Is gaining knowledge all we can do?

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I was a child living in Bangalore, India, with my parents and the whole family.

I loved sports, especially playing soccer.

I would go to school and sit on the front desk so I could see the writings on the blackboard well. I had difficulty recognizing people unless they were close to me. I did not understand why my friends could see them before I could.

I did not know what myopia, or near-sighted vision, was at that time. Slowly and surely I was learning to live with this limitation.

One day my father noticed that something was wrong. He asked me to read a sign, and I could not. I was soon in an optician’s office and had glasses to correct my vision.

It was a different world after that. I could not play that much soccer, but was about to relate to the world in a different way.

Things were normal as far as my vision was concerned.

Comparative existence

We all live a life of comparative existence. Twenty-twenty vision is normal for most of us. I achieved 20/20 after I got glasses and felt normal because I could see as far as other people of my species could.

An eagle that can spot small objects from soaring heights would laugh at our 20/20 vision. But we do not compare with eagles. We compare and live compared with others in our own class.

Expanding horizons

We are born with a range of vision, hearing, intelligence and other facilities. The range is fairly small. We all have learned to live with it.

At the same time, we also have expanded on possibilities beyond our eyes. The eyes have limitations.

We now have magnifying lenses, microscopes and telescopes to complement our eyes. Satellites can look for us in places we can’t reach ourselves.

Our hearing has similar limitations. We can only appreciate a range of sound waves through our ears.

We have done this to many aspects of our existence.

Man has made a lot of progress in several fields. We have done the same with intellect and knowledge. We have built universities and institutions to increase the field of information and knowledge.

Is this all we can do?

This is the question that leads to the core of these columns.

Expanding our horizons of Awareness

God gives us a little bit of this and a little bit of that with our birth.

He also provides us with potential to grow.

Have we done this in every field possible? We have learned to expand on most of what God gifted us with as individuals and as a society.

Some of what we have expanded on is not that healthy, either. The destructive power of our world is unnecessary and counterproductive to our existence. What can we do to change what we expand on is a major question.

What we do depends to a large extent on what our level or existence (state of being) is. Batman will save the world while Catwoman, the Penguin and the Joker will attempt to destroy it. What makes Batman a Batman? It is well-accepted that a literate society generally lives at a different level compared with an illiterate society. People who know something about Awareness and Consciousness will tell you that state of being is directly related to state of Awareness.

We are all born with a little Awareness and we continue to stay here. We do not make any effort to change the scope or range of our Awareness. We have done a lot of work with mind, desires and our brain power. Yet we have not looked into expanding our horizons of Awareness. Can we do something in this area at all?

We will explore all this here in a series of articles. The practice of expanding horizons of Awareness is what I call Meditation. Before we come to discuss more about Awareness and Consciousness we shall explore the following, which form basis of this practice:

. Abhyas (practice)

. Discipline (practice of staying within a set of rules)

. Sanjam (self-control)

. Ahimsa (nonviolence, practice of conserving energy)

Dr. Krishna Bhatta is a physician in Bangor. This piece is the first of a series. The second part will appear in these pages May 20-21.