Knowledge is perception of the truth—conscious knowledge, cognizant perception, to see it for what it is. When someone spreads gossip about us, we generally want to reply in kind, we want to attack them back. We want to say, Oh yeah, I know this and that about them. They may have said things about me but I know worse things about them,” and we want to spread all that gossip and hurt them back. We do not want to look at the pain in us and what is hurt, and analyze that, and dissect it. What is hurt is our pride. Our pride is the cause of suffering, not the gossip, not the other person: the cause is our pride. The gossip only caused it to be activated.

When we get passed over for a promotion, when we do not get hired for a job, when we do not win a competition, we become angry, hurt, we blame others, we blame conditions, we blame this and that. We do not want to look at the cause of our suffering, which is our pride (embarrassment). We do not want to analyze that our pride is the problem. That is why we suffer. If we want to be liberated from that suffering, we need knowledge of it.

Retrospection

That is the first part; to look at what suffers and to get to know it, to not avoid it. This naturally requires meditation. This observation cannot be successfully done while you are doing other things. You cannot comprehend and understand your suffering while you are doing other things.

You need to sit, close all of your senses, and analyze consciously the cause of the suffering, and see it for what it is. This is why we learn a practice called retrospection.

Everyday we learn to sit at the end of the day and review our experiences of the day, and to pick out those moments that we need to understand better: something we did, something that happened to us, something we thought or felt. Somewhere where suffering was caused.

We just sit and we reflect on it. This is very difficult, because the mind wants to change the memory. We play the scene in our mind and our imagination and the mind wants to change it, to justify ourselves and to make the other people seem even worse. This is why we suffer! We cannot trust our own mind. We cannot trust our own perception, because it is filtered, and even when trying to review the event, we are still trying to filter it.

Our perception is conditioned. It takes enormous awareness to maintain purity of perception. It does not happen automatically. It is very difficult to see things as they are, especially in the beginning. Nonetheless, to be free from suffering, we need knowledge of the cause of suffering, thus we have to train ourselves to see reality.