A newborn child, until around 6 months of age, cannot talk or walk. Then magic unfolds. The child learns to say maa or paa. He starts rolling, and soon starts crawling. Where does he get these skills? Do the parents train him to walk and talk? No. He picks them up on his own. In the language of neurology, his brain mirrors what he sees, and that's how his brain picks up the language, and he starts talking. These mirror neurons are quite magical, and they help us understand how to live in society. We learn so many responses naturally through these mirror neurons. We learn how to communicate, how to live in a society, how to take care of our bodies, how to behave in relationships and many more such things.
Once we mirror something, that becomes part of "me". A child picks Hindi, for example, while being in Delhi, and then he goes to China. What will be his first reaction? He will feel that Chinese is a foreign language, but for him, when he was 6 months old, even Hindi was a foreign language. We own what our brain mirrors, and it becomes part of "me". My viewpoint, my opinion, my way of thinking, my understanding, and my perspective. We look at the world around us through these glasses. That's why we have so different takes on the same things.
What about the things we don't know? Generally, we turn to the people around us. When we decide to marry and don't know much about it, we talk to friends who are already married. When we enter college, we talk to seniors from our school who are studying there. When buying a TV, we talk to someone who already uses that TV. Sometimes we read books written by scientists to learn about nature. We read books written by historians to know about history. We watch videos and podcasts to learn about things we don't know.
When we try to learn about the unknown by talking to someone with that experience, reading a book, watching a podcast, or directly observing the phenomenon, do we really grasp the whole of it? Most of the time, we listen only to what our brain lets us see. We simply reject whatever does not appeal to our brain. When Paul Brunton came to India and we saw certain Yogis doing miracles, his brain rejected it at first. However, he strongly wanted to know reality, so he observed those phenomena with an open mind. It happens to us almost every day. We form opinions about different people based on what we hear. Somebody is bad, while somebody is good. When we first meet those people, we see them through those biases. As we meet them more, we realise that many of our biases were wrong.
That means we need four things to know reality. First, we need to have the capacity to observe. Even if you lay a brain cut open before me, I will not be able to make head or tail of that because I have not studied neurology. Second, we need to give time to know somebody or something. Third, we need to give attention to reality. Even if we give time, if we are lost in our own perception, we will never be able to actually observe anything that does not match our biases. Fourth, we need to remain open. If Paul Brunton had closed his mind, despite spending time with the Yogi and being attentive, he would not have been able to expand the horizon of his mind.
But if we remain open to all types of things in the world, we will lose focus and never reach our destination. When we get into the car and set Google Maps to the place we want to reach, we don't focus on the things on the way. There may be many towns and villages on the way, but we don't stop there. If we want to reach the destination, we focus on the road and drive toward it with single-minded focus. If we stay open, we will never be sure what we want to do in life. Our attention will waver, and we will not be able to achieve anything.
But a question arises: why do we want to reach the destination? What if the destination we have set for ourselves is based on our limited understanding of the world? What if we stay open and get more exposure, we develop the ability to choose a better destination? What if life is not about reaching a destination but about enjoying the journey? When we hurry to reach the destination, we lose the capacity to observe. When we are in a hurry, we rely heavily on past experiences or feedback from a friend, an advertisement or propaganda. Because we don't have time and we want to conclude quickly. The brain wants to make sense of reality, so it searches its own database and forms meaning from whatever information it has or whatever feedback it can gather from the outside world. Only when the brain is not in a hurry to conclude, and when it has leisure to stay with that phenomenon, it can actually enquire into reality. It can actually see through. See through its own biases, viewpoints, the feedback, and the propaganda. That's not easy. The easy thing is to conclude quickly, make stories, and live with them.
That's why so few can see through it. Newton could enquire into the phenomenon of the falling apple, while the rest of humanity ignored it for thousands of years. Newton developed the capacity to observe and understand through years of hard work; he spent time on that phenomenon, observed it with great attention, and remained open to understanding its true meaning. We can stay open only when our centre of life is truth and nothing less than truth. The moment we develop desire for pleasure, or fear of any kind, or form ambitions to achieve something, we lose that purity. Our centre shifts to something substandard, and we become closed. It's because we have a target and are in a hurry to reach it, and that's why the brain will rush to conclude and never give the phenomenon its full attention. That's why none of the great scientists, artists, sportsmen, or any person who has truth and only truth at the centre of his life would ever claim to "know", and they would, till their last breath, remain open to life and explore more and more.
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