Searching and Finding

Searching and Finding
By Atanu Dey on The Really Important Small Stuff

Books influence us profoundly, of course. But for a book to work its magic on you, you have to be ready. The Buddhist have a saying that when the student is ready, the teacher appears. Actually, what that means is that when the student is ready, the presence of the teacher becomes known to the student. The teacher has been around all along but the student did not have the faculty to recognize the teacher. The prepared mind is a necessary condition for books to have any impact.

In a sense you cannot learn something that you don’t really already know implicitly, or something that you are not yourself on the verge of discovering. What you read is just the last hint that solves a problem that you have almost solved, or the little nudge that takes you over the edge. You have to have to be very close to the solution yourself for the hint to work; you have to be at the edge for the nudge to work. If you are too far away, hints or nudges are pointless.

Education has something to do with learning, which in turn has a relationship with knowledge and understanding. The raw material for knowledge is information. Somehow in the human brain, information properly processed and internalized results in knowledge. Somehow the whole body of knowledge further gets processed into understanding.

I feel that there is an optimal amount of information that any given brain can process into knowledge, and that this optimal is less than the maximum capable of being absorbed. It is like calories derived from food: the maximum possible is far greater than the healthy amount.

Processing of knowledge for understanding requires time and effort, just as time is needed for internalizing information to acquire knowledge. Since time is a ultimate binding constraint (you cannot release time constraints unlike all other constraints), what time you spend in internalizing information (gaining knowledge), you cannot spend in understanding. Knowing too much is as much of a hindrance to understanding, as having too much information is a barrier to knowing.

It was in Hermann Hesse’s novel Siddhartha that I got a lot of hints about the nature of understanding. For example, in the final chapter called Govinda (here is a handy copy), the relationship between searching and finding is discussed. Govinda says that he has been searching for a long time but has not found the answers. Siddhartha says:

Perhaps that you’re searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don’t find the time for finding?”

“How come?” asked Govinda.

“When someone is searching,” said Siddhartha, “then it might easily happen that the only thing his eyes still see is that what he searches for, that he is unable to find anything, to let anything enter his mind, because he always thinks of nothing but the object of his search, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed by the goal. Searching means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal. You, oh venerable one, are perhaps indeed a searcher, because, striving for your goal, there are many things you don’t see, which are directly in front of your eyes.”

Later on in the dialog, Govinda presses Siddhartha to tell him what wisdom he has gained from all his years of searching.

Quoth Siddhartha: “I’ve had thoughts, yes, and insight, again and again. Sometimes, for an hour or for an entire day, I have felt knowledge in me, as one would feel life in one’s heart. There have been many thoughts, but it would be hard for me to convey them to you. Look, my dear Govinda, this is one of my thoughts, which I have found: wisdom cannot be passed on. Wisdom which a wise man tries to pass on to someone always sounds like foolishness.”