Sam Munshani: Why as a western society, do we tend to feel that intellect is more important
in dealing with situations on a day to day basis rather than feeling?
Sadhguru: I think, it's a European hangover.
Descartes, you know.
I think for long periods of time, human societies have suffered this struggle for survival.
When you want to survive, your ability to discriminate is the most important quality.
Otherwise you don't survive.
Till we create kind of societies where everybody can survive, this cannot be put to rest.
So this is the reason why eastern societies did not bank so much on intellect but on intelligence.
There is a distinct difference because probably in English language, there is no words to
describe different aspects of one's intelligence.
In Sanskrit language there are at least eight dimensions of your intelligence.
So 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 the intellect.
So 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.
Because intellect has given ability to survive and a certain sense of dominance over others,
we have become devotees of intellect.
Intellect is a wonderful thing, no question about that.
But 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 and you can never project
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.
Sam Munshani: Okay, now when we talk about human identity and false association with
certain stereotypes.
Why do we always strive to be a certain stereotype?
I mean why does everybody in Pennsylvania want to have a big house with a white picket fence.
Why is that status of having arrived?
Sadhguru: Because this is a society, this idea of role model is essentially from the west.
So a few months ago, I was being interviewed by someone from here and this lady asked me,
“Who is your role model Sadhguru?” I said, “I don't roll with models”.
Such an idea never occurred to me. It never occurred to me.
How should I shape myself in whose image, that never occurred to us because 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.
And how to make this yourself into a full potential, full blown growth is all.
The traditional yogic 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.
So 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 and that's all you can do. Otherwise you will become pretentious.
So 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 is rattling out what...
In a dinner party, you can see people saying exact distance between planet-earth and you
know planet Mars and everything but what 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 with life, what is needed
is not information, what is needed is profoundness of purchase that you have into life.
You need traction into life, experiencing life, you cannot know it.
If you read a book and think you know life or you figure out something in your head and
you think you know it. No! You have to experience it.
The profoundness of your experience is what makes this life.
So if you go by the intellect, imitation is a natural process and that's how the role models come.
Can I tell you a story? Sam Munshani: Please!
Sadhguru: I always seek your permission because the moment I start once upon a time, a lot
of people think it's bed time, you know, that's the only time somebody told them a story.
So this happened in earlier 20th century in 1910, there was a man whose name was Topiwala.
Topiwala means a hat seller. You know, people's second name indicates their trade sometimes.
So he is 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 meagre 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.
When you do everything possible and when you don't know what else to do, people pray.
So he looked up to pray and he saw a bunch of monkeys sitting there all hats on.
So he screamed at them, they screamed back at him.
He abused them; they abused him in their own language.
He picked up whatever he could and threw it at them; 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 and 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 Topiwala and one afternoon he went and sat under a tree, ate
his elaborate lunch, 21st century you know, and 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
and gave him a tight slap in the face and said “You idiot, you think only you had a grandfather”.
So there is substantial evidence, there is evidence that monkeys are evolving. Okay?
Now once you go by the limitations of your intellect, you are still a hunter and gatherer.
May be instead of gathering pieces of meat and leather and bone and tooth of animals,
today you gather information.
You know the distance between Mars and Sun and this and that, may be you gather but still
the 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.
But in the experience of life, you will not feel any better.
So if you have gathered that much, if somebody has gathered this much then in front of that
person, you feel like nothing.
So gathering is always by comparison. Your own gathering has no meaning.
It is only in relation to somebody else's gathering being more meagre than yours or
in other words, in some way you start enjoying somebody else's incapability or failure or whatever.
So this is the nature of the intellect because it survives on what you have gathered.