(hopefully correct deduction). The surveyor is our experienced sage,
and his technical reference books are the scriptures. In this way, the
three kinds of proof ideally corroborate one another.
The faculty you are using here is intelligence (buddhi), which we
saw in the past chapter to be more subtle than the thinking, sensorial
brain (manas). It is concerned with facts and reason, not impressions
and interpretations. It is inherent in every aspect of our being but tends
to remain dormant, so our first step is to tap it and awaken it.
The practice of asana brings intelligence to the surface of the cel
lular body through stretching and to the physiological body through
maintaining the asana. Once awakened, the body can reveal its dy
namic aspect, its ability to discriminate. Here the body is providing
subjective factual truth while the mind is generating imaginative ideas.
It is the precise, thorough measuring and adjustment of a pose, bring
ing balance, stability, and equal extension everywhere that hones this
faculty of discrimination. Discrimination is a weighing process, be
longing to the world of duality. When what is wrong is discarded, what
is left must be correct. As intelligence expands in consciousness, then
ego and mind contract to their proper proportions. They no longer rule
the roost, but serve intelligence. Memory, especially, as we have seen,
is now harnessed to the freedom-seeking intelligence, not the bondage
seeking mind.
Prajna-Insight and IntuitionThere is a further stage. Spiritual intelligence, which is true wisdom,
dawns only when discrimination ends. Wisdom does not function in
duality. It perceives only oneness. It does not discard the wrong; it sees
and feels only the right. When we are buying a house, we need to use
the logical, discriminating intelligence. A politician, however high his
motives, must choose and decide in the relative and temporal world.
Spiritual wisdom, on the other hand, does not decide, it knows. It is
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