Can Knowledge of the Scriptures help in Attaining the Truth?

You cannot borrow the Truth from outside; it cannot be obtained. This is because it is already available within you. When a true master points at the truth within you, it is by this grace that true wisdom awakens within you.

Truth is subjective experience, not objective knowledge. It cannot be known as you would the other topics of the world. You can only experience it by ‘being’ it. And to ‘be’ it, you need to empty yourself of all that you have learned about the Truth. You need to release all the beliefs that you have gathered this far. This requires true faith and devotion, which can be awakened in the presence of a living Guru.

Commentaries and interpretations of the Truth lack the potency of the realized master’s presence. The teachings and the instructions delivered by the living Guru have a very deep impact. If you try to hit someone with a bullet held in your hand, the bullet won’t have an impact. But the Guru is like a gun. When the bullet is shot from the gun it hits the person with tremendous momentum and has a grave impact on him. In the same way, if the disciple listens to the Truth from someone else, then the impact is like the bullet thrown from the hand. When the disciple listens to the same words, the same knowledge, from the living Guru, his ego is eliminated. This is because the words delivered by the living Guru are directly coming from the experience of the Self; they arise from the Source – the quintessence of Truth.

The scriptures have been venerated as the Truth. They speak about the Truth; they can point to the Truth. The Truth expressed in the scriptures arose from the experience of the Self that realized masters reveled in. They are a reflection of the direct experience of the Truth. They serve as a mirror. But the mirror is not the Truth.

Moreover, the mirror is tainted with dust. The reflection of the Truth has been distorted through years of interpretation and commentaries, mostly by those who lacked the direct experience of the Self.

When scriptures are transcribed, they are the expression of a realized master. The master bestows grace through the medium of words. But when one holds onto scriptures and invests in mere words and their empirical meanings, then one gets lost in the pointers and loses what they are pointing at.

Consider the grand aphorism declared in the Upanishads – “Aham Brahmasmi”. This declaration arose from the experience of the Self. This has been literally translated by many as “I am God”, “I am that all-pervading reality”.
However, such translations cause the seeker to believe that he is the God personified. A person can never be God. The deeper import of the aphorism can be stated as, “God is the I-AM”. This may sound grammatically incorrect. And yet, it means that God is the “I-AMness”, the sense of existence, the living presence within every body-mind. Interpretations and translations that do not arise from the experience of the Self mislead the seeker away from the essence of the Truth.

When you enjoy a candy, you eat the candy and throw away the stick on which it was held. Words are like the stick. They are meant to be conveying the essence, which is beyond words. Once the essence is grasped, the role of words is over.

You can continue to stuff the mind with conceptual knowledge, ornate with logical reasoning, but all this has nothing to do with the true Self. The mind imagines the Self in terms of the concepts that have been imprinted in memory. Concepts create barriers. To be able to experience the immaculate Self, one needs to unlearn what one has held as knowledge.

It is only with true faith and devotion that one can let go of such bookish knowledge and abide in the Truth. It is then that true realization of the depth and grandeur of the Truth becomes evident. Else, one loses it in intellectual delights of knowledge that is available in poetic lines, scriptural verses and hearsay. Such knowledge does not serve the real purpose.

Summary:
Truth is subjective experience, not objective knowledge. The Truth expressed in the scriptures arose from the experience of the Self that realized masters reveled in. They are a reflection of the direct experience of the Truth. They serve as a mirror. But the mirror is not the Truth. Commentaries and interpretations of the Truth lack the potency of the realized master’s presence.

To be able to experience the immaculate Self, one needs to unlearn what one has held as knowledge.

The above article is an excerpt from the book: 100% Wisdom

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100% Wisdom – Wisdom That Leads You To Experience And Be Established In Your True Nature

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