Tuesday September 2nd, 2025

Learning Through Practice and Experience

In a previous article (Echo From The Cave: 208), I wrote about the value that the teachings of Truth, the teachings of the Enlightened Beings, can have for removing the suffering in our lives. Even though I believe that that is true, I also think that without our effort in trying to understand and practice these teachings, in other words, trying to live our lives every single day through the prism that the teachings of Truth provide, probably we’ll neither experience their true value, nor recognize the true value of the existence of the Enlightened Beings.

Nowadays, the common interpretation of the word “teach” in the English language seems to be “to show or to explain someone how to do something.” Based on this interpretation, we assume and expect that the teacher is showing or explaining something with the intention that we, who are listening or watching the example of the teacher, will learn what is being taught. And I suppose that we, who are there to learn, probably want to be able to have the same level of understanding or experience as the teacher one day.

It appears to be that one of the tendencies that we have is to assume that memorizing is learning; if we hear or see something and memorize it, we might believe that we’ve learned it. But, even though memorizing has an important role in the process of learning, I believe that actual learning comes through the experience of applying it, as its result. And I’d assume that if we look closely, we can admit that this is true when it comes to many experiences in our lives. But how are we to approach the teachings of the Enlightened Beings? Are we considering the process of understanding and learning the teachings of Truth as something different from the experiences in our lives?

Let’s look at an experience that might be more common or easier for us to visualize, for example, the experience of learning to play a musical instrument. We can memorize various things that have to do with that musical instrument, and we can watch the music teacher placing the fingers on the instrument in the correct spots, and we can even listen to the song being played by the teacher over and over again; but after that, can we say that we’ve learned how to play that instrument? We probably all agree that what’s necessary is a lot of practice, actually using our body and mind to slowly try to understand and emulate the action of the teacher before we can start claiming that we learned how to play through our own practice and experience. And then, most likely there’s no telling how far we may be able to deepen our mastery of that instrument, or how far our learning may be able to reach through our experience of playing that instrument, is there?

If I may, I’d like to share my small experience of trying to apply one of the teachings. In Yoga, there is a practice called mauna, which means silence. My understanding is that the beginning level of this practice is to speak less or to refrain from speaking unnecessary things. In my limited experience, when I attempt to apply the first step, the step of refraining from speaking, one of the results is that I can hear or notice what’s in my mind more, and that possibly can give me an opportunity to catch some of the things that my mind is doing or the things that my mind is actually wanting. For example, when I’m part of a conversation, there are many times when I want to say, “Yes! I know!”, but by not saying this assertion out loud, I can hear my mind complaining, and discover some of the things that my mind actually wants, like for example, “I want others to like me.”

Now, considering the teaching of Shri Mahayogi that, “the practice of Yoga is for the purpose of stilling the mind and realizing the Truth, or the true Self,” if I think about what the beginning stage of practicing mauna could mean in this regard, I think it is that mauna can lead us to an experience of recognizing the mind’s behavior, and initiating the journey of stilling the mind by discerning whether the mind’s desires are in line with the teachings of Truth or not. Then, eventually, we can renounce the unnecessary things that contradict the teachings of Truth within the mind.

For me, without this action of “refraining from speaking,” I don’t think I’d have the chance to witness my mind’s behavior, or most likely, it would be very difficult to recognize that my mind actually wants something else in that moment.

This example is just a small recognition that arose through trying to learn from the experience of working to apply the teachings of Truth, to apply Yoga. But if I look further at how life-changing the experience of learning through practicing the teachings of Truth can be and where it may culminate, there is an example that Shri Mahayogi describes in The Universal Gospel of Yoga, which indicates the highest stage of what Jesus taught: “I and my Father are One.”[1] I must say, before reading the part where Shri Mahayogi mentioned this quote of Jesus, “I and my Father are One,” and before learning that this quote is actually a teaching of Jesus, rather than just a statement, I had always thought that Jesus was simply making a declaration; but now, I’ve started to believe that, actually, this is his real experience, and that Jesus shared his experience in order to teach us that, one day, through the practice of the teachings of Truth, we, too, can have the same experience of Oneness with the Truth—which I believe in this statement Jesus calls “the Father.”

-Ekanta

[1] The Universal Gospel of Yoga. “Jesus and His Teachings.”