Empty your mind for wisdom

A POMPOUS professor came to a Zen Master to learn. Instead of listening, he started blowing his own trumpet. The Master asked for tea and when it was brought, started pouring a cup for his guest. He kept pouring tea into the cup without stopping. The cup overflowed and the tea spilt on the table. Irritated, the professor shouted: stop, can’t you see the cup is full?

The master said: so is your mind. Unless you empty it what can you learn? Acquiring knowledge is a transmission process. For this transmission to take place effectively and effortlessly, one’s mind has to be empty and still. Only then the teaching, learning and above all the transmission can happen. Knowledge comes in three varieties. Basic knowledge that we all learn from childhood, the type that learn our three ‘R’s with, is intellectual knowledge. To read, write, and calculate we use our head, our mind, to acquire the needed knowledge. At this level of knowledge transfer what happens is communication.

Another type of knowledge needs the heart to be involved; one’s head is no use here. Can you become a poet using your head; can you become a singer or a painter using your head? You need passion to be a master.

The son of a potter watched his father and picked up the art. He became famous as a master craftsman. People came to him and asked to be taught the way he learnt it. He said, “I don’t know how to teach you. If you want just watch me and do.” What was merely an intellectual communication becomes collaboration between master and the taught, when the heart is involved.

Spiritual knowledge is knowledge of the highest kind; it is not knowledge really but wisdom. This can neither be taught nor learnt. Spiritual wisdom, the Truth of the Universe, has to be experienced, by transmission from an enlightened Master who is willing to transmit it from his Being to your Being. At this level, it is a communion of beings, far beyond collaboration and communication.

Spiritual wisdom happens; it’s not taught or learnt. It happens in the silencing of your mind. It happens when your chatter, both inner and outer are stopped. Meditation is the key to silencing the mind. No spiritual knowledge is possible without the aid of meditation. Ego fills the mind otherwise. To go beyond ego, to go beyond mind, to go beyond chatter, meditation is the answer.