Most of the times our intellect acts like a knife. Its primary function is to cut right through reality so that we are in a better position to differentiate one thing from another.
If a knife has to cut through anything effortlessly, it is important that the subject it encounters does not stick to it. An unclean and sticky knife is hardly of any help.
You must have definitely experienced this yourself — if you cut papaya or for that matter anything after cutting an onion, everything will taste like onion. Such a knife becomes more of a spoiler than of any help.
We often forget our intellect is just like a knife that needs to be put to rest when the task is completed. But what we are doing instead is playing with the tool even after completion of the job and making it all sticky. In fact, we have become so addictive wielding our intellectual knife we are intoxicated by its false sense of bravery and pleasure.
Once our intellect gets identified with something, it gets chained to the identifications and leaves us with a completely distorted experience of the world. And as a consequence, we often get circumscribed by the contours of this identity.
Whatever you are identified with, all your thoughts and emotions emanates from that identity. Suppose you identify yourself as a woman — in that case — all your thoughts and emotions will start flowing from that identification.
If you identify yourself with a particular nationality or region, they will flow from those identifications. Whatever your thoughts and emotions, these identifications will end up creating a certain level of biases within you.
It is your identity that manages and determines your intellect. And this identity around which your intellect functions is the primary source of EGO.
If you start dis-identifying yourself from all those accumulated identities there is a very bright chance that your mind might just turn blank and empty. When you want to use it, you can; at other times, it will simply be empty, devoid of all unwarranted clutter. That is how ideally it should be. But right now, you are identified with so many tags and labels that any attempt to stop your mind seems to be a perpetual exercise in futility.
Irrespective of what you might have achieved in your life when death comes knocking, every identification just falls apart. If you can learn to drop these voluntarily, life might present you with its infinite possibilities.
If you do not burden your intellect with any identifications — body, family, community, degrees, society, race, caste, creed, sex, nation, even species — you may end up gravitating towards your ultimate nature. If not, you can be rest assured death will definitely demolish it all.
Worth Sharing?
If you got something from this post, and feel someone else in your life needs to see this, please share it and tell them how much you care about them.
