Why practice is necessary
Not practising is like only reading and thinking you know everything about a place without actually living there.
When you live somewhere for years on end, you are changed physically and emotionally by the experience. If nothing else, your body picks up the microorganisms there and your mind the emotional microbiases there.
Simple examples - few ad hoardings in Chennai city limits compared to Bangalore. Or cleaner, neater standup cafes in Bangalore vs Chennai. Or incessant though possibly unconscious emphasis on an idealized physique in Southern California vs. Arkansas. Greater body-orientedness in the US vs. greater intellect-orientedness - especially memory-orientedness - in India.
Intellectual understanding is one thing. The physical and emotional implications of practice are very different.
It is also simple logic. If you want to pay attention inward, you must turn your attention inward. If you say that I know everything that will happen at the personal and cosmological levels based solely on someone else's experience, you don't really know.
A simple, but profound, example: can you hold in mind - simultaneously - views of all the sides of a table?
Such an experience is normally impossible, one keeps bringing memories of different sides into awareness sequentially. Or projecting symmetrical views of the visible sides onto the sides non-visible.
Similarly, inward experiences should not be, and are not, like your outward experiences after some point. If they are, then you are not going beyond memories (admittedly internal) to fresh, dynamic, and continuing inner experiences.
Holding on to memories and chewing their cud while dealing with incoming sensations is like simultaneously accelerating and braking a vehicle.
Here your mental system is the vehicle. Just as the physical vehicle is unable to respond properly given opposing inputs, your mental or inner system is also unable to respond naturally and effortlessly when the memory circuit drains off energy all the time.
Going inward requires:
- a high degree of acceptance - this I am,
- a high degree of trust - this I need not be,
- a high degree of courage or an indomitable will - anything other humans have done, I also can and will do,
- a certain open-mindedness - I don't know now, and
- a certain willingness to change - but I can learn and I will learn.
(Other things such as Nature helping your inward evolution can only be understood through experience.)
There is no need for un-reasoning belief. But there is also no need for un-relenting disbelief in one's own experiences. That is another subconscious conditioning or brainwashing. And that leads to a lack of desire to practise or experience at all. After all, why practise if I believe that I won't get believable / pleasurable / useful experiences?
Only practice and waiting patiently to understand its results at all levels will be helpful for self-validation. (Yes, there are caveats, but don't waste time in quibbling or, more importantly, hanging on to eternal disbelief.) Results also manifest and/or stabilise over time at the beginning. Then they settle down faster. Again, this needs to be experienced, not understood intellectually.
Most people prefer to listen or read, perhaps think and/or discuss, but not to practise. They are stuck at the first step or second step of this trio:
- śravaṇa, listening or reading,
- manana, mental/intellectual contemplation to fit understanding from śravaṇa into existing conceptual frameworks or into an entirely new one altogether, and
- nididhyāsana, having the actual inner experience or im-perience corresponding to śravaṇa and manana.
Move on to the third stage to get the complete experience. Do note that this is needed for each condition and each stage.
Lakshman Joo wrote that in Kashmir Shaivism, just experience is not enough. Intellectual understanding is also needed to hang on to spiritual conditions and places.
Similarly, Babuji wrote that gurus who have both theoretical understanding and varied practical experience are the best. They can guide their students better than gurus with only theoretical understanding or only practical experience.
