Information is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience. You need experience to gain wisdom.” – Albert Einstein.
For Einstein, knowledge doesn’t come by thinking:
“I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me.”
He once said: “I think and think for months, for years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.”
This hundredth time, however, wasn’t the result of thinking but of “swimming in silence.”
Einstein was a genius not because of how well he thought or solved mathematical problems, but because he realized that thinking itself might be a problem. He said:
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”
In other words, we must die to our familiar way of thinking in order to think differently. When we think the way we have always thought, we keep creating the same set of problems.
And those problems are unsolvable from the same level of consciousness that gave rise to them.
Einstein realized that true knowledge is not so much a matter of solving mathematical problems as of renouncing a particular type of consciousness.
What type of consciousness?
The one that thinks of knowledge as something we gain by collecting data points. Einstein found that truth comes to him when he ceases thinking.
In other words, truth is not something we reach out and grab – it is something that comes to us.
It is not something we seize but something that seizes us.
Truth comes – strikes us – as a revelation of Wonder. No wonder Einstein himself said:
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is.”
He saw everything as a miracle.
He understood that if you reduce knowledge to information, you will want to collect as much data as possible. You will equate knowing with seizing data.
But this is exactly the type of consciousness that creates problems. We must realize that truth cannot be seized – it comes of its own accord. It reveals itself to a certain type of consciousness.
It reveals itself to a consciousness that humbly sees everything as a miracle. Such a consciousness is patient. It can wait for years until something suddenly becomes clear and lucid.
As Søren Kierkeggardt said:
“You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.”
When we become too greedy for information, we betray true knowledge. It becomes unreachable.
Truth is revealed only to those who humble themselves before the vast miracle of existence. Truth yields itself to this type of consciousness.
To know, we must yield ourselves to experience.
And in experience, we become truly wise.
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On Jun 21, 2026, at 9:47 AM, Janet Asiain <janet...@gmail.com> wrote:
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Yes thanks Rani, I just droned on about my Dialogue group because it exemplified what I had heard and read —actual experience makes a different sort of impression, I guess. But of course many people have realized that the silence that follows the exhaustion of thought is the doorway to that which we do not already know.
On Sun, Jun 21, 2026 at 1:17 PM Rani Madhavapeddi <rmadha...@gmail.com> wrote:
Janet,My 2 cents are with you. Budha, realized after he exhausted everything he thought he needed to do to attain nirvana, Ramana Maharishi thought he would die and wanted to experience death, he succumbed to it and realized his identity vanished. Nisargadatta believed he was more than a body/ mind as his guru told him. He realized that when identity of body mind dropped. He continued to smoke 😁, Krishnamurthy talked about in many ways- listen without memory, reflection, reaction and response, (here I am responding to yours) 😁.Descartes I think said I think therefore I am. Here is a version of it
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