Empty Yourself Of All Knowledge

24 January 2002, 01:31am IST
S H VENKATRAMANI.

We are bewildered by the complexity of life today. confounded by the overwhelming multiplicity of choice, we feel weighed down. whether it be selecting and pursuing a career or choosing a course of study; deciding upon that holiday destination or even the way you want to spend an evening, the plethora of options that stares you in the face is staggering and immense. as we struggle and swim through the river of life, this perplexing range of options badgers us, generating a lot of confusion and restlessness. finally, we are eager to run away from it all, as the poet john keats exhorted the nightingale to do: ‘‘fade far away, dissolve and quite forget/ what thou amongst the leaves has never known:/ the weariness, the fever and the fret/ here where men sit and hear each other groan’’. to de-stress ourselves, we want to renounce all worldly desires and retire to a simple life in the jungle, to what hinduism characterises as vanaprastha in sanskrit. to sacrifice thus is truly great, we tell ourselves, because by sacrificing we are making ourselves sacred. as oliver goldsmith writes: ‘‘then, pilgrim turn, thy cares forego,/ all earth-born cares are wrong;/ man wants but little here below,/ nor wants that little long’’. goldsmith gives us a reason to transcend the vicissitudes of fortune. says he, ‘‘alas, the joys that fortune brings/ are trifling, and decay:/ and those who prize the trifling things,/ more trifling still than they’’. the pleasures that fortune brings us are trifling and ephemeral; therefore the people who value these fleeting and insignificant thrills are intellectual and spiritual pygmies. that is why all philosophies and religions preach the austerity of asceticism. ‘‘simplicity, simplicity, simplicity’’, cried the american writer and philosopher henry david thoreau, who retired to the woods and lived alone in rapport with nature. thoreau greatly influenced the evolution of mahatma gandhi’s ideal of ‘‘plain living and high thinking’’. but is renouncing the desire for worldly possessions all that there is to simplicity? can you attain spiritual salvation by overcoming the greed for material pleasures, the craving for a palatial bungalow and a swankier car? the old testament tells us: ‘‘do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal’’. should we therefore aspire for intellectual joys that will sustain longer? to equate spirituality with saintly renunciation and religious penance is to delude yourself. as you don the ochre mantle of the spiritual seeker you continue to be a prisoner of your ego, nurturing grandiose notions about your self. fancying yourself as highly evolved, you are perhaps caught even more in the vicious grip of the ego. for the more subtle and subliminal the sense of the self, the more inexorable is its stranglehold, and the more fatal the fetters. true spiritual quest involves our going much further. as master eckhart explains, ‘‘man ought to live as if he did not live, neither for self, nor for the truth, nor for god.’’ he expatiates on the point further: ‘‘the man who is to achieve this poverty shall live as a man who does not even know that he lives, neither for himself, nor for the truth, nor for god. more, he shall be quit and empty of all knowledge, so that no knowledge of god exists in him’’. he concludes that ‘‘a man ought to be empty of his own knowledge, as he was when he did not exist, and let god achieve what he will and man be unfettered’’. eckhart is not asking us to be mired in ignorance. he is not saying that it is folly to be wise. what he is saying is that we should not know that we know. we should not feel the slightest sense of exultation in our knowledge. when we bask in the glory of our knowledge, we are treacherously trapped. for with that glory, the contours of the ego begin to assume a definite shape. these boundaries of the ego are the most formidable barriers to self-realisation.