Knowledge is always a good thing, right?
Day 3: Knowledge
As someone who loves to learn, I found that my thirst for knowledge was beneficial in the healing process, at least initially. Exposure to a ton of readings, videos, and assessments was not only therapeutic, it was necessary for me to form a broad conceptual understanding of my issues and to make more confident choices. So please don’t rely on the experts (or a single guru) alone! There’s also so much societal conditioning that we have to see through at this time–we each have to do the work to see past deceptions.
Being in the presence of teachers whose egos were in check, and who offered the truth without fanfare, was soul-stirring and invaluable as well.
However, taken too far, knowledge-acquisition becomes an unconscious ploy to bypass one’s issues; it’s so natural (but unhelpful) to keep stuffing one’s head with ideas and make meaning of circumstances rather than sitting with the pain, something it took a while for me to learn. Nowadays it’s so common for people to consume memes and self-help books ad nauseum, using this to cling to a view of themselves as broken. But sitting with the pain, and compassionately accepting whatever arises, is the real work.
There’s also the danger of falling prey to what the yogi Paramahansa Yogananda called “spiritual indigestion”:
This results from indiscriminately swallowing a lot of mental patent medicines in the form of pseudo-spiritual books and lessons by quack spiritual doctors. This disease kills not only the real hunger for Truth, but also destroys the power to discriminate between good and bad teachings. He who eats theological ideas all the time, and eats anything that he can get, will not only overeat but will consume poisonous ideas along with the good, inviting first, spiritual indigestion, and finally, spiritual death. Long-continued overstudy of all sorts of philosophical principles and treatises, without any effort to assimilate them and test them out in one's own practical experience, results in doubt, indifference, and disbelief in all spiritual laws.
This is also the breeding ground for people who like to quote scripture as evidence of their newly elevated status. 😊
Knowledge is, by its nature, old, stale, and limiting–we can become arrogant in thinking that the more we know the more we understand, but knowledge cannot help us understand the unknown, the new, and the magical, which is beyond the mind.
So for the bookworms and knowledge-seekers like me, out there, these are the potential pitfalls I wanted you to know about.
Much love,
Anubha
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