Is There Knowledge Beyond Reason?

The Mundaka's para vidya vs Bergson's intuition.

Mundaka Upanishad vs Bergson and William James. A knowing that is not thinking about something but becoming it.

Firewood at the Forest's Edge

Picture the hermitage at first light. Smoke from the morning fires curling through the trees. The smell of wet leaves and ash. A wealthy householder named Shaunaka has walked the long road from his estate, and he is carrying a bundle of firewood in his arms. The firewood is the sign. It tells the rishi at the door of the hut what kind of visit this is. Shaunaka is rich, established, learned in the four Vedas. But he has come the long way and he has come carrying the wood of a student, because he has reached the end of what wealth and learning can answer.

The sage Angiras sees him at the door. The two have known each other a long time. Angiras waits.

Shaunaka kneels and asks one question. 'Tell me, sir, that by knowing which everything else becomes known.'

It is a strange question. Shaunaka already knows a great deal. He can recite the hymns. He can perform the rituals. He can argue grammar and meter at any assembly in the land. He is asking for something else. He is asking whether there is a single knowing that makes the rest fall into place, and whether that knowing is even the same kind of thing as everything he has spent his life learning. Angiras's answer will draw a line through the middle of human knowledge. On one side, every fact a person can ever learn. On the other side, the one thing the facts cannot reach.

The Mundaka Upanishad drew that line more than two and a half thousand years ago. A French philosopher named Henri Bergson and an American psychologist named William James walked up to it from the other side in the early twentieth century. They saw the same line. They did not know what to do with it. The Mundaka did.