The ego of knowledge
Let us move to another important form of ego – the ego that comes with knowledge.
As you grow, you collect judgments and data about several things by reading books and talking to people. These two together make up your knowledge, your whole mental set-up. Anything that you see, you see through this mental set-up.
Anything that you see becomes merely a support to your already formed conclusions. There is no scope for any growth. You are all the time looking through a glass of a particular colour – a colour that you have painted! You miss a lot in this wonder filled world because of this.
A small story:
A man was telling his friend, 'Do you know, I really made a fool of myself.'
The friend asked, 'Why, what happened?'
The man said, 'I replaced ten cracked windows in my house and then discovered that I had a crack in my glasses!'
If we just look inward for one moment, we will understand that we are the common factor in all that we see. But somehow, we never look in. We never doubt our own mind. We feel we know everything; there starts the problem. Our mundane knowledge doesn't give us a chance to evolve.
The most dangerous thing in this is, you feel you are solidified with just your knowledge. You feel you have become a solid character by virtue of your knowledge. Little do you know that you have only become a burden on your being.
Your being is a river and you have made it stagnate with the so-called knowledge. Real knowledge is in knowing how to drop the knowledge that comes your way and live like a child, flowing with spontaneity. You need to move from ego to spontaneity.
We are ready to categorize and label all that we see in our lives. In the event, we simply rob life of its beauty. We categorize people, places, situations, everything that comes our way.
A small story:
A man once went to a movie theatre to watch a film.
The film started with the caption of a famous international studio, which had produced that film.
The man said to himself, 'Oh! I've seen this movie before!' and got up and walked away.
Every movie of that production comes with the stamp of that particular studio and the man concluded that he had seen the movie before! He missed it, that's all.
This is how we all are; grown-ups especially. Children are not like that. They see everything with freshness. They are so full of life; they are not dead like us.
When you go to the beach, just watch the children, how excited they are. Whereas when you go to the beach, you feel you know the beach already. The incomparable freshness and beauty of nature comes through your tinted eyeglass. The beach simply becomes yet another place. Understand, if at all you feel you are not enjoying life, it is because of your mind, because of your solid ego; not because life is not beautiful.
A man went to Switzerland for a holiday and returned after a month.
He met his friend one evening and decided to go out for a meal.
The friend asked him, 'So did you enjoy the beautiful scenery in Switzerland?'
The man replied, 'Yes, kind of. But the mountains kept coming in the way.'
We are so insensitive to Nature! And we complain that there is nothing to enjoy.
The capacity to enjoy is within you. As a child, you enjoyed everything around you. What happened after that? You became serious and forgot how to enjoy. You got dulled by your so-called knowledge.
As I told you earlier, people often ask me, 'Swamiji, how is it that with all your knowledge you seem like a child. Every time you crack a joke, you laugh so spontaneously and we look at you with awe! When you start telling a joke, sometimes we've heard you say it before and so we don't laugh, but you enjoy it so much as if someone else were telling you the joke for the first time!'
You see, this is exactly what I mean when I say you've lost your spontaneity and capacity to enjoy. You acquire a 'know-all' attitude with your knowledge.
Now that I have told you this, let me tell you a story that I repeat very often in my talks and which makes me laugh every time I narrate it!
In my native place Tiruvannamalai in South Bharat, during the yearly temple festivals, there will be a temporary stage constructed in the open, where famous drama troupes will enact plays, mostly scenes from the great Hindu epics like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.
I used to go and watch those plays.
On one such occasion, they were enacting the scene from Mahabharata where Dusshasana attempts to disrobe Draupadi and she is ultimately saved by Lord Krishna.
The Draupadi character was played by a man dressed in a saree, an Indian costume.
As per their plan, he would wear seven sarees, one on top of the other and Dusshasana would pull them out one after the other keeping a count.
When the seventh saree was reached, Draupadi would scream to Lord Krishna for help and Krishna would appear. Somehow…the Draupadi character missed out one saree while getting dressed, and wore only 6 sarees.
On stage, Dusshasana started pulling and suddenly when the 6th saree was being pulled, Draupadi realized the mistake!
He started screaming, 'Hey leave it! Hey leave it!'
Dusshasana thought that Draupadi was playing her role so beautifully and continued to pull!
Finally, Draupadi was standing on the stage with just half trousers and a blouse, with make-up of a woman!
But he had good presence of mind, and he screamed, 'Oh Krishna! How gracious you are; you changed my gender to save me from shame!'
Even now if I think of that scene, I can't stop laughing!
So understand that having knowledge is alright, but don't use it to solidify yourself. Just encounter every moment with openness. Don't have any preconceived notions. If you live with this openness, nothing will be mundane to you. You will then see that even your own wife with whom you have been living every day is fresh and enjoyable!
When this becomes your attitude, there is every possibility that the other person feels the openness in you and he or she also opens out to you in more enjoyable ways. It then becomes a positive cycle where you move from freshness to freshness every moment. Then there is only freshness everywhere; nothing is stale!