JNANA yoga is the path of attempting to understand reality through the process of enquiry.
When I was a teenager, I began to question the nature of reality instead of merely swallowing what I was taught, whether it came from a priest or a scientist.
What led me to start asking such questions in the first place? It was something very simple – inaccuracy. I would occasionally notice that the world did not function in the manner I expected it to function. And as a consequence of that, I experienced a certain degree of suffering. When your beliefs are incongruent with reality, some form of suffering is the result.
It took me many years to realize that my sense of suffering, pain, or otherwise unpleasant sensations were NOT caused by reality itself. They were caused by my own lack of understanding of reality. Inaccuracy is the root of all suffering.
Following the path of jnana yoga is like playing detective, where everything you experience is a clue, a pointer to the underlying reality. Have you ever experienced something that you just can’t explain? Does fitting that experience into your current model of reality feel like trying to shove a square peg into a round hole?
For example, consider the concept of objective reality, which suggests that we’re all physical beings in a physical universe, and our thoughts and consciousness are merely a phenomena of the physical world. Can you think of a piece that just doesn’t seem to fit this model, something that sticks out a bit?
The raw experiential data you’re able to know with certainty is that you can perceive lots of other physical bodies walking around, but you only directly perceive that one of them is conscious and aware — you.
Steve Pavlina
