I used to know a musician who had great knowledge of his music and great skill in playing, but he had not developed his being to the same degree as his knowledge. He used to come and play classical guitar on a Sunday afternoon in the brasserie I was waiting tables. He would set up his music stand and sheet music and begin to play. His playing was very skilful but he never played without reading from his sheet music, or at least having it there to prompt him. He played these pieces he had practised so well, entirely mechanically. I would catch him occasionally gazing around the room, completely detached from what he was playing, a million miles away, simply and mechanically going through the motions. He played flawlessly, his guitar in tune, but nobody much payed him much attention and he rarely got applause. He probably wondered why, because technically he played exremely well.
I love live music and I love classical music, but in this confined space with this person playing so mechanically it began to drive me spare and I wished I had the nerve to snatch away his sheet music and insist he play something from memory in the hope that this might cause him to engage with the music, because otherwise it was almost unbearable and certainly a terrible injustice to the compositions he was reproducing. I was never so bold. I could see however that despite his note perfect playing, the skill he had with his instrument, it was because his being was so underdeveloped and he played so mechanically that he was rendering the beautiful pieces he was playing completely dull and lifeless.
There are lots of people in the world whose knowledge is great but whose being remains undeveloped. These are the people who can reel off lists, talk for extended periods about history, science, religion, whose knowledge cannot be denied. They deal in facts and figures but do not give their feelings or opinions about these things other than perhaps by way of insinuating already commonly established understandings. They deal only in facts and figures and they don’t ask why enough. They soon become lost for words however or angry and dismissive, if pressed to express what this knowledge actually means to them personally or what it has meant for humanity. After a while listening to such people, it becomes completely boring to listen to them any more, even though you cannot deny their knowledge. Perhaps you think to yourself you should be interested in what they are saying, but you cannot stay with them, you cannot listen to them for very long, and generally such people talk for a very long time, unaware of the boredom or the fatigue of those who are struggling to keep listening. They know a great deal, but they do not understand what they know. Quite often these people are loud and boorish perhaps in an effort to make up for what they realise is true about their own lack of understanding or their own limited 'being'.
Knowledge is prized in the Western world, being however is not.
Knowledge by itself does not give understanding. Nor is understanding increased by an increase in knowledge alone. Understanding depends upon the relation of knowledge to being. Understanding is the resultant of knowledge and being. And knowledge and being must not diverge too far, otherwise understanding will prove to be far removed from either. At the same time the relation of knowledge to being doesn’t change with a mere growth of knowledge. It changes only when being grows simultaneously with knowledge. In other words, understanding grows only with the growth of being.
~ In Search of the Miraculous.
Gaining knowledge in this world is relatively easy, increasing one’s being however, depends entirely on your own internal efforts and the friction of internal struggle. Sometimes being develops through suffering forced upon you by extremely difficult emotional or life-threatening circumstances that you have eventually managed to transcend.
Generally, being develops with an awareness of one’s relativity--with an awareness of one’s relationship to others, to the universe and to oneself. Being develops through many hours of sincere and heartfelt prayer and contemplation, being develops through physical and emotional suffering.
When being outstrips knowledge one becomes an empathetic, sensitive but essentially useless ‘saint’. And when knowledge outstrips being, one becomes a know-it-all-bore who people have no time for regardless of how much or what they say they know.
