How do we understand anything? How did people like Gautam Buddha manage to gain enlightenment by just sitting still and focusing inwards?
I want to take you through the mental process by which I arrived at some conclusion to these questions.
There is something about thinking in terms of questions and answers that triggers a mental process enabling moving towards a solution or clarity. when a question is posed to the mind it seems to start a process of going through the available database of knowledge , information and experience and at times it will come up with an answer. To me, this simple mental process is quite baffling in how it works. We routinely experience this process without realization of how it is working. It might be the desire to trigger this mental process that Bhagwad Gita is in the form of a question answer session between Krishna and Arjun. Reading it is expected to initiate a process of contemplation and reflection.
Sometimes when we pose a question to ourselves, we find that our minds are able to come up with some solution other times it cannot. When we cannot find the answer, it is indicative that we are not able to access the mental database of information and experience required- so either we presently do not have that knowledge or we are not able to fetch that knowledge from the mental stockpile.
I like to picture the process of contemplative thinking as something that involves two things - an external reference and an internal reference. I like to think of external reference as a key specially designed so as to be able to hook up with an object of certain specific shapes only. An internal reference is like a lock with grooves of specific shape that will engage with an external reference of a matching shape only. The whole thing works similar to the lock and key mechanism of enzymes as shown below.
When we ask ourselves a question, it works as an external reference. This external reference is the form of specially designed key takes a dip into a well of knowledge, information and experience. Whether we are able to get a solution or not will depend on if that answer piece of information has a suitably shaped lock to engage with this external reference. If yes, then we have a probable solution which just seems to pop up in our mind. In case we do not get an answer, the reason could be either that the shape of the external reference is not suitable to the solution i.e. the internal reference or there is an absence of an internal reference.
There is an ancient saying which translates into: "No one can teach anyone something that he/she did not already know". The underlying theory probably is that our minds already have access to every required knowledge. This availability is a sum total of all the information, knowledge and experiences that we have had in our lives. If the concept of Hinduism is subscribed to then, it contains the sum total of all knowledge and experiences of all our past lives since the soul is a common factor in all our lives and it carries forward everything. Most of us clearly can access this database atleast from this current life. There are claims of people who can remember things from previous births and some people claim to be able to tap into previous lives in a state of hypnosis. But we will not delve into that since most of us cannot seem to access it even if it exists.
The shape of external reference is determined by language - so it is dependent on how we pose the question- how we frame that question will decide whether or not we will get the answer we are looking for. The internal reference's shape is decided by the manner in which we consume that knowledge - it can be in terms of experience or co-relation with other information or experiences. We can alter the shape of the internal reference by two methods: one is by thinking about it and second is by association and co-relation with other knowledge/experiences. The process of thinking about it helps translate what we know through experience into language. We learn in experience but we think in language. It is somewhat like how computers understand in machine language and to interact with humans it needs to be translated into programming language. The process of association and co-relation helps build a sort of graph where each piece of knowledge is interconnected to others in different ways as shown below.
CONNECTED GRAPH
The associating of "a" with "c" will enable an external reference capable of accessing "c" to also be able to access "a" because of this connection of "a-c". So co-relating "a" with "c" has an effect of altering the shape of the grooves of the lock of internal reference such that it accommodates a wider variety of key shapes. Ergo, the more connected an event "a" is, the more the ease of fetching it from the database. It is this interconnected nature of information that translates into knowledge that can be actually applied.
The shape of external reference is dependent on language and its articulation. That is why reading books helps. An author is able to articulate things in a manner that allows an external reference to form that is able to fetch a suitable experiential internal reference from within us to make us really understand the point being conveyed. But the fact remains that unless we have had an internal reference relevant to the external reference, we will never truly understand what it means. Therefore the ancient saying "No one can teach anyone something that he/she does not already know".
Let me give an example from personal life. You are teaching Yoga to someone and he/she says that they are experiencing pain in some body part during a particular asana or pose. Now for you to truly understand what they are saying, you must have had experienced something similar in some point of time when you were doing that asana. Let us retreat further and think about the word 'pain'. When someone says they are in pain, for another person to truly understand it there has to be some personal experience of pain. The word pain carries meaning for you only if you have experienced it - otherwise it is just a word and you are just parroting it without truly understanding it. Most of us in some part of early life have learned to associate an uneasy bodily experience with the word pain. So the word pain is an external reference for getting an internal experiential reference of that unpleasant feeling. So if we look at it, humans think in language while we learn in experiences.
Now this presents a fundamental problem of translation of the experience into language. This is probably why despite having all knowledge inside of us, we do not have clarity on things or we do not truly understand many things till we are somehow able to articulate that experience. When we read a book many a times you feel you have understood a concept or idea correctly. That is because the author has been able to articulate it in a manner that you were able to correlate it to a personal experience which allows you to truly understand what is being said. He has been able to provide a suitable external reference to enable you to fetch the relevant internal reference.
When someone like Gautam Buddha has been able to sit still and focus his mind internally I feel what really happens is that he is able to tap into all the experiential knowledge he has had- maybe also tap into previous life experiences. One might feel how can anyone have had sufficient life experience in such young age to understand the nature of life and the universe. But let me give you an example. You are watching a cricket match. You see the batsman execute a particular shot but you just see him move his body and bat and the shot is over. But when an expert batsman or a commentator sees the same shot, he is able to give nuances about the batsman's body position, back-lift of the bat, his foot position, his head balance, his follow through etc. But the event was the same for both you and the expert. So what expertise teaches you is the ability to focus and see the nuances and details. But the fact remains that the information was always present - the difference is your ability to see and understand it. Similarly every life situation is full of information that reveals the secrets of life and the ways the universe functions. You just don't see it. We all have experienced this in personal life when long after a life event is over, something happens that triggers an insight or a deeper understanding of what happened. What you understood at this point of time was available as far as information is concerned at the point of time when it occurred too. What changed now is you were able to get some other association which provides that insight into the event.
So when Buddha sat in meditation he was probably through focus able to gain that "eye of an expert" allowing him to tap into the enormous information present in every event he experienced and co-relate everything to obtain the knowledge that gives an insight into how the universe functions. Also the universe seems to have repetitive patterns - if you gain sufficient insight into any particular field you start seeing the underlying patterns which can be applied in other aspects of life. When you dive deep into an any field, you arrive at philosophy. Look at Bruce Lee - who was he ? He was a martial artist - someone most people would expect to be a meathead but he had dived deep enough to come up with philosophy. His deep philosophical statements like "Be water my friend" give a preview into this aspect. It can be seen in old time wrestlers of India - they can be heard philosophizing that their devotion to wrestling is their way to find God. The centenarian Fauja Singh who used to run marathons used to say he connects to God when he runs these marathons. Buddha was able to unravel the mysterious patterns of life and saw how it repeats itself in every aspect of life and how this world functions. Buddha and other enlightened people probably gained from reflecting upon what has transpired in their life and gain a sort of clarity that reveals the laws and patterns of the universe.
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