Namaste, Welcome to SAM-VAD (Together In Conversation), Today I would like to share an excerpt from ‘Knowing How to Know. This book draws our attention to, often unrecognized barriers which prevent us from gaining knowledge and understanding in general.
Also as we begin today ‘let us remember this about ‘Attention’. Our life experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to. Attention: is important and most of the times we are so indifferent to it. It is as fundamental as food; and we go blundering about, seeking ways to assuage the craving, instead of learning how to provide ourselves with what we need, sensibly and calmly. We feed the hunger blindly. Once the mechanism is brought to our attention and we begin to study it, it is as if a veil has been stripped off ordinary life, and we become freer in our action and choices.
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Excerpt
Working within Limitations:
All work takes places within limitation – all work, that is, which can be thought of or described in the ordinary way. In order to do anything, you have to have the means to do it – the facilities of materials, people, possibilities of time and place. You also have to accommodate the work within a framework, within limitations. If you want, for example, to furnish a room, you are working within the limitations of that room. Your objective is to do something within the possibilities of the situation. The limitations are another words here for your obedience to something. You want to heat a room. The room has certain dimensions, a certain volume. In providing heat for it, you are subordinating yourself to its requirements – ‘obeying’ the room, which says, ‘in order to heat this space, you must have so much coal, electricity, gas’.
All human life with which we are concerned is a matter of doing the best within limitations. Limitations are the commanding elements which we ‘serve’. The fact that we pretend that we do not serve our environment does not alter anything. Even in ‘overcoming obstacles’ you are serving those obstacles by recognizing them and taking them into account. You cannot be indifferent to them. Man’s ‘conquest’ of space is carried out within the restrictions imposed by his environment. He designs spacecraft in accordance with the conditions which they have to meet, not to replace these conditions. In so doing, he is subordinating himself to an order which he already finds fixed for him.
Knowing How to Know – Idries Shah
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