There are few certainties in this world. Here is one of them.
Goenka asks,
What one knows about one’s body?
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Experiential vs intellectual knowing |
All the saints and sages and seers of the past have said, “Know thy self! Know thy self!” They became saints because they knew themselves. They passed through the process of exploring the truth about oneself.
Know thyself not merely at the intellectual level, that won’t help. Know thyself at the actual level. That means the experiential level.
What is this to which I say “I,” “I,” “I”?
This corporeal, physical, bodily structure?
This mental structure?
The combination of the two?
Is this “I”?
Tremendous amount of attachment towards this physical structure, the mental structure, by identifying oneself with it as “I,” “I.” And the resultant misery. When you identify yourself with the matter and the mind, and you develop attachment towards it, you start becoming tense, you start tying knots, and the misery starts. To accept it merely at the intellectual level or even to accept it at the devotional level, because an enlightened person has said so, doesn’t work.
At the actual level! You have to explore the truth—the reality—of your entire being. The mind. The matter. From the surface level—the apparent, grossest level—going deeper, deeper, deeper, subtler, subtler, subtler, subtlest level. This technique will help you to explore the truth of the entire field of matter, to explore the truth of the entire field of mind, at the experiential level.
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Knowledge via maps |
Like you want to explore the truth about your body. What one knows about one’s body? One may have read books on physiology or anatomy and might have seen charts, this or that. That doesn’t mean that you know. You don’t know at the experiential level. It is just an intellectual game.
The strangest thesis of all world religion and philosophy is that of cognitive magick. The claim is that an act of knowing produces real effects.
For Burmese Buddhism and Satipaṭṭhāna enthusiasts, the Buddha’s most core message is,
To be free, get the bubbling physical under-necessity that drives the enthralling froth of this compulsion-driven experientiality.
This is the supreme, unsurpassable, most excellent, highest, greatest, all-conquering METHOD of philosophy, mysticism, wisdom, truth, right living, and righteousness. It is an idea that follows automatically once you recognize the unavoidable truths of idealism and physicalism. And that is this:
The way to realty/truth can only be via the stuff of the body that makes experience.