Real knowledge is to know the extent of ones ignorance

Confucius
THE SPEAKING TREE
NEW DELHI, FEBRUARY 1, 2015

Sense Of Humour

Hasya is the rasa of joy, with

humour as its most popular
expression.The favourite subject of
humour is maya, the illusory aspect
of the universe, the eternal play of
opposites that is never the ultimate
truth but merely a reflection of truth.
Peter Marchand

When you realise how perfect

everything is you will tilt your head
back and laugh at the sky.
Gautama Buddha

He deserves paradise who makes his

companions laugh.
Quran

Everyone is so afraid of death, but

the real Sufis just laugh. Nothing
tyrannises their hearts.
What strikes the oyster shell doesnt
damage the pearl.
Jalaluddin Rumi

I created you human beings

because I desired to see you lead a
joyous life.
Ofudesaki

A man of knowing attains to a

sense of humour. Let this always be
remembered. If you see someone who
has no sense of humour, know well
that that man has not known at
all.Knowing brings a playfulness;
knowing brings a sense of humour.
Osho

Laugh as much as possible, always

laugh. Its the sweetest thing one can
do for oneself and ones fellow
human beings.
Maya Angelou

There is no limit to joy.

Happiness has no end.
When you are standing in the love
of God, every cell in your body
jumps for joy.
Sun Myung Moon

When you laugh, you change and

when you change the whole world
changes around you.
Madan Kataria

Humour is just another defence

against the universe.
Mel Brooks

One Huge
Think Tank

CORBIS

MUKUL SHARMA

E D I T O R I A L

Being Irreverent
Faith in laughter, laughter in faith
JUG SURAIYA
of Salman Rushdies novel The Satanic Verses, which resulted in a fatwa being placed on his life. Such face-offs
between freedom of expression and
the sanctity of religious belief will inevitably become more frequent with
the proliferation of social media and
the platform for uncensored comment
and opinion that they offer.
In a climate in which one mans
bon mot can be anothers blasphemous
poison, humour can become a deadly
dangerous business.At the core of the
problem lies the question: Does humour undermine the transcendent authority of faith?
How can laughter walk the
tightrope between irreverence and of-

fence? The clue lies in the equipoise

Laxman maintained between irreverence and lack of malicious intent. Irreverence begins by being ready, willing and able to laugh at its progenitors,
the satirists themselves. If you can first
learn to laugh at yourself, you legitimise your laughing at others, because
you have shown that your laughter is
not motivated by malice.
The laughter of irreverence is always directed upwards, from a subordinate to an entity of higher status.A
joke made by a beggar at the expense
of a king is funny; a joke made by a
king about a beggar is not a joke but
malicious cruelty.Thats the paradox of
irreverence: by its very nature it also

subsumes an upside-down reverence:

if we laugh at that which is deemed
superior to us,we ratify that superiority by our laughter.
An example of such reverent irreverence or irreverent reverence
is the Indian custom of referring to
God by the familiar form of address,
tu, which is used for children, those of
a lower social status, and lovers. If our
God cant stand a bit of kidding at His
cost,then He doesnt deserve to be our
God, worthy of our worship.
The laughter of irreverence sans
malice is laughter directed not at someone or something, but laughter with
everyone and all things, including divinity and the concept of divinity itself.Sartre called genius the scandalous
audacity of nothingness.The genius
that we call laughter has the same negative capability: it can mock all of creation because it has first mastered mocking itself.
Thats the gift of laughter,one that
we can share with who else? the
Common Man and all humanity.

Knowledge Is Darkness
Bookish learning does not always banish ignorance, writes VIJAY SRINATH KANCHI,
commenting on a verse from the upanishads

he upanishads say
that the ignorant go
to a world of darkness, but the learned
go into a world that
is even darker. But isnt knowledge a lamp that banishes the
darkness of ignorance? How can
knowledge that dispels ignorance, extolled as the panacea for all ills and
evils, lead one to a world that is darker than the ignorance itself?
The process of acquiring knowledge which illuminates a person inside
and lets him become aware of the external reality, begins with sense data.
This data, when contextualised, transforms into information which again
turns into knowledge when we know
how to apply it.But knowledge is bipolar; depending on the context, sometimes one aspect of the knowledge is
right and sometimes the other.There
is no knowledge in the world which is
not dichotomous.Experience coupled
with knowledge during the course of
practical application leads to the germination of discerning wisdom.That
is why it is said wisdom dawns as man
grows old.

The External World

But what is the teleological objective of this whole effort of knowing the
external world? Why at all, this process
of knowledge acquirement between
the subject and object should take place?
Simply put, this is an effort to become
one with the external world.This process
of knowledge acquirement would continue till such time the equilibrium is
established.That is to say, the process
begins with a state where the subject
and object are two separate realities and
transfer of data continues to facilitate
the identity of the object in the subject.This process ideally would continue till there is no object left to know.
But as the Jains argue in Anekantavada and its corollary Syadvada, every

ecent neuroscientific research on mice reported by

Nature and New Scientist, suggests that some experiences can influence subsequent generations. For example, in one such study mice trained
to fear a specific smell seemed to be
able to pass on their trained aversion
to their descendants, which were then
extremely sensitive and fearful of the
same smell, even though they had
never encountered it, nor been
trained to fear it. Interestingly, changes
in brain structure were also found.
The researchers concluded that The
experiences of a parent, even before
conceiving, markedly influences both
structure and function in the nervous
system of subsequent generations.
Scientists are now beginning to
speculate that similar genetic mechanisms could probably be linked with
phobias, anxiety and post-traumatic
stress disorders, as well as other neuropsychiatric disorders in humans.
If the Swiss analytical psychologist
C J Jung had been around, he would
only have called it yet another manifestation of racial memory or collective

DIGITAL ART/CORBIS

S AC R E D
S P AC E

he many tributes that were

paid toThe Times of India cartoonist R K Laxman when
he shed his earthly vestment to be
reborn in the avatar of his immortal
Common Man had one thing in
common: they all remarked on his
uncanny ability to balance a lively irreverence with a total absence of
malice. This is the real secret of his
art, which will continue to live on
after him.
The distinction between irreverence and malice is of particular relevance today when the world stands
deeply and bitterly divided between
those who champion the cause of
freedom of expression, as represented by the French satirical magazine
Charlie Hebdo which lampooned Islam and the Prophet, resulting in the
death of 13 people, and those who
believe that matters of religious faith
are sacrosanct and beyond the purview
of scepticism and humour.
Such confrontations have taken
place earlier, most notably in the case

and not rubbed into the practitioner

with practice and warmed with direct
experience, the person becomes rigid
and hard in his intellectual understanding.Then new teachings will not
soften him, will not penetrate and
change him.We must be careful not
to store the teachings as only conceptual understanding lest that conceptual understanding becomes a
block to wisdom.
Tenzing Wangyal Rinpoche further
says that there are many philosophical
systems that are developed with the intention of leading beings to wisdom,
but they produce ignorance in that their
followers cling to a dualistic understanding of reality.This is unavoidable
in any conceptual system because the
conceptual mind itself is a manifestation of ignorance.

SOUL SOUP

Divine Currents
I vaguely remember that there was a
sign, saying:Dangerous Currents.
No Lifeguard. I grew up in the
middle of the United States.At age
twenty, I had hardly ever seen an
ocean and certainly knew very little
about them, so the sign meant
nothing to me. It was a beautiful
sunny day, and there I was in
California at the Pacific Ocean.
All I could think about was diving
into those waves. Paddling around in
the water, I reveled in this new
experience.Then everything changed.
I was caught in a riptide and it was
carrying me away from shore. I
fought against it, but the current was
too strong. Farther and farther it took
me out into the sea, until the
crashing surf was tossing me about
like a rag doll. I struggled and
struggled to no avail. I was fighting
for my life and the ocean was
winning. Finally, unable to swim
another stroke, I turned over onto my
back and literally went belly up. I
was convinced there was nothing I
could do and no one who could save
me.Waves were crashing around me,
but I felt completely calm.
I had never considered what I would
do when faced with death. In
hindsight, I am surprised by my

Break The Circle

object has innumerable qualities and

so it would take very large, if not infinite amount of time before this equilibrium is struck. Anyone who sticks
to this process contending
that this process of knowledge acquirement banishes
ignorance is really ignorant,
because he is never going to
succeed in this process.The
problem is that we have a
short and limited span of lifetime, and there obviously is
needed some other way,
some other practice, if we were to attain the equilibrium in this life itself
or at least in a definite time frame in
future. And this path is not the path
of knowledge, but the path of pratyabhigna, direct experience.
In his book Tibetan Yoga of Dream
and Sleep, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche
explains with a beautiful allegory how
knowledge becomes a hindrance to en-

lightenment. He says, in Tibet, new

leather skins are put in the sun and
rubbed with butter to make them softer.When a sentient being enters this
world with the loads of past
samskaras, it is like the new
skin, tough and hard with
narrow views and conceptual rigidity.
Knowledge is like the
butter, rubbed in through
practice, making it soft and
pliable. But the same butter
when stored in leather bags
for some years, makes the bags hard as
wood and no amount of new butter
can soften them.Someone who spends
many years studying the teachings
acquiring knowledge, intellectualising
a great deal with little experience of
practice, is like that hardened leather.
The teachings can soften the hard skin
of ignorance and conditioning, but
when they are stored in the intellect

Ignorants have a scope of redemption at least some time in future, but

those believing in the inviolable supremacy of knowledge and adhering
to the path of knowledge acquirement
would continue to tread on the never
ending path infinitely.The upanishads
warn us of the danger of being stuck
in the furrows of knowledge and wake
us up to break the circle and proceed
on the path of direct experience one
that does not depend on the sense-mind
interface between subject and object.
Osho says, for eons, people have
been moving round and round in circles in a small room, wondering how
enormous their room is, since despite
millions of steps for eons together,they
failed to find the end of the room.Suddenly, one among those circling morons decides to move in a perpendicular direction,breaking the accepted path
and lo, there he discovers the door
the entry and exit to this presumably
infinite-sized room and gets liberated from the room.
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unconscious. In addition to our immediate consciousness, he wrote,

which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the
only empirical psyche, there exists a
second psychic system of a collective,
universal and impersonal nature which
is identical in all individuals. Jung believed this collective unconscious didnt develop individually, but was inherited. It consisted of pre-existent forms,
the archetypes, which could only become conscious secondarily and which
gave form to certain
psychic contents. Our SCIENCE
bodies
have
an
anatomical prehistory of millions of
years, as does the psychic system.
Jung even saw UFOs as an expression of something in the collective unconscious,as an updated version of the
gods of old and the little people of
popular folklore. He wrote a book
called Flying Saucers:A Modern Myth Of
Things Seen In The Skies in 1958.
Its through the medium of the collective unconscious that information
about a particular time and place can
be transferred to another individual

mind.This was how Jung explained to

himself the feeling of restlessness one
evening and then the dull pain that
woke him at about 2.00 am, passing
from the forehead and to the back of
the skull, the day one of his patients
shot himself in the head.
An alternative view is that an individual mind has access only to its own
store of memories from the past
that is, all the experiences and knowledge that the psyche has so far acquired, not only from the moment of
birth but from parents
& SPIRIT and their parents and
so on, as the neuroscientific study of trained rats mentioned
earlier clearly demonstrates.
According to this view, not until a
much higher level of consciousness has
been reached will an individual mind
have direct access to other parts of the
universal mind, even though we are always part of it.This idea doesnt contradict any of Jungs theories about archetypes. In fact, it makes them more
vital because of a slightly different emphasis: instead of the archetypes existing outside the individual conscious-

ness in a collective unconscious to

which one must first gain access before
contacting them, they exist within the
individual as real memories.
Zoologist and anthropologist Lyall
Watson, who had been following such
studies for a large part of his life,
thought there was a need for a new
term for the common awareness that
can be shared by a group: Sama
composed of two Sanskrit roots sa
meaning together, and man meaning
think,something that links together or
is of like mind.Sama describes those
parts of an individual or society which
share information, whether they be in
the germ cells or in the mind.
The thalamus and hypothalamus,
part of the so-called old brain common
to all animals, controlling the autonomous nervous system, has been
thought by some to be the area responsible for memories, impulses and
feelings which we attribute to the collective unconscious. On the other
hand, awareness and appreciation of
the collective unconscious can be extended into a more transcendent experience of cosmic consciousness.

response. I had just started

meditating, and I knew God was out
there somewhere. I wasnt sure what
role He might play in my life, and
what my relationship was to Him.
Now, as I looked at the vast blue sky,
the bright sun, and the ocean around
me, I offered myself completely to
God. No words. I wasnt asking
to be saved. I didnt pray to die
quickly.With all my heart, I just
gave myself back to Him.What
happened next seemed the most
natural thing in the world. In
response to my self-offering,
God gave me bliss.
Basking in His bliss, it took me a
few minutes to realise that I was now
floating in calm water. I rested there
until my strength returned.Then I
dog-paddled in a channel of calm
water all the way back to shore.
Loved and Protected,
Ananda Sangha

A Day Off
One time, Bob Marley was scheduled
to play at a concert that promoted
peace.Two days before the concert,
strangers broke into his house and
shot him. Even though he was shot
at and injured, he still showed up
two days later to perform
at the concert. Someone came up to
him after the concert and asked him
why he did the concert when
he could have been recovering from
his injury. Marley replied,The
people that are trying to make this
world worse are not taking a day off.
How can I?
Devon H, values.com