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Commentary 11 - Page 5 |
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The idea expressed by P. D. Ouspensky that: "you cannot understand and disagree" is of course a different and stronger esoteric translation of the sentence quoted earlier. The normal emphasis on belief biased by the intention of getting people to believe, while the more precise esoteric translation given by Ouspensky, if we understand it, is in its original context, as referring to scholarship and to the attempt to understand statements, is clearly not concerned with encouraging blind belief, but is intended to convey the need for recognition of facts. This ancient psychological method, then, was a form of traditional knowledge, having different rules for verification from those of modern psychological science, but they are genuine working rules. In its time, it had its own consensus, and this evolved over time as does any modern scientific consensus, but was very different from that of contemporary psychology because it had very different goals. This whole concept leads to a practical way of presenting these ideas. This can be put in modern terms by utilizing the word recognition. The goal of texts in this tradition, and the characteristic by which texts which genuinely belong to this tradition can be identified, is that they write for recognition ... that is, they write in such a way that they intend that the experienced reader will recognise what they describe. This meaning of this idea itself must be understood and recognized. We are not using the word recognition here in the sense of public recognition. Usually nothing was further from the minds of practitioners of this ancient science. They taught a traditional knowledge, and in it, their scientific method depended on the student accepting the truth of what they taught by discovering it for himself and so becoming able to recognise what it was they were describing. The fact that they had in general a consensus about what was true makes it clear that they all in fact -- although step by step, not immediately -- came to recognize the same things. Experience will enable the present-day student who strives for such a level of accuracy to recognize that this situation, carried out rigorously, eliminates all possibility of doubt. This view is in exact opposition to that which the church had reached by those Mediaeval times when it put Galileo on trial and burned Bruno for his thinking.
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