Knowing and Knowing: Unleashing the Power of Inclusion

There is knowing and there is knowing. The first knowing is with our organs of perception. This is the ordinary way of knowing used by the majority of us in most instances. The second knowing is the Einsteinian way, with the “eyes” of the mind. The latter way of knowledge creation is contemplative exploration, learning and research.

There is more to life than meets the eye is not merely a cliché. One needs to cultivate the mind to “see” a needle in a haystack. Many before Einstein did that but we picked on him because of his perceived modernity.

Einstein was a theoretical physicist. He, a clerk in a German patent office, did not have access to a physics laboratory. With his “thought experiments”, he single handedly developed the theory of relativity, the physics of heavenly bodies on one hand and made ground breaking discoveries in quantum physics, the physics of infinitesimal micro particles on the other. His contemplative explorations steered him outside the box of Newtonian physics, the physics of bodies within the reach of human experience with their physical organs of perception.

Mass-energy equivalence arose from his theory of relativity; it was this work that united science with spirituality and made Einstein exclaim, “A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.”

Seeing with the “eyes” of our mind is called insight or inner experience. The “eye” of the mind can see what the “eyes” of the body cannot. When we know with our own insight that all existence in the universe has the same source, self-sacrificing love and blissfulness becomes within an easy reach. We then unleash the power of inclusion making an ordinarily weak but unifying force stronger than the strongest divisive force of self-protection.

For this we need to uproot spiritual ignorance? It is nothing short of first hand clear insight or inner experience of the unseen spirit-energy as the underlying reality manifesting itself in the immense diversity of perceptible forms in the entire universe. Hearsay, book learning, simple intellectual understanding, ethics, value system or heart feelings of love and compassion don’t have the strength of withstanding the force of fear, especially that of death although they may be enough to tolerate, accept and to include.

The gaining of the said insight is easy if we make some effort to cultivate the mind by minimizing or eliminating its usual fluctuations with a deceptively simple physiological practice. To understand how mind can be cultivated, we need to understand the nature of human mind.

Brain being the physical correlate of the mind, understanding the development of brain function amounts to understanding the mind. To develop that understanding, we will look at the development and function of an individual brain and that of the brain in general on the planet.