Never Repress Emotion

Within this philosophy, so much is placed on cultivating your body, your mind, and your intellect.

And even the articulation that you have two inner equipments, a mind and an intellect, is a central practical contribution of this philosophy.

That you have a subtle equipment called the intellect to guide the mind.

And the mind should not be in control.

The mind is like a five-year-old child.

Beautiful, beautiful to have in the home.

But the intellect is like the adult in the room.

As amazing as it is to have all three of our daughters, six, three, and one in our household, I would not leave them home alone.

And they should not rule the roost.

And within this philosophy, one can get carried away and too much application emphasis on the intellect.

The majority of the episodes in this series within the Daily Vedantic is on cultivating, developing the intellect, or it's on concepts within the philosophy that need to be digested and applied with the intellect.

The intellect is that which discerns what should be done, how should it be done, when should it be done in any scenario in life.

quite the mastery if you can know what, how, and when anything should be done.

That's the ideal.

Another definition of the intellect is that is the capacity to see the end in the beginning.

And for someone with a developed intellect, they just make really great decisions where the end is awesome because they saw that end in the beginning and they knew what to decide.

It is this quality of discernment.

The mind is where our emotions are.

It's our feelings.

It is our preferences, our desires.

And within these feelings and preferences, the joy or sorrow we might feel the preference for heat over cold or cold over heat, and given life situations, our preferences for this work thing to go this certain way or this parenting thing to go a certain way or this relationship with one of our own parents to be a certain way, that is all mind stuff.

And like I said, mind is a beautiful, powerful thing, but it should not rule the household.

And in this delineation between the intellect and the mind, where the intellect should be in control, there can be a misinterpretation that the mind or emotions or preferences don't matter or they shouldn't matter, or worse, that they should be repressed.

Something that's said often at the ashram is, and Swami says this in so many lectures, that we must feel to understand, and we must understand what we feel.

There should be a conference between the head and the heart, the intellect and the mind.