The Ignorant Knower, pp. 239-240

Opening Remarks
Mind assumes that it knows whereas actually it has only gathered sense data and classified and analysed it. But this breaking down and categorising information into bits and pieces is not knowledge. It can serve as a prelude to knowledge that comes only as we enlarge the field of our senses beyond the material domain and tune our minds to receive truths that are now sealed to our vision and understanding.

Obscure ideas
The ideas that drive the obscure embodied spirit
Along the roads of suffering and desire
In a world that struggles to discover Truth,
Found here their power to be and Nature-force.

Though the Ideas descend from a high realm, here they enter into obscurity and drive humanity towards suffering. The light of truth is obscured and hence this realm struggles to discover it. This obscurity is natural to this realm and finds its force here trying to stamp its ignorant ‘truth’ upon the world.

Forms of an ignorant life
Here are devised the forms of an ignorant life
That sees the empiric fact as settled law,
Labours for the hour and not for eternity
And trades its gains to meet the moment’s call:
The slow process of a material mind
Which serves the body it should rule and use
And needs to lean upon an erring sense,
Was born in that luminous obscurity.

This mind regards a repetitive habitual pattern as the law of things. It devices practical means that work for a moment and then fail again. It seeks not the deeper truth or the Wisdom that can outlast Time. Its gaze turned solely towards matter sees mind itself as a creation of matter, bound by its laws even though it is meant to rule. Its instrument are the imperfect senses that grope for truth but only manage to catch a small little surface strip of the vast cosmic canvas.

The web of ignorance
Advancing tardily from a limping start,
Crutching hypothesis on argument,
Throning its theories as certitudes,
It reasons from the half-known to the unknown,
Ever constructing its frail house of thought,
Ever undoing the web that it has spun.

This mind builds hypothesis and theories and then shuts itself in the formulas it has reasoned out. Then discovering the inadequacy of its theories and formulas it labours again slowly limping towards the unknown summits where Truth reigns in majestic Silence. In its slow and stumbling, limping march it spins webs of thought, constructing systems out of its theories and then gets caught into it. Then it undoes this web and builds yet another as a scaffolding to scale the heights.

Twilight sage
A twilight sage whose shadow seems to him self,
Moving from minute to brief minute lives;
A king dependent on his satellites
Signs the decrees of ignorant ministers,
A judge in half-possession of his proofs,
A voice clamant of uncertainty’s postulates,
An architect of knowledge, not its source.

Fed by information from moment to moment it processes this sense data from minute to minute amidst shifting scenes of life. Though the master sense it depends heavily upon the other senses approving their inputs blindly and accepting their testimony. Yet all its knowledge is uncertain and at best a reasoned guess.

Powerful bondslave
This powerful bondslave of his instruments
Thinks his low station Nature’s highest top,
Oblivious of his share in all things made
And haughtily humble in his own conceit
Believes himself a spawn of Matter’s mud
And takes his own creations for his cause.

Though this mind thinks that it is basing its conclusions from accurate data but very imperceptibly it adds its own mixture into it, falsifying and colouring even the raw input of the senses to which it is tied as a slave. Though it claims to be humble in its pursuit of knowledge it refuses to admit that there may be other means and ways of knowing things. It believes itself to be the highest instrument of knowing while declaring itself to be born out of mud since it has evolved slowly out of bodily life. It knows not that what we call as matter is the result of division in One Substance created by the action of a cosmic Mind.

An insect crawl
To eternal light and knowledge meant to rise,
Up from man’s bare beginning is our climb;
Out of earth’s heavy smallness we must break,
We must search our nature with spiritual fire:
An insect crawl preludes our glorious flight;
Our human state cradles the future god,
Our mortal frailty an immortal force.

This is our slow beginning even though this mind crawling out of the mud of earth nature is meant to fly towards the very Source of Light. But for that we must light within us or awaken the spiritual Fire concealed in Matter’s base and search our nature with that light. Then we shall discover within this obscure house the hidden god and the immortal force housed within this mortal frame. This is mind’s inevitable destiny to outgrow its smallness and rise up buoyed on wings of spiritual fire.

Closing Remarks
This little mind is not an instrument of knowledge even though it feigns itself to be. It is rather an instrument of formation that constructs frames of thought as scaffoldings to climb towards the true Home of Truth from where Knowledge descends in the still mind.