Hyper Intellectual Spirituality: Highlands of Unfulfillment

A lot of truth seekers these days have a kind of Attention Deficit Disorder. If they’re reading a book, listening to a lecture, or having a conversation, and they hear an idea they recognize as familiar, they lose interest. “Oh yeah. Got that already.” They go off somewhere else, mentally, and don’t come back until they happen to pick up on something they recognize as “new,” later in the book, lecture, or conversation.

This withdrawal is not a total lack of openness; it’s a selective openness to that which is most valued: KNOWLEDGE. As a result of having a supreme value on ever-increasing knowledge, an intellectual seeker will always look for more facts, more approaches; a fresh teaching; a new metaphor. It all adds to the wealth of knowing — and presumably, at least — to understanding, comprehension. The value on knowledge, and the search for more and more understanding, accounts for the proliferation of so many new books, new paths, teachings, techniques — and it accounts, too, for the popularity of pundit-style teachers and their offerings.

In that process, people’s categorization scheme becomes more and more detailed. For example: When they hear an idea, they want to correlate it to everything else. “Oh, yes, I get that. The Sufis have a similar concept, only they have it with this other twist, which I think they got from the Hopis, which is similar to what they got from Meyer Baba, which he described as ________, and it is not so different from what he got from the Koran.”

Knowledge can certainly be eminently useful. Understanding can be truly liberating — especially when an old, limited understanding gives way to a new and brighter one. Who hasn’t hoped to help a friend by explaining their problem to them? We all have, many times. But haven’t we also discovered, many times, that understanding their problem doesn’t help them unless they also do something to solve it?

Real fulfillment is in the currents of life, not in the intellectual categorization/“comprehension” of life. How much of what life is can even be intellectually comprehended? If it could be comprehended, would it be what it is?

Life, by design, is nutritive. What if you understood life well, but let life in poorly? That would be like eating one-tenth of what you need, physically, to survive, and then saying, “That’s enough. I’m good. I got it,” while pushing away your Food. It’s like a person who declines a refill on coffee, saying, “I’m good. No thanks.” But here we have a hungry man who receives a loaf of bread, reads the wrapper, and then throws out the bread. “Oh yeah. I’ve had this before.” In that case, one would eventually just die of malnutrition. That’s a problem punditism, as a pattern, entails. It’s a systematic way of dying of malnutrition due to the fact that you already “got” the idea.  

The point is, people are not sustained by ideas. It’s the energy and the love and attention that are contained in an idea that our life depends on. So we feel sorrowful, out of it, upset, ripped off, under-nourished, because we habitually dismiss the true nutrition that comes our way, because we already “got” the concept. No wonder we stay hungry for new ideas. Because we never get what is truly capable of satisfying us.

What’s truly new is to go deep into something, to commit one’s life to something, and to get what it’s worth out of it as a result. That is a whole different experience.

Here’s to good nutrition, folks! Consider it integral.