07.15: Is our intelligence building a wall or a bridge?

We human beings have an intelligence more advanced than our nonhuman fellow beings. This developed intelligence enables us to think beyond the immediate issues that occupy the animal world – eating, sleeping, mating and defending – to the ultimate issues – the meaning and purpose of our existence, the source of creation, the ultimate goal of life, for example. Of course, these issues deal with a realm that is invisible and intangible, but that does not make these issues insubstantial or insignificant. In fact, those who consider these issues to be insubstantial and insignificant sentence themselves to an insubstantial and insignificant existence that is not much different from that of the animals, being devoted to mostly animalistic pleasures.

The Bhagavad-gita (7.15) calls such people by a curious name, mayayapaharita jnanah, those whose intelligence has been stolen by illusion. This Gita verse acknowledges that these people have intelligence, but illusion has stolen from them the awareness of the purpose of intelligence: to build a bridge that raises them from the animal level to the spiritual level.

For those of us who wish to fulfill the purpose of intelligence, Gita wisdom offers us a philosophical, logical and experiential sense of the world beyond. When we use our intelligence to comprehend and implement Gita wisdom, then our intelligence forms a bridge that takes us from the visible to the invisible, the material to the non-material, from the mundane to the divine. In that invisible, non-material, divine realm, our potential for personality and relationships blossoms fully in our loving connection with Krishna.