Approximating Reality

 I took my first Sanskrit workshop in 1997. I’ve spent a lot of time looking things up in the dictionary, attempting translations, chanting and studying. Recently, I had a pretty huge epiphany. Sanskrit doesn’t have the same alphabet as English, so when we are reading regular books, all the Sanskrit words are transliterated into English letters. And every yoga book out there has a little chart that tells how these letters are pronounced. But they are all wrong! Because English doesn’t have the same sounds as Sanskrit. So for many of the same letters, there isn’t any English word that can be used to demonstrate that sound. While I knew this, I still clung to those charts and even made up my own to train yoga teachers, but recently it’s become clear to me just how many of the letters don’t have a good equivalent. If I pronounce everything perfectly according to the English letter pronunciation chart, I am mispronouncing my Sanskrit.

Sutra 1.8 is about misperception, misapprehension or misunderstanding, the second activity of the mind. Viparyayo mithyajnanam atadrupa pratishtham means “misapprehension is false knowledge that is not based on the true form.” Many people say this is the most common activity of the mind—I was talking about it in the last post as well for just that reason. Unless we can see an object (an object being a thing, person, situation, feeling, thought, whatever) perfectly and clearly, which we virtually never do, we are getting some approximation. There are so many layers that filter and alter what we see and experience that not only can we not be sure that when we stand together and look at the sky and call it blue we are seeing the same color, but we can’t be sure that any of us is seeing “the real thing.”

Whenever I attempt to fit reality into my existing experience and knowledge, I am not really getting Reality (with a capital “R”), but what else can we do? Humans see things the way we think they are—we don’t like cognitive dissonance (when we are having conflicting ideas or beliefs). As I am writing this, it occurs to me that practicing holding multiple ideas or feelings could be a practice for increasing our ability to see things clearly because we may be less likely to make things fit our existing framework (or our framework is more likely to be broad enough to hold things as they are). If I can see that my coworker has some annoying qualities and that there are things I like about her, maybe, just maybe, when she does something, it won’t get miscategorized as easily.

At any rate, I guess I end up in the same place as the last post, which is that it’s important to know that we are mostly misperceiving—until we’re enlightened, we are seeing approximations.

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