What are the Limits of my Mind?

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What are the Limits of my Mind?

Why as a rested society do we tend to feel that intellect is more important in dealing with situations on a day to basis rather than feeling?

I think it’s a shame. They copy, you know. I think for long periods of time human societies have suffered this struggle for survival. Many want to survive your ability to discriminate is the most important quality, otherwise you don’t survive. Until we create the kind of societies where everybody can survive, this cannot be put to rest. This is the reason why eastern societies did not bank so much on intellect but on intelligence, there’s a distinct difference. Probably in English language, there is no word to describe different aspects of one’s intelligence. In their language, there are at least 8 dimensions of your intelligence. Intellect is just one of them.

Intellect is very useful for survival process because it gives you discriminatory capability. If you allow your intellect to find out anything. Suppose you want to know this flower through your intellect, you will see the only thing you will do is pull it apart and try to know it. Dissection is the way of intellect. If you want to know your mother, please don’t dissect, okay, that’s not the way life happens. If you want to know life in its entirety, you need other dimensions of intelligence. Intellect has given ability to survive and a certain sense of dominance over others, we have become duties of intellect.

Intellect is a wonderful thing, no question about that. You need to understand human intellect functions only from the limited data that it has gathered. It cannot explore anything entirely new. You can only project from what you know to another dimension. You can never predict into an unknown dimension through what you know. Right now, that’s the reason why I would say western societies have been on a treadmill for a long time. They run a lot and they get fit but they don’t go anywhere. Fitness happens of course.

Okay. When we talk about human identity and false association with certain stereotypes, why do we always strive to be a certain stereotype? Why does everybody in Pennsylvania want to have a big house with a white picket fence? Why is that the status of having arrived?

This is a society, this idea of role model is essentially from the west. A few months ago I was being interview by someone from here. This lady asked me, “Who is your role model?” I said, “I don’t roll with the models.” Certain idea never occurred to me, it never occurred to me, how should I save myself in who’s image, it never occurred to us. The east is always looking at how to turn inward and discover the deeper potential in you, never going out to be like somebody else. This is something which is there in the natural ethos of India, that you cannot be somebody else. You can never ever be someone else, you can only be yourself. How to make this yourself into your full potential, full blown growth is all. The traditional examples go like this, if a mango tree looks at a coconut tree and thinks coconut tree is taller and aspires to become a coconut tree, it will become a no-good mango tree.

Every life is unique in its own way and has its own place. The only thing that life has to do is to find the necessary nourishment to get full-blown growth. If you become a full-blown yourself, then that’s all you can do, otherwise you will become pretentious. The problem is, once you go by your intellect, these two things are very connected. Once you go by your intellect, you will have a whole lot of information but you don’t know anything. This is modern education, you have a whole lot of information with you, everybody’s rattling out, what dinner party you can see people saying exact distance between planet earth and planet Mars and everything but relevance is it?

It is just that you can gather information like this. When you have information you have a false sense of feeling that you know everything but you know nothing. It may help you in the financial market to have information but in life what is needed is not information, what is needed is profoundness that you have in your life, you need traction in your life, experience in life. You cannot know it. If you read a book and you think you know life or you figure out something in your head and you think you know it, no, you have to experience the profoundness of your experience is what makes this life. If you go with intellect, imitation is a natural process and that’s how to role model comes. Can I tell you a story?

Please.

I always seek permission because the moment I start, “Once upon a time,” a lot of people think it’s bedtime, you know, that’s the only time somebody told them a story. This happened in early 20th century, 1910, there was a man who’s name was something that means a hat seller. You know people’s second names indicate their trade sometimes. He’s going from village to village, town to town selling hats in the tropical heat. One afternoon he felt tired and he went and sat down under a tree, opened his meager lunch, ate and dozed off. After a little while he opened his eyes and to his horror all the hats were gone. He looked all over the place, no hats. You do everything possible, when you don’t know what else to do, people pray. He looked up to pray and he saw a bunch of monkeys sitting there all hats on.

He screamed at them, they screamed back at him. He abused them, they abused in their own language. He picked up whatever he could and threw it at him. They picked up whatever they could and threw it back at him. Not knowing what to do, out of sheer frustration, he took his hat and flung it on the ground. All the monkeys took their hats and flung it on the ground. He picked them up and went about his business. 2013, December 21st, another man was going around selling hats, his name also happens to be similar. One afternoon he went and sat under a tree, ate his elaborate lunch, 21st century, you know? Promptly fell asleep, after some time he woke up, hats gone. He didn’t look here and there, he looked straight up. A bunch of monkeys were sitting hats on. He got up and jived, they all jived. He made funny faces, they made funny faces.

He had all the fun he wanted to have, when he was done, he picked up his hat and flung it on the ground. A baboon of a monkey quickly came down, picked up the hat, walked towards him, gave him a tight slap in the face and said, “You idiot, you think only you had a grandfather?” Very substantial evidence that monkeys are evolving. Now, once you go where the limitations of your intellect, you’re still a hunter and gatherer. Maybe instead of gathering pieces of meat and leather and bone and tooth of animals, today you gather the information you know the distance between Mars and sun and this and that, maybe you gather but still, nature of the intellect is to gather. By gathering, if you gather so much, somebody who has this much in front of that person, in comparison to that person you look better. In the experience of life, you will not feel any better.

If you have gathered that much, if somebody has gathered this much, then in front of that person you feel like nothing. Gathering is always by comparison. Your own gathering has no meeting. It is only in relation to somebody else’s gathering being more meager than yours. Or in other words, in some way you start enjoying somebody else’s incapability or failure or whatever. This is the nature of the intellect because it survives on what you have gathered.