When “hearing” (śravaṇa) of the Truth fails to remove my ignorance, I don’t find spiritual freedom but instead find myself beset with doubts and questions. That is the time to take the second step.
Step 2: “Reflection” (manana)
Hearing the teacher’s instructions and pondering over them, the student’s reservations regarding the scripture, or “verbal testimony” (śabda), which is a means of knowledge (pramāṇa), are generally removed. Can I trust what the scriptures say? What is the best way to study and understand a scripture? How can the wisdom in the scripture become my own?—questions such as these get answered through the teacher’s instructions. But what persist for most students are doubts regarding the object of knowledge (prameya), in other words, who God is—philosophically, what the nature of “that” (tat) is and how it is related to me (aham).
When I receive a valuable equipment as gift, I may recognize that it is precious but remain unsure about how to operate it or how to take care of it. I’ll likely bring it home and examine it carefully, study it from every angle, in order to learn more about it. That is what happens to us after hearing the teaching. We recognize that it is important but we are not able to understand it fully because of doubts and questions. The teacher’s instructions need to be “brought home,” that is, inside my mind and heart, so I can examine them with care to solve the doubts that are still lingering in my mind. To do this effectively, I need to intensify my Four Basic Practices to gain greater understanding.
What does God being my father or mother mean? How is this relationship similar to or different from my relationship with my biological parents? How can I be God’s child without ever having seen or known God? In the supreme intensity of love, can any distance remain between God and me? Maybe there is just Being (sat) manifesting apparently as two, God (īśvara) and the embodied soul (jīva)? But how can the infinite perfection of the Divine be identical with the little mortal human that I am?—questions similar to these arise and the student tries to grapple with them. These questions are related to the seeming impossibility (asambhāvanā) of a relationship with the Divine.
Remembering the words of the teacher and diving deep into the texts, the student begins to reflect. Like hearing, reflecting is also an art. Doing it haphazardly yields only haphazard results. Reflecting must be done in a disciplined way. The most important thing in the practice of reflection is steadiness, that is, the ability to hold and keep an idea or a thought in the forefront of the mind in order to examine it minutely from every angle. This becomes a challenge if the mind is habituated to flitting from one thought to another. Acquiring the ability to stabilize the mind and focusing it for a length of time on a given idea is a must for a successful practice of reflection.
All the means of knowledge—such as direct perception (pratyakṣa), verbal testimony (śabda), inference (anumāna)—can be summoned to help in the process of examining an idea and assessing its worth. It is like solving a crossword puzzle. Getting one or two words right makes it progressively easy to find the other words. In exactly the same way, one insight leads to another and the initial doubts begin to disappear. What did not make sense earlier now begins to look like the only sensible answer. Doubts are replaced by clarity. Questions melt away.
For most middling students, the practice of reflection can take days or months, even years—depending on where they stand on the scale that separates the mediocre from the magnificent. But eventually all obstacles vanish when their doubts are resolved and they attain spiritual freedom.
But that may not happen in every case. It is possible to resolve my doubts regarding the nature of my relationship with God—and find that I am still tied to my body and mind, still stuck to my mortal human identity, still enmeshed in the web of ideas and concepts, and nowhere near experiencing the spiritual freedom that I seek. The reason is that another obstacle, a more formidable one, is blocking my path. This cannot be overcome merely through reflection. That takes me to the next step.
from Vedanta Blog - Vedanta Society https://ift.tt/Itbj7G6
