Reference: posted by: ruckerrr on 6/26/00 to Kirpal Singh Satsang Club; Message number 440-443
This is the second essay reflecting on the book Naam or Word, by Kirpal Singh. (All page numbers for the quotes come from Naam or Word by Kirpal Singh, 1994 edition published by Ruhani Satsang Books). This essay is simply my reflection on the book to share some thoughts and try to make sense of the path….
One of the essential distinctions in mysticism is that of outer knowledge, or knowledge of the physical world, from inner knowledge. As previously noted, the book Naam or Word links many spiritual traditions by their nexus, the Word of Life, called Naam in eastern traditions. Along the way, Kirpal Singh also succinctly covers some essential points of mysticism, such as in the chapter Gyan or Jnana, a mere 13 pages distinguishing knowledge from Knowledge, where he integrates both into the framework of Surat Shabd yoga.
Many authors have used buckets of ink attempting to explain spirituality and its practice; probably not enough ink has been spilled distinguishing between intellectual knowledge of spirituality and Knowledge gained from its practice. In the chapter Gyan or Jnana, Kirpal Singh provides a good starting place to understand how inner knowledge and outer knowledge are distinct.
The distinction between inner and outer knowledge is important to seekers after Truth, especially since many come from traditions where they feel there is no practical difference between inner and outer knowledge. That is, seekers ‘seek’ from a sense of unfulfilled purpose in their natural-born religion since in the practice many established religions have a large focus on the outer aspects of spirituality, such as the social interactions and the intellectual perceptions of faith and spirituality, but the inner practice, well...
Those of us on the path may not feel like seekers, since we’ve ‘found’ what we are looking for; but we often seem to suffer from lack of fulfillment, too. In world religious traditions, gaining inner knowledge is at best difficult, due to the lack of practical methods for its achievement, as well as the general lack of adepts in the practice and the relative distance of the religion from its origin. For satsangis, it is the failure to put the theory of the path to work that creates the distance between us and the Truth. It is, as the Sants say repeatedly, the practice of religion, not the religious practice that brings inner fulfillment. So this chapter on knowledge has relevance not just to seekers from outside Sant Mat. It is also vitally important to those of us within the tradition who confuse our chatter with what counts.
In Naam or Word, Kirpal Singh suggests that Gyan or Jnana (Sanskrit, “to know”) refers to two very distinct concepts—in fact, concepts that are different in kind and not just in degree. Apara Vidya, or “knowledge that comes through the senses” (285) is outer knowledge, or knowledge gained and understood by the intellect or mind. In contrast, Para Vidya (I think, literally, ‘knowledge of the beyond’) is knowledge through practice, “gained by the spirit or soul when it reflects back upon itself.” (286) One is acquired from use of the mind, and confers knowledge of the world; the other, through the use of the spirit, illuminates the Truth, “the knowledge of which makes everything known.” (286)
For Kirpal Singh, if life is a journey and the pursuit of knowledge the focus of the trip, the results of the pursuit will validate the journey. On the one hand, the pursuit of inner knowledge is a completing, a fulfilling, a filling-in-of-the-blanks experience that encompasses all other knowledge. “When the light of self-knowledge dawns, all doubts and all differences vanish; one views the world in an altogether different setting, like a person standing on the summit of a hill, looking at the landscape around and below him stretching out in an endless undulating series.” (286) In essence, the journey to inner knowledge leads to integration. It is a process of metanoia, which does not reject but rather embraces the whole of creation from a larger Experience.
On the other hand, the pursuit of outer knowledge might be said to lead to dis-integration, with opposite effect. Kirpal Singh suggests that our quest for understanding through apara vidya or intellectual knowledge will not give us what we seek. Quoting Tennyson, “Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough/Gleams that untraveled world, whose margin fades/Forever and forever when I move.” (287) Kirpal continues, “It is a kind of wilderness through which there is no way out. Even a person with all his wits about him is sure to be lost in its labyrinthine maze. Like a flogging horse, he may kill himself with sheer exhaustion, but cannot possibly get through. Such is the terrible path on which we trudge.” (287)
The reason for the differing effect is because it is in Naam where inner knowledge resides, and so the practice of inner knowledge requires accessing that current of life. But since outer knowledge does not connect to Naam, the use of the intellect to understand the theory of the Path never results in inner knowledge. And so a further distinction is made throughout Kirpal Singh’s writings, that between the two sources of knowledge, inner and outer, the latter is gained through the former; but not vice versa. Kirpal Singh states that the two “go cheek by jowl and are interdependent.” And although there is a place for each, the practice “requires stilling the mind and intellect before anything else.” (289)
To say that the mind and intellect are useless, indeed that their suspension is prerequisite for attaining inner knowledge, is a startling revelation to those interested in mysticism but unfamiliar with Sant Mat. To those of us more familiar with the uncompromising expression of the Sants, it is a reminder of a distinction too easily forgotten in the day-to-day practice of the path.
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