Truth cannot be given to you by anyone, however wise or certain they sound. It can only be found, and found alone, in your own direct experience. Every teacher, every book, every confident voice is a traveler describing a summit you still have to climb for yourself.
There is an old story of a man who lived his whole life at the foot of a mountain and finally set out to climb it. Near the bottom he met a traveler coming down and asked what the path was like and what could be seen from the top. Rough going, the traveler said, and too cloudy to see much. So the man looked for another route, and met another traveler, who told him the way was crowded and the view only fair. He asked a third, and a fourth, and by the time he had gathered enough answers he turned around and went home, satisfied that he now knew the mountaintop. He had never once stood on it. Something in us does this all the time, quietly mistaking a heap of descriptions for the thing itself.
You could read a thousand pages about honey, its color and its sweetness, the flowers it comes from, the ailments it is said to soothe, and still not know the first real thing about it. Honey is known the moment it is tasted, and not a moment before. This is the difference between two kinds of knowing. There is surface knowledge, made of words and other people's reports, and it behaves like the waves on the sea, restless, forgetful, endlessly rearranging itself. And there is deep knowledge, gathered by your own seeing and tasting and touching, which lives far below the waves where the water does not move. Deep knowledge is closer to who you are than any fact could ever be.
The trouble is that life sends a steady stream of travelers down from their mountains, and nearly every one of them is trying, gently or forcefully, to press a truth into you. One has seen God up there. One has seen only atoms and accident. One returns speaking of spirit, another of hard fact, and each comes down selling a black or a white as though it were the whole of things. Unless you keep a quiet watch at the gate of your own mind, you are slowly furnished by their reports and defined by paths you never walked. Most of us have been defined this way a hundred times over without noticing it happen.
None of this is a case for cynicism, and none of it means the travelers are lying. It means only that truth does not live in the well-worn paths. It runs more like a stream in a shaded valley, silent, easy to miss, and you do not truly recognize it until you have come upon it from your own angle, in your own life, with no one standing between you and it. To meet the world without a borrowed opinion laid over it is not ignorance. It is a kind of open, willing not-knowing, and it is the very thing that lets something fresh be seen.
So take even these words lightly. Words can point, they can sketch a direction, they can say there is a mountain, but they cannot make the climb for you, and the last stretch is always walked in silence. Someone can describe the sea to you for years. Then one evening you stand with the cold water rising past your ankles, and the whole of it is known in a single breath, plainly and wordlessly, in a way no description ever managed. That is the only knowing that truly changes a person, and it is always yours to find.
Questions that arise
Can enlightenment or truth be taught to me by someone else?
Not directly. A teacher can point and describe, but the actual seeing has to happen in your own experience. What is handed to you in words stays surface knowledge until you meet it for yourself.
What is the difference between deep knowledge and surface knowledge?
Surface knowledge is borrowed from words and other people's accounts, and it shifts constantly like waves. Deep knowledge is what you have seen and tasted directly, and it stays quiet and steady underneath, because it is close to who you actually are.
Why doesn't reading about spirituality seem to change me?
Because reading gathers descriptions, and descriptions are not the thing described. You can collect a mountain of accurate words and still be standing at the foot of the mountain. The shift comes only when insight is lived rather than read.
Isn't it arrogant to distrust experts and teachers?
It is not about distrust but about not mistaking their words for your own seeing. Learn from them freely, then test everything in your own experience. Even the best guidance is meant to point you toward what you must finally find alone.
These contemplations are drawn from The Sound of the Bells by Jussi Niittyviita, the story of a dying man who learns to hear the stillness beneath his life. More of his books, audiobooks, and courses are at www.jussiniittyviita.com.