There are two kinds of intelligence.
One is the intelligence of the outside world.
The intelligence that helps us work,
Create things,
Navigate life basically.
The intelligence of the physical world.
That's what we go to school for.
Life teaches us that.
We have books,
Skills,
Tutoring,
Anything and everything.
Then there is a second kind of intelligence.
Intelligence about who we are,
Who we truly are.
That is what I call the exploration of truth,
Truth of who we are.
These two intelligences operate separately.
Just because you are good at the first one,
Which is the external one,
That is you are well-educated,
You come from a great university,
You are working on cutting-edge technology,
You're rich,
You're famous.
Just having all these things does not imply that you have the second kind of intelligence.
The intelligence of peace and happiness,
The truth of who we are.
That's why material success does not equal fulfillment,
Peace,
Harmony.
Think of today's session as you going to school.
Not for learning something from the outside,
But learning about inside.
Because the mind that has become shaped with all the skills you have learned about the external world,
Including your education,
The mind thinks that the principles that apply to the external world apply to the internal world as well,
Applies to who I am as well.
So any exploration of the truth is easily dismissed.
So one of the most important prerequisites for the exploration of peace and happiness,
The exploration of truth,
Of who you are,
Is openness.
Openness for truth to enter through your mind.
Humility that I don't know.
I remember this quote by one of the tech philosophers of our times,
By the name Naval Ravikant,
Who says,
If you are so smart,
Why haven't you figured out to be happy?
What is necessary today is the openness,
The curiosity to find out,
To learn,
To explore,
To experiment.
To question the old,
To trust the obvious and the experienced.
The mind cannot figure out who you are.
Only you can know who you are.
The mind is at the service of you,
You the presence,
That which you call I,
The simple I.
But this recognition of I is not conscious because we think I is the body.
Sometimes we feel,
We think that I is the entire body.
Sometimes we think I is behind my eyes,
Allegedly in my brain.
Even the way we phrase things,
We call every body part mine,
Which means it belongs to me,
It's not me.
The brain,
We don't call I the brain,
No,
It's my brain,
My heart,
My legs,
My voice,
My thoughts,
My mind.
If everything is yours,
Who are you?
When we utter these words,
Do we question,
If everything is mine,
Dot,
Dot,
Dot,
Then what am I?
Because at an intuitive level,
We know that I am not this body or body parts or organs of the body.
I know intuitively that I am not the actions of the body.
Although sometimes I refer to myself through the roles and titles that I have in society,
But I intuitively know that it is my role and my title,
My job,
My possession,
My relationships.
It's not who I am.
Intuitively,
We know that I am not my mind.
I am not the thoughts of my mind.
I am not the feelings that are inflicted upon me.
So we use these words,
Which are intuitively correct,
But we act differently,
We act as if I am that.
It's like me saying,
I am sitting at my table,
But acting as if I am the table.
I can see the table,
I can perceive it,
I can talk about it.
It has a clear shape,
Clear form,
It has a clear name.
I perceive it as a subject-object relationship.
And then I believe I am the table.
Sounds completely absurd.
But that's what we do with our body.
We can perceive our body,
It has a clear shape,
Form,
It even has a name.
We experience the body as a subject-object relationship.
My body,
I see it,
I perceive it.
But then,
We have this belief that sometimes I am this entire body,
Sometimes I am only a few parts of this body.
Sometimes we think we are the reflection in the mirror of this body.
So the belief is not even constant.
It is a moving target.
When we are dreaming at night,
The kind of dream doesn't matter,
Any dream.
And we have all dreamt,
We know we dream,
And we have recollections of some of our dreams.
In that dream,
We have zero experience of our body.
If in your dream I paused you and interviewed you,
Are you the body?
You will have no experience of the body to reflect upon.
So this belief that I am the body is pretty flawed,
Uninvestigated.
The simple rule of exploring the truth of what I am,
Who I am,
Is to know that whatever I can perceive,
Whatever I can see,
That is,
Whatever that has a name and a form,
That's the only reason we can perceive something,
Because it has a form,
And we can talk about it,
Because it has a name to refer to.
So the rule is,
Whatever I can perceive cannot be me,
Because I am the subject of that object.
I am the perceiver of the perceived.
This might seem crazy to someone who is so intelligent in the first kind of intelligence,
Namely the worldly intelligence.
But if we stayed true to our experience,
To this investigation,
And relied only on facts,
The first intelligence might be humbled,
Because as long as I identify with that which is perceived,
I suffer the fate of the perceived,
Because everything we perceive is changing.
The experience of our body is not constant.
When we are lost in thoughts,
When we are dreaming,
When we are lost in a movie,
When we are lost in a juicy problem,
We don't experience body,
But we do have this experience of being present.
We do have this experience of perceiving,
Because that's our true nature as presence,
As awareness,
As consciousness.
We cannot not perceive.
And because our true nature,
I,
As presence,
Is so transparent,
Shapeless,
Formless,
That it's easy to merge with something and misidentify ourselves as the perceived.
The second misidentification that we often make is with our thoughts,
With our mind.
The same rule applies about the subject-object relationship,
The perceiver-perceived relationship,
Even for the mind.
And our first-person experience of the mind is only of the thoughts and images.
If somebody cuts open our brain,
They are not going to find the mind,
So there is no third-person experience of mind.
And even within this subjective first-person experience of the mind,
All we experience is thoughts and images.
And again,
We perceive our thoughts.
We perceive those images,
That is,
We see those images and we hear those thoughts.
Unfortunately,
We can't smell,
We can't taste,
We can't touch our thoughts and images,
Like we do in the physical world.
So we have this sense of sound,
A.
K.
A.
Thoughts,
And sense of sight,
A.
K.
A.
Images,
That we call the mind.
And this experience happens so intimately,
So close to us,
Yet it still has that unique quality of every thought having a shape.
That's why we can distinguish between two thoughts.
If it didn't have a shape,
Just like physical space,
We would not be able to call it space one,
Space two.
It would all be just space.
So this thought,
Whether as a word,
As a sound,
Or as an image,
Has a form that you are perceiving,
That you,
Awareness,
Are perceiving.
As a subject,
As a witness.
Because it happens so intimately,
It's easy to be fooled into believing that I am the thought that appears in our mind,
In my mind.
Because I've seen my reflection,
My photographs,
It's easy to think that I am that.
I am that image.
And you don't need me to tell you that when you misidentify as an image in your mind,
That image suffers.
Suffers the replay of past events,
Because whatever event you are replaying comes from your memory of what happened to this body,
From your point of view.
And you experience that again from that image's point of view,
Because you have identified with it.
And whatever has happened,
It happens again and again in your mind,
And you suffer again and again.
Or,
That image might venture out in the future,
Imagining things which again happen in the form of images and sounds as narration,
And then you suffer with anxiety.
Anxiety.
Fear.
Because the future hasn't happened.
It's only the imagination.
And even with the imagination,
Which is a necessary tool for this human experience,
It's the misidentification that makes us suffer.
It's the belief that I am that image,
To whom that imagination is going to happen.
Not only that,
We even mistakenly assume that the images of people who we interact with in our mind are the people that we interact with.
So instead of talking to those people,
We talk to the image of them in our minds as if it's real,
Just like in a dream.
When we are replaying an event,
Of course there are other images in the picture,
In our mind.
It's not that we know that those images are images,
But we suffer that event,
We replay that event as if they are real,
As if they are the physical person.
Because if we didn't believe them to be the real people,
The real event,
There would be no suffering.
It would just be an enjoyment movie,
A feel-good movie.
Because you don't identify with any of that.
But again,
Even with thoughts and images,
The same subjective witnessing experience happens.
And the same misguided,
Misidentified,
Misguided misidentification happens.
And suffering ensues.
Outside the physical experience of sights,
Sounds,
Tastes,
Textures and smells,
That is,
Actions and relationships,
And the mental experience of thoughts and images,
The bodily sensations,
Everything that appears to you as a witness,
Is not you,
Cannot be you.
You are the ever-present,
Ever-perceiving presence,
Awareness,
Perceiving this throughout.
Whenever we don't identify with any of these things,
There is automatically peace.
Which also says that I cannot perceive myself,
I can only be myself.
Because everything that I perceive cannot be me.
I invite you to explore this.
I invite you to verify the truth of these words.
To experiment and see if not identifying with something reduces your suffering.
Then the choice is yours whether to continue with your old ways of identifying or your newfound experiential truth.
Thank you.
