The whole purpose of intellect is to say “yes”. When you ask a question and you get the right answer, what happens inside you? “Yes.” If you say “no”, it means you didn’t get the answer. All right answers bring you to “yes”. The yes-mind. When you are in a yes-mind, no questions come. The purpose of questions is to bring you to a yes-mind.
This is buddhi yoga– the yoga of the intellect. It is not blind faith. It is the height of intelligence. You go to the height of intellect and then see there is something beyond it. That is transcending.
There are two systems. One says: “Don’t ask questions; just do what is said. The book says it. Follow it.” Another says: ask as many questions as you want, but don’t get stuck there. Go beyond intellect-experience it. Otherwise, you are like someone who goes to a restaurant, reads the menu again and again, but never eats, and then walks away hungry.
Our path is: go to the height of intellect, ask everything, but then go beyond experience.
Way back in the early 2000s, I was in Sweden. A famous journalist kept attending my talks. Once he said, “Gurudev, don’t beat around the bush. I have a straight question; give me a straight answer. Are you enlightened?” I looked at him and said, “No.” He said, “You are lying. You are not telling the truth.” If I say yes, then I must prove it. Why take that trouble? Better to say no and end it there. But he wouldn’t accept it.
Then something in him must have known he wouldn’t react like that. I told him, “Listen to your heart.” He still said, “No, you are lying.” Things you really need to know do not come only by question and answers. They come from a different sense, the sixth sense. You need to feel it.
The purpose of the intellect is to arrive at a deep yes. Ask every question, rise to the peak of understanding, and then go beyond it. True knowing is not in endless analysis but in experience, where the mind rests in a silent and unquestioning yes.
Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
