ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Knowledge and the Sacred Chapter Ten: Knowledge of the Sacred as Deliverance As by a jar is meant the clay and by cloth the threads of which it is composed, so by the name of the world is denoted consciousness; negate the world and know it. Śankara, APAROKSHANUBHUTI 1 And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

Gospel of John Knowledge of the sacred leads to freedom and deliverance from all bondage and limitation because the Sacred is none other than the limitless Infinite and the Eternal, while all bondage results from the ignorance which attributes final and irreducible reality to that which is devoid of reality in itself, reality in its ultimate sense belonging to none other than the Real as such.

That is why the sapiential perspective envisages the role of knowledge as the means of deliverance and freedom, of what Hinduism calls mokśa. To know is to be delivered.

Traditional knowledge is in fact always in quest of the rediscovery of that which has been always known but forgotten, not that which is to be discovered, for the Logos which was in the beginning possesses the principles of all knowledge and this treasury of knowledge lies hidden within the soul of man to be recovered through recollection.2 The unknown is not out there beyond the present boundary of knowledge but at the center of man's being here and now where it has always been.

And it is unknown only because of our forgetfulness of its presence. It is a sun which has not ceased to shine simply because our blindness has made us impervious to its light.

The traditional concept of knowledge is concerned with freedom and deliverance precisely because it relates principial knowledge to the Intellect, not merely to reason, and sees sacred knowledge in rapport with an ever-present Reality which is at once Being and Knowledge, not with a process of accumulation of facts and concepts through time and based on gradual growth and development.

Without denying this latter type of knowledge which in fact has existed in all traditional civilizations,3 tradition emphasizes that central knowledge of the sacred and sacred knowledge which is the royal path toward deliverance from the bondage of all limitation and ignorance, from the bondage of the outside world which limits us physically and the human psyche which imprisons the immortal soul within us.