LIFE LESSON

 

Dear friends,

   HEART AND INTELLECT 
    
I  have  no idea whatsoever,  how many of you find this series of daily short letters on spirituality  interesting.  I dont get feed backs.  However I shall continue irrespective of the feed backs to my heart's content.

Religion is not attained through the ears, nor through the eyes, nor yet through the brain. No scriptures can make us religious. We may study all the books  in the world, yet do not understand  what is said of  Religion or  God. We may talk all our lives  but to no practical purpose.  We may be intellectual yet we may not come to terms with who  God is.   Our  educational curriculum fashioned by Western ideas because they ruled us,  is on intellectual education alone, and take no care of the heart. It only makes men ten times more selfish, and that  is the cause of the  destruction of our society.

When there is conflict between the heart and the brain, let the heart be followed, because intellect has only one state, reason, and within that, intellect works, and cannot get beyond. It is the heart which takes one to the highest plane, which intellect can never reach; it goes beyond intellect, and reaches to what is called inspiration.

Swami Vivekanand observes that  Intellect can never become inspired; only the heart when it is enlightened, becomes inspired. An intellectual, heartless man never becomes an inspired man. It is always the heart that speaks in the man of love; it discovers a greater instrument than intellect can give you, the instrument of inspiration. Just as the intellect is the instrument of knowledge, so is the heart the instrument of inspiration. 

An ignorant man knows nothing, but he is a little emotional by nature. Compare him with a great professor — what wonderful power the latter possesses! But the professor is bound by his intellect, and he can be a devil and an intellectual man at the same time; but the man of heart can never be a devil; no man with emotion would ever be  a  devil. Properly cultivated, the heart can be changed, and will go beyond intellect; it will be changed into inspiration. Man will have to go beyond intellect in the end. The knowledge of man, his powers of perception, of reasoning and intellect and heart, all are busy churning this milk of the world. Out of long churning comes butter, and this butter is God. Men of heart get the "butter", and the "buttermilk" is left for the intellectual.

J K SIVAN