Training the Intellect

 

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Training the Intellect

If intellect is such a big obstacle, why train it in the first place? Why not introduce children to meditation while they are still innocent and simple, instead of sending them to university? Instead of shaping their logic and thinking faculty, instead of educating them, why not drown them into meditation in their innocence and simplicity? If intellect is an obstacle, why help it grow? Why not get rid of it before developing it?

It would have been alright if intellect was only an obstacle. But an obstacle can also become a stepping-stone. We are walking on a pathway and there is a huge rock lying on the pathway. Now, this is an obstacle, and we may return from there thinking the pathway does not go anywhere further. But if we climb on the rock, a new pathway is revealed – which is totally on a different level from the previous lower one. A new dimension opens up.

The unintelligent one will return from there taking the rock as an obstacle. The intelligent one will use the rock as a ladder. And intelligence, wisdom, is a totally different thing from what we call intellect. Without training the intellect the children will remain like animals. Of course, they wouldn’t have the obstacle, but they wouldn’t have any means to climb up either. In itself, neither is the stone an obstacle, nor is the ladder a help.

So, it is necessary that every child goes through the intellectual training. And the more beautiful this training, the sharper this training, the stronger, the bigger, the vaster this rock of intellect; the better because in the same proportion it is a means to rise to greater heights. The one who gets crushed under this rock is the pundit. The one who stands on top of this rock is the sage. And the one who, out of fear, does not even come close to the rock, is the ignorant.

The ignorant one’s intellect was never trained; the pundit’s intellect was trained but he could not go beyond it; the wise one’s intellect was not only trained, he also managed to go beyond it. Avoidance would not help; one has to go through and beyond. And whatever experience one goes through, it intensifies one, it makes one luminous.

Pass through the misery of intellect so that we can attain to the bliss of wisdom. Pass through the anguish of the world so that samadhi, the ultimate ecstasy, awakening into the divine, can be ours. We will have to pass through the opposites, that is the way.