and unblemished, and it is a safe guide for us in our knowledge of the essential substance of creation. The world is not an object, either of mental cognition or sense perception. That it appears to be such is really to be regretted very deeply. This world is a world of regret, basically, because we are involved in a state of affairs which refuses to be known in any way from the point of view of the instruments of knowledge available to us. Our sorrows are invisible things. They cannot be analysed, vivisected, or known in any way. What we know is, therefore, a peculiar presentation. Sometimes the world is compared to a mirage, which looks like water and recedes as we approach that reservoir of water. The more we try to touch the horizon, the further it moves from our reach.

No one can possess any object in the world, finally. Nobody has done it, and nobody will ever do it. The object cannot be possessed merely because of the fact it is not something that is expected to be possessed. Nobody can be subservient to another in the sense of an object, either of the senses or of the mind. There is a noumenal independence maintained by everything in the world, and it is not for nothing that we are told by the Upanishads, for instance, that the world is a ‘Self’ rather than a ‘not-Self’, an atman rather than an anatman, a pure universal subjectivity rather than anything that is of the nature of an object.

If the world is not an object, then so much the worse for our sense activity, because there is no function that is expected of the senses – there is nothing that they can do – if the world is not their object. If we are able to realise the reason why the object is not really outside the perceiving subject, and also why the world cannot be an object of the percipient, we will also know why the senses are to be controlled. It is because they are wild movements of consciousness, erratic activities of our mind, chaotic behaviour of our personality, and therefore we are entirely out of balance when we actively operate only through the senses. A disbalanced personality always overemphasises sense activity; and total dependence on the values of the senses is a dependence on what we call ‘a misguided existence’, finally. Who would like to live such a life?

Thus, yoga takes this question very seriously, and in the interest of introducing a wholesome, healthy characteristic into the personality of the human individual, it admonishes that no one can be really healthy if the senses are not restrained – because an overactivity of the senses is not a healthy condition of the personality. It is not healthy because it is a wrong way of thinking and acting. It is wrong because the senses are jumping on things which are really not there. This is a very interesting thing, indeed. Why should we control the senses? It is because the overwhelming activity of the senses acts like a screen over our internal vision. We have a blurred vision of things, as if mist is hanging between us and what we perceive, when the action of the senses is impetuous, overactive and uncontrollable. They come over us like a flood. They dash upon us like uncontrollable waves of power, desire and passion. The senses are actually repositories of desire and uncontrollable impulses which insist that we should go out of ourselves in order that we may be happy in the world.

Thus, dependence on the sense organs for obtaining any satisfaction or joy in this world is to accept that we have to be other than what we are in order that we may be happy. What a wonderful thing – that we have to be other than what we are in order that we may be happy. We have to sell ourselves to that which is not really there, and lose ourselves for nothing in order that we may enjoy a phantasmal satisfaction in the world.

It is really a work of opening our eyes in which the yoga system is engaged. In yoga parlance, ‘pratyahara’ is the principal word used for the restraint of the senses. Pratyahara usually means withdrawal of the senses. This is very difficult to understand and hard to achieve because, as we go wrong in understanding anything and everything in the world, we also go wrong in understanding the very meaning of sense control. We may imagine, like children, that not to be attracted by the visual objects of the world would be to physically close our eyes and not see them. This may be wrongly thought to be a sort of pratyahara; but it is not what is expected of us by yoga.