The Way To Learn

The Way To Learn

What is the food of a mind?
No matter how good is the food
you cannot eat it more than your stomach size
Whether food is free or prepared,
purchased or prasad from a temple
There is a limit to food.
After eating, we get settled for some time.

But, what about the food for the mind?
All the time mind is searching for food
Never getting settled
Sometimes get tired but that
can be managed by context switching
And changing topic
those are different sources of getting mind food.

What are we looking whole day
either in books, TV, newspaper,
phone, youtube, blogs or social media sites?
You guessed it right. Food.

Our mind is searching for food for himself
Whole day variety of food for the mind
Without giving any food,
It is not easy to set your mind at rest

Till we are awake either body
is looking something through mind
or the mind is looking for itself.

But why mind is looking for food all the time?
Does it want to know more?
Does it want to Experience more?
Or simply it is never trained
to simply sit and watch the breath!

A mind can search the whole day and get tired
but still like it and
then the next day go again.

It is not that easy for mind to search in awareness and with breath
Why? Because, there are high chances
That normal mind will completely get lost
In pure awareness of the self
And normally mind is not ready to get lost.
For him it is defeat!

How mind explore, learn, and get absorbed?
Focus on breath and you will learn about the body,
Focus on dynamics inside stomach
and know what is going inside.
Look on the moon and mind explores the same
And sometimes tearing a leaf or flower,
Like a child in curiosity for what?
Exploring, learning, and experiencing!

Generally in the context of mind
we say search inside or outside
But the mind does not have that kind of boundary
It is spread everywhere.
For mind outside is inside, if it absorbed!
And inside is outside,
if it is able to inspire the surrounding.

Learning in human life is the core process
It gives us survival capability.
Ability to choose between flight and fight
But this is available to all creatures
Through the learning of millions of years
Our body cells have that infused knowledge.

Using a mind for survival is too much overuse of the mind
It is like using a heavy weapon to kill an insect
For human, a mind opens the gate of realization.
Something which cannot be directly sensed, perceived.

A journey of learning starts in our life
when parents guide us,
we may learn or fail to learn there,
then the teacher teaches us and we fail or pass in the class,
Our friends and society teaches us continuously,
From this, we may accomplish something or not is immaterial.
What matters is we are learning and experiencing.

Daily we observe lives around,
without the help of any other being.
We see some patterns and try to assimilate,
the meaning of happenings.
We may succeed or fail to assimilate that learning.
But mind keep trying with one more step

How do we know that we have learned?
when we see contrary patterns
Or we do something and
the outcome is not as expected
Then we learn that we have not learned enough
Or we not learned correctly

Learning is a life long process
Therefore even if you learn wrong
Or you make a mistake
There is nothing wrong,
In making mistake or doing wrong.
But the condition is you should be self-aware
An awareness which is free,
From the guilt of mistake and fear of blame

Ancient wisdom traditions say
One-fourth of learning come from a teacher
One forth from friends and society
One forth come from experiments
Final one forth come with time, passage of life.
There is no shortcut for the fourth

The source of learning is the question
Not the borrowed question!
But those which made you sleepless and restless

Depth of learning doesn’t depend upon
How much we have read
But how much we could assimilate
Assimilation of knowledge is not possible with borrowed questions

The best teacher in life is a question
If by the time children finish their education
Teachers can teach them how to ask questions,
Related to the subject of their interest
Then we can say a college education is complete.

A Master degree doesn’t mean I have become a master
But it means by now I know
that how Limited I know
And this is the door opening for new life.

Our teachers should tell us that
An answer is that
which settles some aspect of life.

But no matter, How much you read
It will not settle any aspect of your life.
You need to move to next step.
Reading and Listening conditions us.
Is reading or listening bad?
No, it helps us in asking questions
But it happens to a seeking mind
Asking those questions on which we can put our life
And seek the answers on our own
No copy and paste of guru, book, notebook, teacher or parents

Why do we fail to ask the right questions?
Because we are in a hurry of generalizing knowledge.
This takes us away from the context
And we fail to understand correctly.

We need to understand generalisation
in knowledge is a very heavy load process.
We need to have huge experience and knowledge
before we generalize the idea or concept.

How should we ask questions?
The way a child asks, with inquisitiveness,
perseverance, trial, application
And all on the self!

If I learn anything in such a way
that my wrong understanding can cause
Serious loss to me or my dearest
Then I will never fail to learn correctly.
Thus, we should keep in mind that
the right understanding is important.

Why do we fail to learn correctly in class?
Because we don’t know,
The consequence of poor learning is
A bad doctor, engineer, pilot, politician.

Why do we fail to learn?
Because of borrowed questions.
Because of no relevance to the questioner’s life.
Because of no context.
Because of no application.

So learning is important.
But how to learn?

Hari Om Tat Sat
Yours Truly Hari