53. Into the depths of the mind

Try this simple exercise that can reveal so deeply the nature of your mind.

Write down on a piece of paper whatever thoughts come to your head. Do it honestly, sincerely without editing. Write down any thought that comes. Do this for just five minutes. Then read what you have written.

You will be shocked! For one moment you would have written about something that happened in India, the next moment about your daughter in the USA, the next moment about your school teacher, the next moment about a dog that is barking next door…and what not! The paper will look like a madhouse! If you analyze the paper, you will see, your thoughts are actually independent, unconnected and illogical. The mind is just a collection of thoughts which are independent, random and illogical by nature.

Understand, thoughts have no solid existence at all.

Thoughts cannot survive the arrow of your watchfulness.

What we call mind itself is an illusion. Mind is a collection of unrelated thoughts projected onto it, much like a movie screen which displays the images from multiple frames of a movie. The screen itself is not the movie, it simply displays the projected images.

Thoughts are like bubbles rising in the mind. Like a bubble which breaks when you touch it, thoughts dissolve when they are touched with the finger of awareness. They simply dissolve and the inside and outside become the same. This happens in the mind when we bring awareness to thoughts.

All you have to do is witness your thoughts, be aware. Then you will see how your thoughts simply drop. Thoughts cannot survive the arrow of your watchfulness.

Intelligence is the quality that actually witnesses the mind.

Body Intelligence

How many of us realize the tremendous intelligence that our body possesses?

Intelligence of the digestive system

Take the example of our digestive system. The whole process of converting bread to blood is such a complex and delicate one, requiring fine intelligence to convert the different types of food into energy to run the body.

What is achieved through a few feet of coiled intestine would need a few miles, if it were an industry outside of the body!

The process of digestion starts from our mouth. We chew the food and the saliva we secrete starts the digestion. There are so many big and small body elements that perform amazing functions in the process. We swallow the food and it passes through the throat into the food pipe. Beautifully the food is blocked from going into the wind pipe instead of the food pipe by the epiglottis. The food enters into the stomach, which is like an elastic bag and has a delicate and powerful digestive mechanism. Depending on the type of food taken in like carbohydrates, proteins or fats, the digestive mechanism varies.

The digestive fire in us, what we call jataraagni in Sanskrit, is related to the acid in the stomach. The stomach is such a delicate organ but it actually contains this powerful acid needed to digest the food we eat. The stomach itself is beautifully protected from this acid by a thick mucus layer around its wall which neutralizes the acid.

All the complex foods we eat take just a few hours to digest and absorb into our system. Imagine not even a single process has to be consciously thought about! It is managed automatically and so precisely, adapting itself so beautifully to accommodate all our diets.

After the stomach, the food passes into the small intestine where the majority of the digestion takes place. It is actually a long structure but so efficiently fitted in a small area with many folds which increases the surface area of absorption. Most of the nutrients get absorbed in the small intestine. The main function of the small intestine is absorption of nutrients. The complex products like carbohydrates and proteins are broken down into basic elements and absorbed. The nutrients that are absorbed are carried to the liver for further processing.

Then the food moves into the large intestine where mostly water absorption occurs. Then the food that cannot be absorbed like fiber is mixed with other waste products from the body and thrown out as waste matter.

This is just a basic explanation of digestion. But in the body it is such a complex, well-organized and adaptive mechanism.

Similar to the complex process of digestion, controlling the level of blood sugar involves an intricate mechanism. When we eat, the level of sugar in the blood increases because the food is broken down into glucose or sugar. Because blood reaches all parts of the body, it is very important to monitor a person's sugar level. Otherwise, many parts and functions of the body like the kidneys, eyes and nerves can be affected. This is what happens in people with diabetes.

Insulin, a hormone released by the pancreas which decreases the level of sugar in the blood, is important in regulating blood sugar levels when we eat food. This hormone helps protect us from blood sugar levels that are too high. If the blood sugar level drops too low, sugar stored in the liver is broken down into glucose by a hormone called glucagon that is also released by the pancreas. The glucose is then released into the blood stream and the blood sugar level increases.

The same pancreas which generates the insulin that reduces the blood sugar level also generates another hormone, glucagon, which raises the blood sugar level!

Every moment, the level of blood sugar is regulated so beautifully by the body sensing the level of blood sugar and activating the appropriate mechanism to maintain it in a safe range.

Intelligence of the brain

Take the example of the human brain. Such a mind-boggling intelligence operates inside a structure that is just about two fist sizes! To date, scientists around the world have not been able to replicate tasks that the brain seems to do so effortlessly.

A recent research report reported that ten linguists working full time for ten years to analyze the structure of the English language could not program a computer with the ability of a child that learns the language in the first five years of life.

A computer may be able to perform trillions of mathematical and logical operations in a second but it cannot perform the amazing array of parallel tasks that the brain performs every millionth of a second.

Intelligence of the heart

If you see, the body and the heart function in such beautiful synchronicity. The natural pacemaker in the heart sets off an electrical impulse every few seconds. This impulse creates an electromagnetic field, which is sent to the whole body. The field acts as a field of resonance where all the body cells tune in to each other. Because of this resonance, each cell not only does its own specialized function but also

If you eat with awareness, you will never feel the heaviness because you will never overeat.

adapts to the activity of its neighboring cells, so our body can function in a completely

integrated way.

Distributed Intelligence

The human body starts from a single cell which replicates and becomes about 250 different types of cells.

Imagine one cell transforms into so many different specialized cells that form the complex parts of the body! Not only do these cells do their specialized job, their very maintenance needs millions of things to be done in a second. And all their activities have to be coordinated for the body to function as a single organism. It is the best example of distributed intelligence.

Trusting the body intelligence

Just think, when our body can digest food, pump blood, adapt to the environment and at the same time perform a thousand other complicated tasks without help from outside, you have to accept that there is an intelligent energy driving it.

If you just reflect on this, you will realize there is something called body intelligence. But we don't see it because it goes on silently within us.

A small story:

Once a king went to an enlightened Zen master and asked him, 'I heard that you are an enlightened man and you radiate energy around you. You are always in bliss. What do you do?'

The Zen master replied, 'I eat when I eat and sleep when I sleep.'

You may ask, 'Don't we also do the same thing?'

Look into your own life. You will find that while you are eating you are thinking about all of your worries and problems. Your mind will be busy planning everything about work tomorrow or your vacation next week. You quickly eat your food because there is no time for eating. You don't really eat when you eat! When you eat, your being never feels the food. If you eat with awareness, you will never feel the heaviness because you will never overeat. Your body has its own intelligence to decide what food to take and how much. You can very clearly find out which food suits you and which does not if you eat with awareness. This itself is a great meditation.

In the same way, when you sleep, you never really relax your mind, you start analyzing all of the events that happened that day. Just try focusing on the present moment and falling asleep, that is enough.

The guaranteed way out of addictions

A real incident:

Once a young man came to me and asked me to help him stop smoking. I asked him how he picked up the habit in the first place. He said, once he had gone out with a group of friends who were all smokers.

He happened to meet his father on the road that day. Seeing him in the group, his father assumed that he too had been smoking. When he returned home, his father yelled at him, and refused to believe him when he said he was not smoking.

The boy said that the next day he smoked a whole pack of cigarettes just to spite his father! In that way he gradually got addicted.

When he asked me how to drop it, I told him, 'Don't drop it. Go ahead and smoke. But don't do it to prove anything to anybody. Don't do it to spite your father. And don't imagine that you have become mature and independent by

When we become conscious of what we are doing, many things drop on their own.

smoking. Every time you pick up a cigarette, do it silently. Be conscious of why you are smoking. Consciously feel the smoke entering your system. Be aware of how you hold the cigarette, how you put it in your mouth. You will realize on your own.'

After just a few days the boy returned to me. He said, 'Swamiji, I am not able to smoke anymore! Doing it consciously, I started wondering how I could send so much smoke into my system! Also I realized that smoking is not that important to me after all.'

Then he added something which made me very happy. He said, 'Swamiji, I realize now that I have been abusing my body all these days by pushing smoke into my system.'

When we become conscious of what we are doing, many things drop on their own. This is the only permanent solution. Of course it may take a few days to awaken the intelligence. During that time, the important thing is, not to lose hope and fall back on the borrowed intelligence that you have picked up from the society, from the moral codes set up by society. Have trust in the natural intelligence of your body, that's all.

There is no need to control the body at all because whatever we try to control will express itself in some other way. It will refuse to be controlled! The only thing needed on our part is awareness in every action that we do and the trust in our own natural intelligence. That itself will break the wall of conditioning that makes us do things unnatural to us and will allow us to live life consciously.

Every cell in your body has Intelligence

We have been taught that the center of our intelligence is in our brain. We think that we control the body through our brain. Science has all along been saying that the brain controls respiration, digestion, blood circulation, and all such activities of the body.

Now, cutting-edge research has given rise to a new field called epigenetics. One of the pioneers in this field, Dr. Bruce Lipton* , an eminent biologist, has been doing research in the field of epigenetics for over ten years. In his book, 'The Biology of Belief ', he states that our brain does not control our body. In fact, there is evidence of intelligence in every cell, even in the cell's membrane!

Recent research at Sandia National Laboratories, USA, supports cellular intelligence theory. Scientists there studied how cells responded to a harmful substance called an antigen that attacked the cells in the body. They concluded that even the cell membrane had a beautiful and complex structure to fight the antigen, and that the cell membrane was not as simple a structure as earlier believed.

Our body is not a simple centralized system of intelligence controlled by the brain. The human body is a highly evolved distributed system of intelligence beautifully and seamlessly orchestrated.