Spiritual Straight Talk
Q. I am a very intellectual person, but my mind seems to often be in conflict. How can I master my mind?
Sadhguru: The more people think, the more joyless they are becoming in their lives. It should not be so.
Your mind is just society's garbage bin. Anybody who walks by you stuffs something in your head and goes. You really have no choice, whatever comes and hits any of the sense organs, either a vision or a sound or a sensation or a taste or a smell that touches your sense organs gets stored in the mind. So what you call as mind, the accumulative part of the mind is subject to the kind of social, religious and cultural situations you are been exposed to.
We could make the mind into three parts. The discriminatory dimension of the mind, which is called the intellect; the accumulative part that gathers information; and awareness, which is called pragna.
The very way you think, feel and understand life is just what kind of garbage you gathered in your head. Some of you have social garbage, religious garbage, spiritual garbage, it doesn't matter. But all this has comes from outside. It's of survival significance only. It is not of any life significance. Your ability to recycle the garbage is your intellect. Your survival on this planet is possible only because you are able to discriminate between one thing and the other.
The more intellectual you become the more you start splitting everything around you and it doesn't know where to stop. It doesn't allow you to be with anything totally. So Intellect is a wonderful instrument for survival, at the same time intellect is a terrible barrier for you to experience the oneness of life. Only if you know to what extent your logic should go and where it should not go your life will be beautiful.
All the impressions that have entered your mind have entered you only through your five sense organs. And sense organs can perceive everything only in comparison. If you had not seen darkness in your life, you wouldn't know what is light.
Sense perception is not giving you an impression of reality, it is giving you a distorted impression of reality because sense organs experience everything only in comparison with something else. And when there is a comparison there is always duality. You can only perceive in parts. So your perception is all in bits and pieces and these will never make the whole.
Now if you wipe it with awareness, this intellect can cut through what is true and what is not true. When your intellect becomes razor sharp, so that nothing sticks to it, it doesn't get attached to anything, it is not identified with anything, it just makes you see everything, simply the way it is. It is not influenced by your accumulation, by your identifications, by your emotions.
The whole process of yoga and meditation is just this, if you sit here your mind is here, you are here. Once you have a clear space between you and your mind it's a completely different dimension of existence.
Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev is an international spiritual teacher, author and authority on yoga, with profound spiritual and cultural insights on health and human values.
Send your questions for Sadhguru to Isha Foundation, 10 Belcaro Circle, Nashville, TN 37215 or email: info@ishafoundation.org
Enjoyed reading Khabar magazine? Subscribe to Khabar and get a full digital copy of this Indian-American community magazine.
