Knowledge Vs Realization

Knowledge Vs realization or to know versus to realize has much more to do when studying vedanta / spirituality. One should keenly know difference between these two before starting to explore anything in spirituality.

Knowledge is characterized by its transferable nature. It is an entity which an be given to anybody else by verbal or non verbal means of communication. While realization is a personal experience which is not transferable. To take a simple example, a person has headache and he tells that to his friend. Now, the experience of this person having headache is very much personal to him. The headache can happen in various ways. It's intensity, exact location, flavor :) everything can be experienced by only that person. And all that he can communicate is "I have headache" which can be understood by others in some abstract form. Now the conceptual abstract entity represented by sentence "I have headache" is the knowledge about headache. Everybody in this world knows about headache but they can experience it when they actually suffer from it. This very experience of it, is realization of headache.

We can say that knowledge is a crude form of realization. Generally, many kinds of realizations can be boiled down to some form of knowledge to transfer it to others. But there are some forms which can not be. For example ask a person who suffers from trauma (psychological) or depression, how he feels. He can never explain it exactly. And even if he explains the listener can never interpret it because he has never experienced it. So all types of realizations can't be boiled down to knowledge. They are characterized by their unique nature. Realization is complete in itself while knowledge is not. Knowledge can only point towards realization but it itself possesses no meaning without realization.

So we can conclude following things:

1. Knowledge is transferable while realization is personal
2. Realization is complete in itself while knowledge is just an abstract representation of realization
3. Some forms of realizations are convertible in knowledge (Type1 realization)
4. Some forms of realizations can't be converted into knowledge (Type2 realization)
   

Vedanta (or Upanishadas in specific) tries to give us the knowledge in form of text. And this knowledge unfortunately is about the realization of type2. These texts try their best to transfer what they knew. But realization is left to us !