Educating For A Lesser Idea Of Knowledge

By Arjuna Seneviratne -October 26, 2013 |

Arjuna Seneviratne

The greatest knowledge there is, is that there is no greater knowledge than that which enables one to be in harmony and in contentment with one’s self and the externalities that affect one most.

Harmony and contentment are difficult to engineer without much trial and error, without spectral scoping and without many lifetimes because one must be able to absorb and resolve both internal and external negatives and positives with joy, compassion, equanimity, understanding and insight. Tough though this certainly is, some have come very close to achieving precisely that harmony, precisely that contentment. All of them had that rare ability to heal souls and calm troubled waters not because they crusaded for it but simply because they existed. Most of them basked in happiness and signed off on their lives with the slogan “a job well done”. A few, a very few, spent their lives instructing others on how to sample that happiness and achieve it if not to a higher degree than they did themselves, then at least to a level equal to theirs.

Some of these I have known, some I have heard of, some I have read of or studied and from others I have got to know many things.  They were the accomplished ones. They saw a lot and instructed those that came into their orbit to look both wide and deep. They knew a lot of things about a lot of things and encouraged others to know similarly before they call themselves “knowers”.  They subsumed their egos completely in order to instruct those who were full of it in the skills they required in order to perform.  They never held up a board saying “Come to me, I am a teacher”. Instead, people naturally gravitated to them and were given instruction according to their abilities. None, ever, were sent away empty handed.  They taught the world all that was worth knowing.                                         Read More