General Application of the Seven Ways of Knowing

Introduction

Our topic for this weekend is “ways of knowing” or lorig in Tibetan. This is a very helpful topic because it deals with how we know anything, how we know that what we know is correct, and how we know that it is decisive. It very much affects how we proceed on the spiritual path.

As we all know from the Buddhist teachings, we all experience a great deal of suffering. Why does that suffering come about? There are many different levels of suffering and all of this is basically because of our unawareness, usually called our ignorance. Unawareness is based on our misconceptions and projections about reality. We really don’t know or understand what is going on, and if we want to get rid of that confusion, we need to have clear understanding of how things actually exist. We have to clear away all this misconception and confusion or so-called ignorance. 

For that we need to be able to know if we are seeing things and understanding things correctly. When we hear the teachings, how do we understand them? How do we evaluate that we do understand them? This is particularly relevant to the process of trying to deal with others and help others. When they say something, are we sure that we heard correctly what they said and that we understood what they said correctly? All these things are very important in terms of following the spiritual path and dealing with others. Even if we are not following a spiritual path, it is important with our daily interactions with others that we clearly understand what is going on.

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