Meditation: A Vision of Life
Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived. – Osho
In Sanskrit, buddhi refers to the faculty of the mind responsible for discernment (judgmental) and reasoning. It is sharp in nature, an analytical part of us, that categorizes, calculates, plans, and makes sense of the world in this way. Buddhi is what enables us to solve problems, make decisions, and plan our lives. The modern term for the buddhi is intellect, and from now on, I will use the word intellect for the discussion. The best way to describe intellect is: a faculty or a part of us, a mechanism within us, that is capable of logic, critical thinking, and analysis.
Attachment to Intellect
Today, we are in the most scientifically advanced era in human history, and intellect is the cornerstone of this progress. Our entire society is built on science, technology, analysis, critical thinking, and logical reasoning. We have elevated intellect-buddhi to a near divine and god level status, believing that it can do anything; it can unlock the mysteries of existence. Science, logic, and critical thinking are celebrated as humanity’s great achievements. We have built a society that worships the mind’s ability to analyse and control. For many, the intellect is a badge of honor – a symbol of progress and power. Our whole education system is based on intellectual development; we send children into school so that they only develop their faculty of intellect, their buddhi. The intellect has a sharpness to it. It simply knows how to cut. Intellect wants to understand things, life, and people by cutting them into pieces, dissecting them. This is simply how the intellect functions. Story time;
A great young scientist, in the field of Chemistry, was on a walk with his girlfriend. He was a great scientist, one of the top in his field globally. They walked by beautiful flower plants. He never saw this kind of flower; it looks very overwhelmingly beautiful to him. So he wanted to understand it; he simply could not stop himself from trying to understand it. In this compulsion to understand the flower, he plucked a flower. His girlfriend thought he wanted to give it to her, and she smiled. But to her surprise, he simply put that flower in his bag. She got frustrated and asked, ‘What are you going to do about that flower?’ Without waiting for his answer, she said, ‘Whatever, I don’t want to know.’ The scientist took that to his lab at his university. He plucked its petals one by one. He conducted 100s of tests on that flower over the next 3 weeks, got a lot of data, and analysed it. Now he was very happy; he had finally understood the flower. He wrote a research paper on his findings, got a lot of applause and appreciation from his peers and colleagues. Now, after one month, his girlfriend was visiting him at his lab for lunch. She saw remnants of that flower one month ago, but she only saw small bits and pieces of it. She was still angry about it because he didn’t give it to her, so she asked What did you do with the flower. He told everything about it. She told him with frustration, ‘You are stupid; you wasted the flower. Now there is no flower anymore here.’
Did he really understand that beautiful flower? Did he really feel connected to the flower?
This story may sound funny or naive, but this is our day-to-day behaviour in this modern scientific world. This is the story of all of us. We take everything in life and dissect it to understand it. Today, we have the highest amount of information, knowledge, and words available, yet we are somehow missing life. We all know about psychology, mental health, and emotional health. We all read self-help books, and everyone has 10 different theories about everything in life. We label people: good people, bad people, right people, wrong people, introverts, extroverts, emotional, logical, traumatized, healthy. All we do is cut people into pieces in order to try to understand them. But what we do is we simply reduce their totality and complexity into different pieces, cut them, but never really understand them, never really experience them.
The problem I point out is not the intellect, as many would think reading this, the problem is attachment and worth attached to the intellect, almost like how the rich and poor men in my last blog story were attached to money. So seekers or readers may easily mistake the above story and my view, as I am criticizing the intellectual capability. No!! What I am criticizing is the attachment to the intellect.
How attachment feels like: It is like in the above story, how the young scientist could not help himself but pluck that flower to take it to the lab and cut it into pieces. This compulsiveness almost forced him to do it. It was out of his control. This attachment turns the intellect from a useful tool into a relentless master, dictating our every response to life experiences. We become slaves to dissection, always slicing experiences in order to control and understand them. Here are a few examples of how this attachment to intellect and its compulsion manifests in life and keeps us away from truly living life.
Imagine waking up in the middle of the night. You would like to sleep, but your mind starts to rush around: the things you have to do tomorrow, the conversations you had today, and some big problems in your life. In the middle of the night, even if you have no power to do anything over these things, your mind is continuously thinking, analyzing, and planning. At 3 AM, and you are lying down, yet the brain is fixated on solving these problems somehow. This is the attachment to intellect, which reflects in the compulsiveness of thinking.
You are feeling heavy or sad one day without any clear cause. Instead of simply being with these feelings, now your brain starts its dance. It demands answers. You grab your phone, scrolling through YouTube for the top reason for unexplained sadness, googling psychology articles, or even asking an AI like ChatGPT for some answers. Finally, you end up with 10 different reasons: ‘hormonal imbalance’, ‘unresolved trauma’, or ‘diet issues’. But this is not a genuine inquiry; rather, it is a compulsive way of the brain asking to know why I feel this way.
Finally, think about learning a new skill, say, swimming. You went to a few classes, but now, rather than practicing it consistently, you do something else. Your intellect is not interested in practicing it, but it wants to learn the right way to swim. You binge-watch tutorials on YouTube: ‘best style of swimming’, ‘10 common mistakes beginner makes in swimming’, ‘efficient biomechanics of swimming’. This is not a normal preparation for learning to swim, but it is rather a compulsion to learn about how, why, and what is the right way by your intellect. Weeks later, you might know everything about swimming intellectually, but you’ve not learnt it.
The attachment to intellect is this compulsiveness to always use it: to analyse, reason, and apply logic, no matter what the context. Yes, it is necessary to use the intellectual mind sometimes in life, but not always. It is as if your intellect has hijacked your life, running 24/7 on autopilot, convinced that it can solve everything in life. But just like the young scientist reduced the living flower to data points, we reduce people, experiences, and life to lifeless pieces of dissected ideas.
A Personal Story
A few years ago, I was a quintessential intellectual person. Science, mathematics, and philosophy were my go-to things. I have always been fascinated by understanding everything about the universe, people, things, ideas, and cultures. This passion developed during my childhood. Schooling, college, and university – all in the service of developing my intellectual capability. It made sense because everyone from childhood had told me that I should study hard, so I developed all my energy into developing the only thing that was needed to study hard – my intellect. Always at the top of my class. Of course, so many things had always been easy for me; understanding science, mathematics, and a great career. These are the gifts of my extremely developed intellect. But I want to talk about meditation here, so I will tell you how I stumbled upon meditation.
With everything in life, one thing had always bugged me. I simply never really felt connected to anybody. Forget about relationships, I didn’t really feel proper friendships. Something was always missing. Despite my ability to understand everything – philosophy, religion, psychology, science – I felt very hollow. I felt disconnected, lonely, not in fleeting moments but like a 24/7 ever-present feeling. Many things life showed me, and I started to see that something was missing. Something very, very fundamental to who I am, making me feel disconnected: disconnected from others, and disconnected from life itself.
One day, when I was 28, I was meditating on my balcony alone at night. Suddenly, something just happened, and I was blank for maybe 1 minute. I am not sure, but my mind was totally blank, totally silent. That was me for the first time truly stumbling upon meditation. Something triggered that day, something serious, something real. The next morning, I felt so connected to everything: trees, leaves, flowers, everything around me. I had this urge to talk to strangers as I was walking by. Pet dogs were roaming nearby, and I had always been afraid of dogs. And suddenly the fear was gone; it was not there anymore. Of course, after one day, that feeling of connectedness went away, and I was left with even more painful loneliness. It was more painful because I had now seen. I had seen that it is actually possible to feel connected to life.
Now, with my hyper intellectual mind, I wanted to figure things out. I started on another journey. I turned to my trusted intellect to solve the problems of loneliness, connection, relationships, meditation and love. I analyzed, read books, and reasoned my way through, believing logic could conquer anything. But what I discovered shook me to my core. I read books, listened to hundreds of lectures on meditation, with a pride in me that I am going to solve meditation. I would meditate almost daily, trying to reach that state again and again. Years passed, and I never really reached that state. The more I tried to figure it out, the more I failed. I was desperate to reach that state, but I failed.
The closer analogy would be love. Remember the first time you fell in love? It was effortless – your world felt sparkly, you didn’t need to know why or how it happened, it just did. You experienced something wonderful, beautiful, and magical connected to another person. But once it was gone, you were left with a vivid memory of it with a deep yearning to feel it again, yet no amount of analysis can re-create that magic. This is exactly meditation, without limited to one person but to everything around, and life itself.
This failure, this inability to solve meditation, to reach that state of being meditative, really shook me to my core. It was not a single moment of realization, but years and years of failure, and still it is an ongoing process for me. Very painful. Too vast to capture in this short post. My intellect, my greatest strength, is powerless against real problems of life. I had always believed there was no challenge my mind could not conquer, yet here I am. I was trying to understand life the way the scientist in my earlier story tried to understand the flower, by tearing it apart, only to lose its beauty in the process. However painful this process may be, I would not have it any other way either. Because I am discovering and seeing glimpses of my personality that I would have never imagined I would see. Experiencing life beyond compulsive intellectual pursuit is humbling, liberating, and opens up new dimensions of life. Now I can’t help but admire this quote from Osho:
Life’s problems that have answers are not really problems; they are simply nuances. Real problems of life have no answers, and one day you will have to accept this fact with celebration. -Osho
Disconnection and Loneliness
Over the past 50 years, humanity has made staggering scientific progress. Social media, instant worldwide communication, and 24/7 internet access have given us constant connectivity across the planet. Yet we are becoming increasingly lonely. Loneliness is slowly becoming an epidemic. I believe we will progress even more rapidly in the future due to Artificial Intelligence (AI), and it will drive us towards even more disconnection and loneliness.
Here’s something I’ve noticed: the more a society operates from logic, reasoning, and critical thinking, the more isolated people become. I’d go so far as to say that loneliness is a hallmark of an intellectual person. You might not think of yourself as an “intellectual,” but if you find yourself overanalyzing, constantly reasoning through life’s complexities, or seeking answers through logic alone, chasing answers with your mind, you’re operating from the intellectual mind. And that mind, when left unchecked, can create a barrier between you and others. A quick Google search will reveal countless studies and articles confirming this: people with high intellectual tendencies often equated with “intelligence” or “smartness” in our society, frequently struggle with loneliness, dating, and relationships. To explain how intellect actually creates loneliness would require a whole blog post, which is for another day. Here, I will leave this just as an observation of mine.
This trend is evident in the West. The society has embraced philosophy, psychology, therapy, and countless theories on attachment styles, the science of relationships, friendships, and connections. Here, people are dissecting human bonds into categories – secure, anxious, avoidant. Here, people are being put into boxes of traumatized and healed. Yet years pass by, the intellectual knowledge keeps growing, theories keep coming up, surveys keep piling up, yet loneliness keeps increasing. Now, slowly eastern societies like India, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia are becoming more scientifically oriented. They, too, will face such issues in the coming decades.
I am not condemning the intellect here. As someone who once lived, breathed logic, I know how intellectual people behave. They will immediately assume intellect is the problem. I aim to make you see how attached we are to intellect and the way we let intellect become our master instead of our tool. This over-reliance, this compulsive need to dissect every moment, is what traps us in loneliness, not the intellect itself. Intellect is very powerful and a great tool within us. But it is simply a tool, nothing more than that.
A Challenge that I Present
Here is a challenge I give you, if you are an intellectual person.
“Sit with yourself and stop your thoughts in your mind. Make your mind thoughtless, and thoughts of being thoughtless should not be there also. The mind should stop effortlessly by itself.”
The challenge seems simple. First, many will avoid it, saying it’s not for me, it’s stupid, simple, unnecessary, and a waste of time. However, if you decide to take on this challenge, your very foundation of life will tremble.
Why? Because it is something for the very first time, your intellectual mind will come across a problem that it can’t solve. You will try to stop your thoughts by thinking about stopping them – maybe you will tell yourself, ‘Don’t think just be quiet.’ The funny part is you are using your mind to tell your mind not to think, and that itself is a thought. You might manage a few seconds of silence when you sit alone, but soon enough, your mind will start running again. The real challenge isn’t just to pause your thoughts for a moment forcefully. It’s to let your mind stop completely, effortlessly, without forcing it or thinking about it. After practicing for a while, you will ask, ‘How do I do it?’
Who is asking this question? Your own intellectual mind is, in an effort to solve the challenge. I don’t have an answer. You will have to solve this challenge by yourself, wrestle with it, and see what happens.
But if this can happen to you, even for 30 seconds, you will not be the same person you were before those 30 seconds.
Meditation: A Technique
You might ask, “Ok I will sit for the challenge, but what do I do?” But be aware that it is your intellectual mind asking or craving a plan, a methodology, a path to follow. To ease into it, I will share the simplest meditation technique from Gautama Buddha’s The Dhammapada: “Love yourself and watch—today, tomorrow, always.”
It means turn your attention inward, and watch your thoughts with total awareness. Watch and notice every flicker of your mind, every worry, every thought that passes by. Not even a single thought should go unnoticed by you. Watching it is one part, now don’t judge that this thought is right and this thought is wrong. This non-judgmental (love) awareness(watch) is meditation as a process or technique. The difficult part is not to judge your most devilish, darkest thought as bad or your most angelic, beautiful thought as good. But if you practice this day after day, year after year, you’ll start to stumble upon moments of pure, effortless silence, a stillness that transforms you.
If you seriously take on this challenge, you will soon see that you can’t solve it. Years will pass by, you will keep trying, but you will fail again and again. Even the simple technique of “Love yourself and watch – today, tomorrow, always,’ the intellect can’t solve it. And definitely, the path to reaching absolute silence, effortlessly, the intellect can’t solve it. So your mind will keep on failing. It will be very painful to watch a part of your identity – the part that prides itself on solving everything crumble to its helplessness. But through this failure, you will slowly accept the very simple fact that not all the things in life need to be solved or understood. Out of this, you feel a sense of letting go, a surrender, and slowly your mind starts to slow down on its own.
It is so beautiful when your attachment to intellect starts to loosen. I have experienced this, and this is an ongoing process for me. It is so painful yet beautiful. When the mind slowly becomes a tool, not a master. I can’t put into words what it’s like when your hyperactive mind starts to quiet effortlessly, especially for someone like me who used to live in their head. The 25-year-old me would demand, ‘Tell me what it is like to live with less active intellect, and if only I can understand it, then maybe I will give meditation a try.’ It’s like trying to describe sugar to someone who’s never tasted anything sweet.
We are now creating something outside ourselves that mirrors our inner condition: Artificial Intelligence. AI is nothing but the externalization of our own intellect, multiplied a thousand times. Just as we are trapped in compulsive thinking, we are now building machines that think compulsively for us. The danger is not that AI will replace us, but that it will magnify our attachment to intellect globally. Our obsession with logic, data, and control is being coded into silicon. And just as the intellect within us makes us lonely and disconnected, the AI outside us will only accelerate this disconnection on a worldwide scale.
The next 20-30 years will be a dangerous time. People are imagining and planning for robots to help human beings, AI partners, interacting with chatbots, utilizing AI models, and consulting AI psychologists, among many other applications. The future of art, painting, photography, and graphic design is uncertain. The future technology will challenge us in ways we can’t even imagine right now. Our education system is so focused on intellectual development. This is why, sadly, we have reduced human beings, including children, to an intellect, rather than a living, energetic being. This is why we are even capable of imagining replacing people with AI. But dangerous as the future may be, I am hopeful that it will challenge our intellect-driven society to its core. Meditation will become the cornerstone of spiritual growth, guiding us to rediscover what we are beyond our intellectual capabilities.
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