Inner Strength - Access to Insight

than people in general.For example, people in ships out at sea got it into their heads that they’d liketo see the ships approaching them from a distance. “How can we see them? Howcan we get their image to appear in our ship?” They worked on this idea untilthey succeeded. First they started out really simple-minded, just like us. Simplemindedin what way? They thought like a mirror, that’s all, nothing special. Theyput a mirror up high on a mast and then had a series of mirrors pick up theimage in the first mirror and send it on down into the ship. They didn’t have tolook in the first mirror. They could look at a little tiny mirror down in the shipand see ships approaching from far away. That’s all they used in the beginning.After a while they made a single mirror in waves. When an image hit the topwave, the next wave picked it up and sent it on down the waves of the mirrorinto the ship. They kept thinking about this until now, no more: They have radar,a tiny little box that doesn’t use a series of mirrors, and doesn’t use a mirror inwaves, but can still pull the image of a faraway ship and make it appear in yourship. This is how knowledge develops to a high level in the sciences.As for medicine, doctors these days are researching into how they can keeppeople from dying. Lots of people are doing the research, but no one has foundthe solution. No matter how much research they do, people are still dying. Theyhaven’t succeeded in making people live longer than their ordinary span. This isanother branch of knowledge that comes from thinking and not from textbooks.And there’s still another branch that’s moving even further out, but how farthey’ll get is hard to say. These are the people who want to go and live on Mars.It must be really nice up there. But the chances of their succeeding are small.Why small? Because the people aren’t really sincere. And why aren’t theysincere? Because they’re still unsure and uncertain. The idea isn’t really clear intheir heads. This uncertainty is what gets in the way of success.So this is the second level of worldly knowledge, the level that comes fromthinking and ideas, or cint›maya-paññ›.But in the final analysis, neither of these two levels of knowledge can take usbeyond suffering and stress. They’re the type of knowledge that creates badkamma about 70 percent of the time. Only 30 percent of the time do theyactually benefit the human race. Why only 30 percent? If another war getsstarted: total disaster. The kinds of knowledge that are really useful, that giveconvenience to human transportation and communication, are few and farbetween. For the most part, worldly knowledge is aimed at massive killing, atamassing power and influence. That’s why it doesn’t lead beyond suffering andstress, doesn’t lead beyond birth, aging, illness, and death.Take, for instance, the countries at present that are clever in building all kindsof weapons. They sell their weapons to other countries, and sometimes thoseother countries use the weapons to kill people in the countries that built them.There are countries that can’t build their own weapons, yet they declare war onthe countries who gave them military aid. That’s about as far as the results ofworldly knowledge can take you.This is why the Buddha taught us a higher level of knowledge: Dhammaknowledge. Dhamma knowledge arises in two ways, through thinking and77