Vedic Wisdom - Why Humans Alone are Having the Intellect

Vedic Wisdom

Why Humans Alone are Having the Intellect

This is a question that has been bothering many Rishis, seekers, gurus. This in any case was one of the enquiries of the Vedic Rishis.

It is a natural inquiry because humans have come in to the world after a long time from the creation of the earth.

There are 84 lac species on the earth and the last to arrive, as of now, are the humans. They are the most powerful specie on earth as of now.

But for the one faculty – the intellect and discriminative faculty, we could not have achieved all that we have achieved.

So they started the search as usual with all seriousness and sincerity as to why and how the humans alone got the intellect aspect.

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Many reasons occurred to them. But they are such rationalists that they will not accept anything, ‘Neti.. neti.. not this...not this...’ was their attitude

They wanted only that what is real- always real-the satya- the eternal - the always correct truth..

They saw many animals like Dolphins, Chimpanzees, Elephants all having intelligence as much as man has. What they miss is the intellect.

That is why they are afraid of us and that is why they are tamed by us.

Our Rishis as usual looked all around for the right answer. Studied these animals .They could notice the fear in them - The fear of death.

But our Rishis also realized that humans also have the same fear of death. But they inquired further.

Is everything gone with death? They found that plants die, but the same plant comes back – in a new form. Same thing with animals and men also. It made them to think – what does it mean.

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They realized that every being contains all about it in its seed and before it departs it has ensured that it has left its seeds on the earth and the process of birth and death is continuous.

They realized therefore that on death of a being the world does not end and even the being has left it’s off springs to carry forward the lineage .

So there is a principle of immortality in mortality; concept of birth in death. In as much as birth is phenomenal, death is also phenomenal. How much birth is temporal, death is also equally temporal. A birth has an inbuilt death and a death has an inbuilt birth.....‘punarapi jananam, punarapi maranam’

They realized that the nature simply refurbishes itself with fresh outer cover – inner substance remaining the same.

With this hypothesis when they studied the nature they realized that truly everything is immortal – starting from cluster of galaxies to atom in its ‘essence’ – i.e., the principle of ‘consciousness’; but the encasing body perishes and new body comes in.

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Ultimately everything is only the energy of consciousness and it is only a change in form and name and not in substance.

Now they realized that while humans have grasped this concept the animals have not.

With this wisdom their inquiry as to why human alone are having intellect had to be turned on its head – which meant the question has to be why the other equally qualified animals have not evolved to have intellect – the discriminative faculty.

With the change in the approach the wisdom fell into place. Since these animals have understood only the mortal part of the matter-and not the immortal part of the spirit, they could never break away from the fear of death and always being worried about it; whereas humans have on the contrary given up that over obsession with death -in fact on the contrary they have even forgotten that this body is mortal; they live the life as if they are bodily eternal.

They had to be repeatedly advised about the fact that the body is mortal and not to run after it.That is

why when Yaksha asked Yudhishthira, what in his opinion is that the great wonder in the world, yudhishthira replied that despite seeing death every day, the humans living as if they are eternal.

This understanding of the immortality would have matured definitely over a period of time from the neanderthal man onwards until it reached the say stone age man.

Then this understanding would have altered their thinking process which could have then got coded in the genes and passed on until it reached the time of Vedic seekers.

So when they started the deep enquiry on this question of intellect they realized the knowledge of the immortality of the spirit lead to the dawn of this wisdom whereas the animals could not cross that critical pass since for them when they die the world dies.

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To put it simply since the animals had the perennial fear of death they could not cross the ‘annamaya kosha’- the body consciousness and whereas the man understood the eternity principle and so he could reach the ‘vijnyanamaya kosha’- the faculty of intellect.

But we must understand that beyond this there is another sheath – anandamaya kosha- the faculty of eternal bliss. This we have not attained yet. The objective of Vedas and Upanishads is only to make humans to attain that .

This is called the original thinking – what we call as lateral or out of box thinking. This is an example of the deep wisdom and non compromising inquiring capabilities of the Vedic seers.

This article is a snippet from the Book Vedic Wisdom, Authored by Pandit Sri Rama Sharma. Vedic Wisdom is available online at www.giri.in and across Giri Trading Agency Private Limited, A chain of Speciality Stores dealing in all kinds of products needed in Indian Culture and Tradition.