 A question about the role of thinking in spiritual progress, role of philosophy, because there's an idea which I find very commonly amongst modern-day gurus which I don't find in pre-modern Indian sources. By profession I'm a Sanskrit scholar and I used to teach Sanskrit in Harvard University and now I'm a professor of Indian philosophy here. And what I don't find in any of the Indian darshanists is this idea that is commonly repeated these days about forget about your brain, your brain is irrelevant. I find it in say Zen Buddhism, so some forms of Buddhism that developed after Buddhism left India. But in Indian Buddhism it's there's a very high price put on, high value put on thinking clearly. So do you have any comments about that? The idea that thinking is useless in the spiritual quest has absolutely no basis in spiritual experience. In fact if you look at the various layers of consciousness that you yourself can experience in a normal day actually, one would be your physical material experience. One would be your emotional body, your emotional experience. One equally is your conceptual experience. And then moving on to your transformative experience, in other words your creative, that part of your consciousness that is open and able to create. And we could move upward but we can stop there for the moment. Each of these layers of consciousness or these abilities or these functions has to be perfected by the spiritual aspirant. In other words when you think, you think clearly. When you emote, you emote to depths. When you're aware of the material consciousness, of the materiality of your body, you're fully aware in all cellular consciousness. So to create a sort of a space where thinking has no meaning, leaves you actually in what I call a stupid state, statements like, I merged with the truth, therefore it's my body doing what it does, not me. This is when thinking has been relegated to a sort of a negative stage and everything else around it, let's say experiences of the cosmos, cosmic experiences, are treated as something to aspire to. So very clearly when one is on a path of self-realization and self-realization is not an idea in a book. It's an actual real thing that happens as you tune into the source within to your soul, to the antaratman. As you tune into that, you circumvent ego and the more you're tuned in with source, the clearer your thinking becomes. You're able to speak clearly. You're able to enunciate clearly. You're able to describe clearly. And you're able to not do that when not required. So this is a sort of a mishmash neo-advaith in spirituality which has spread in the subcontinent in the last hundred years mainly and from there naturally to the rest of the world and then come back in even greater force. Any spiritual aspirant who is in touch with source and not lost in a cosmic blur, a nebulous cosmic blur, will per force begin to think clearly, speak clearly. It'll come automatically. Even if you don't have language, the one opposite, the one sitting opposite you will grasp what you're saying with the minimal language you have at your disposal because there's clarity in thought. Thought and language, as you very well know, are related. But you will still be able to express beyond the limitations of language in such a way that the other one grasps what you're saying. So clarity of thought is actually one of the first signs that a person is on the path of Self-realization. Do you think, nevertheless, that there's some grain of truth that has led to this disparaging of thinking, that there are some circumstances or the thinking can be used in a way that's completely non-productive and that completely misses the point and people maybe sometimes get lost too much in some kind of thinking process that is completely unhelpful? Yes, absolutely. I mean, thinking is should be seen as a tool and not as a given, a tool you pick up for use and put down and that process of distinguishing between these two ways of thinking, thinking as a tool and thinking as a given, happens through that Self-realization process where the focus is on the soul actually, on the Antaratman, on the master of your being, on actually surrendering, on tuning into that master and being able to distinguish between the ego in action and the truth. In order to do that, you have to use thinking. There has to be an eye over there, an identity of some sort that does that thinking and also thinks and distinguishes between the two, discerns between the two and then decides what to take. So when thinking is used in that way, it leads actually to clearer thinking, less thinking and thinking as a tool. When it is not used in that way, it basically becomes the extended arm of the ego, moving the thinker away from the truth. So once you set out on that actual path to the Self, your thinking itself begins to appear when required. So there is no need to sit and fight those thoughts and be battling with all that stuff because the more you fight it, the stronger it becomes, rather than to use it to move inward. So certainly when thinking is not used in the right way or in the way that leads you to Self-realization, it stands in the way and becomes an instrument of the ego where a professor like yourself might, and I'm saying might, not does, but might assume that because of the ability to speak those beautiful sentences or to think those amazing thoughts that there is also realization. That's when the ego is taking over the system, convincing it that it knows when actually what it has is a string of thoughts and not a realization. So that battle is always there and especially for those who are trained thinkers. They are the ones who are most endangered, and they are the ones who have to let go of that of the ego thinking and move into the truth thinking. It's a challenge of course because even when I listen to you speak or ask your question, it can become mesmerizing because it's so beautiful how it's placed and there is substance behind it. Now when that substance is tuned to Self, source or Self is a simple thing actually and then a lot of that can be left behind in that tuning in. So certainly thinking can stand in the way also.