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22
HERMANN KUHN
SUTRAS
We generally assume that if we want to explore new areas of experience, we first need to acquire knowledge and then to apply it. Yet reality works exactly the opposite way. We first experience something new and then only begin to search - more or less intuitively and often subconsciously - for concepts that may explain our new experiences and connect them to our current understanding. This process is especially true for all expansion of consciousness that makes us perceive areas beyond our familiar sphere of life.
Contrary to common belief most experiences of expansion of consciousness are hardly ever clear and vivid enough to make us recognize them the very moment they happen. Most insights into different (new) levels of consciousness are so brief that they appear like highly fleeting, almost unreal apparitions. Since we mostly cannot explain what we experienced, we usually store these events in the same place as all the other unresolved experiences that accompany our life and which we choose to ignore or forget as well.
Hidden deep inside our memory we therefore carry a number of experiences we are barely aware of, but which nevertheless contain vital information how higher, more advanced states of existence feel like.
The type of knowledge mentioned in the sutra (samyag jnana) has the purpose to alert us to these hidden experiences and to make them accessible.
It is special knowledge that can reach us through a variety of channels. Some of these channels are unknown to the West or their mechanisms are misunderstood. Sutras 9 - 31 explain the bandwidth and range of each of these channels, the different types of knowledge they transmit and how we can use them.
It is not of primary importance whether this special knowledge reaches us through verbal instruction, by reading respective descriptions or by sudden intuitive comprehension.
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