Belittling Intelligence

When you cross the forties, it is likely you have seen a large part of life and you kind of know what you will get in the remaining time seeing those in front of you.

I have seen that fatigue sets in in many. The pursuit of materialism changes over to some extent at least to some as pursuit of happiness. And suddenly they begin to belittle the mind.

Mind, the source of all what you did suddenly seem to bring in more misery or seem to stand in the way for you in your pursuit of happiness. You find people telling everywhere to cut down on your thoughts and mind is the root cause of all problems.

Spiritual seekers often misunderstand this. They even begin to find animals to be more happier than human beings. I have had discussions with friends about how animals do not THINK like humans (they may have a very limited sense) and hence they are not tortured by thinking. Anything that needs deep thinking is scorned at.

You stop watching movies that are very deep. You are fine with those comedy, action, light weight stuff. You stop reading deeper things and you even keep away from people who do that. You start blunting the very weapon which gave you all the pleasures of life until now and dumb yourself down in the idea of becoming happy.

And often I find that you do not become happy either by doing all this. In fact you become worse. You lose the sharpness, as well as you allow thoughts that are surface level, shallow, you end up having conversations that are meaningless and in short you chicken out of an intense living by having wrongly identifying the root cause of all your miseries as your mind and thoughts and the intelligence which defined you over the years.

Now, I am asking you to stop doing this, if at all you were in this path. Instead, sharpen your intellect to be able to better see things. What led you to this path is not the mind, but what you had gathered in your mind. Plenty of garbage of this and that. Sharpen your intellect to identify the garbage and keep your mind to remain free of it. Unburden your mind of the contents. Keep vigil constantly on what gets in. But remember that it should be done with an ease, with a sense of having your mind as a tool, a certain level of ease with which you would operate a tool that lies outside of you like driving a car.