By Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar | Posted: October 17, 2019

In this brief video, Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, founder of the Art of Living, discusses the 3 different types of knowledge, where they come from, and how they interact. All of these sources of knowledge are important for holistic and integrated education.

There are 3 levels of knowing, or knowledge.

Senses

One is the knowledge you gain through the senses. This is very individual. For example, if you say, “This gulab jamun (milk dumplings in syrup with saffron and cardamom) is sweet,” only you can know what you mean by that. If you say that, it doesn’t really convey what you mean to others. It’s vague. You cannot exactly describe how sweet it is or what the individual taste is really like.

The knowledge you get from the senses, all the 5 senses, is the first level of knowledge. It has its limitations.

Intellect

Now, higher than this is the knowledge from inference, from the intellect. For example, the sun never sets, and never rises; this is intellectual knowledge. Senses say the opposite. When  you look, you see that the sun is setting and the sun is rising, but the intellect says no, the sun is neither rising or setting.

Similarly you see when you put a pen in a beaker of water it looks bent, but you know it’s not. Optical illusions are called illusions of intellectual knowledge. This is superior than the knowledge from the senses.

Intuition

Then, there’s the sixth sense, from which you get an intuitive knowledge. It’s higher than intellectual knowledge. With intellectual knowledge you can calculate, you manipulate, you understand, you acquire. But there’s something that comes with a gut feeling, which defies your reasoning or logic. 

So then you go into that gut feeling and you get intuitive knowledge that you find is even higher than knowledge from the intellect.

It never fails. If it’s really intuitive knowledge, then it never fails. If it fails, it was never intuitive knowledge.

Science and education

So these are the 3 levels of knowledge: knowledge through the senses, through the intellect, and through something beyond the intellect, from the spirit itself, from the consciousness itself. Each has its significance.

Sensory knowledge is very individual. But the knowledge of the intellect isn’t individual; rather, it’s a collective knowledge, inferred knowledge. And then you go beyond that to universal knowledge. It’s intuitive knowledge, beyond time and beyond space.

Real education must touch upon all of the 3 levels.

Art of Living’s Intuition Process course can help you develop your faculty of perceiving intuitive knowledge. To learn more, find a course near you today!