The Well-spring

Maharishi Ayur-Veda describes the lack of connection with the body's inner intelligence as the primary source of human suffering. In the ancient Ayurvedic texts, this condition is referred to as "the mistake of the intellect," or pragyaparadh. Pragyaparadh is mistaken perception that the ever-changing display we experience through our senses is all that there is; we do not perceive the underlying wholeness of life, the home of all the laws of nature.

It is as if we sailed out into the sea, looked out over the waves on the surface, and concluded that they comprised the total reality of the ocean -- without perceiving that there are unfathomably vast, silent depths beneath from which those waves spring.

The book I have just begun reading feels like contraband. Like Montag will be in at any moment to seize this text, whisk it away to the adjudicating 451 degrees. I feel as though what I'm reading is something that I wasn't supposed to read until ten years from now or so, like I've robbed the future, like I wheeled a crane up to Sisyphus and catapulted the boulder like it was a piece of ash. Running my finger along the spines of so many rows of books, what caused it to stop? And what caused my hand to investigate the book that my finger found rest upon? I think I feel a bit of kinship with what Mike said his experience was when reading For the New Intellectual, but on the other side of the pole. Precepts feeling very tenuous, should I really be reading this teacher's edition of the text I have been wading through of late [life]? My desire is to hoarde it away and keep it like a secret.