Chapter 5 - Innovation
Day 10
When your mind is at peace, your intellect becomes sharp. If your mind is clogged with a million worries or desires or sorrows, you are unable to achieve anything.
Some calmness in the mind, some pleasantness, is essential for the mind to function at its best. Do you know why children are so sharp? It is because they are happy.
As you grow up and as your happiness graph declines, that is when your ability to learn and imbibe also declines. You smile less.
It is spirituality that makes you smile, that allows you to keep the smile that nobody can take away from you, and not just when you greet somebody, but a genuine, lasting smile that springs from the depth of your mind, your heart.
That is a pleasant mind. The intellect becomes sharper, then it gets re-established. If you are not coordinated within yourself.
If you are not integrated within, if body, mind, breath, awareness, life, is haphazard, then neither is there any intellectual growth, nor is there harnessed emotion.
And in the absence of both these, there cannot be peace. When there is no peace, there is no happiness. This is what Lord Krishna says to Arjuna right in the battlefield.
Life itself is a battlefield. Every day there is something or the other that we need to battle with. And how you can be centred is all that you need to worry about.
The rest innovation, will spring from it. Take a pause to see what is happening in your mind, right at this moment. See whether your attention is directed at me or at what I am saying.
Now, focus on yourself for a bit. So far I was the scenery, you were the seer. Now turn your attention from the scenery to the seer.
When you turn away from everything on the outside, instead focusing on your self, that is what centredness is. This is getting back to the seer is what happens when the mind settles down.
Yoga is not just exercise, it is getting away from the object to the subject. And it happens just like that, in a minute. Taking your mind inward, that is extremely energising.
And that is meditation. Even if we close our eyes, we do not shut our mind. Our mind is constantly flying all over the place, thinking about what all we did or all that we still want to do.
Meditation is this distilled moment. It is taking attention from what I have done or what I want to do to what I am. This exercise will enhance our intelligence, our capabilities.
We were once in a school in Dharavi, I had just inaugurated the opening of the school. Seeing the poor kids from the Dharavi slum, I thought, many of them will become so brilliant that they will go to IIT to study.
In our country, we have this technology, we have these resources to enhance our memory, our innovation, our intelligence.
Our country can lead the world in these aspects. It is so unfortunate that we do not value what we have. Especially those who have studied more than others around them have, they think they know a lot.
Real education is to make you aware that the more you know, the more you will be baffled, the more you will say, "I do not know, I know very little".
Innovation has taught us a lot. Yet we know very little about our universe. What we see is only a tiny part, a rather insignificant part of what we do not know.
You must have, at some point, seen how people fish in water. (As businessmen, you do know how to fish in troubled waters) So when you go fishing, what do you notice?
The moment you take that body (fish) out of the water, there is no life left in it. That fish struggles for a few seconds and then collapses.
The eyes are still there, looking at you with a blank stare, but with no life in them. When under water, this very fish was moving, expressing life.
So now tell me, where is the life of the fish to be found? Is it in the body or in the water? That's a question for you. If its life is in the water, then that means its body is only exhibiting signs of that life.
The same is true for all our human bodies. If your human body is taken out of this atmosphere, 200 miles above this planet earth, it will shrink like the fish. Your eyes too would still be there, staring, but there would be no life in them.
So now where is your life contained? Is it in this shell-like body or is it in the air that is all around you? You simply have to sit and reflect on this.
You will realise that your life is not really within this body, rather it is all over, all around you. This also explains the phenomenon of phantom limbs.
How many of you know that there is a medical phenomenon called phantom limbs? When a person gets his arm or leg amputated, he does not have that limb afterwards.
But that person still feels pain and itching in the place where his arm or leg once was. Have you heard about this?
Even after the limb is lost, there is this sensation of pain in that part where there is no leg at all anymore. Doctors are unable to explain why this happens.
It's in the mind, in the brain. When such a person does meditation, he realises that he is made up of not just his body.
But also the spirit, and upon this realisation, the phantom limb problem disappears. This has been witnessed in thousands of cases.
