"Hello and welcome to another edition of Lectures Revisited, where I, a stutterer, practice my speech by saying the most iconic speeches of all time. And today's speech is by Ram Dass, one of the great Eastern philosophers and orators. I just love how he speaks because it's so from the soul. Today's speech is called “The Thinking Mind.” Let’s begin.

Speech Begins

So there's the critical one. The critical one is whether or not you are your thoughts. We grew up—some of us even grew up learning Latin in the old days—and we grew up with the statement “Cogito Ergo Sum,” therefore I am. It turns out that it would be more accurate to say, “I am, and I think.” Thinking is a power that you and I have. It allows us to symbolize, remember, plan, define ourselves, and know who we think we are. It's such an incredibly interesting and fascinating power.

There's a Chinese curse: “May you be born in a fascinating time.” I love it because you get lost in it. When you get lost in the power of thinking, you see what we can do with our thinking minds. Even this auditorium is a product of our thinking mind. All the handling of thought technology is a stepchild of our thinking minds' manifestations.

In fact, most of us live almost entirely within the projections of the thinking mind. You are living in a room that is square, and very few things in nature are square, but the thinking mind creates sharp, flat planes. We are eating food that has been thought through, modified, and prepared, thanks to the thinking mind.

We live very much in our minds. While the thinking mind is an exquisite power, I mean, we developed interesting things in terms of Darwinian evolution. We learned how to be upright bipedal creatures—that was a great advantage—and we learned the prehensile capacity of the thumb and index finger, so we can pick things up. Then we developed these big frontal lobes, which some of our old uncles don't have—from the eyebrows right back, it goes flat. We developed these big thinking machines that give us symbolic power, which sets us apart as a species. This thinking mind is incredibly powerful.

The Easterners say, “Don't get caught in the Siddhis” (S-I-D-D-H-I-S), which means the powers that you develop along the way. One of these powers is the intellect—the power to know you know. But it's beginning to dawn on us that there's a difference between knowledge and wisdom, because we're beginning to see a lot of people who know a lot of stuff, but are not very wise. You notice that? I mean, we have a lot of them in politics.

Henry Kissinger is a very knowledgeable man, but I rarely feel his sense of great wisdom. I'm not putting him down; he’s just another being like us. But I think what we have worshiped in a culture that worships the intellect is knowledgeable people rather than wise people. And there's a way in which you and I, in the way we are gathered here tonight, are in wisdom training. Wisdom has a certain innocence to it, and it's different from the intellect because it turns out that the intellect is only one way of knowing the world.

We think of it as the only computer program in town, and for years, in a kind of chauvinistic way, we said, ‘Well, tough-minded people, they’re really it.’ Then there are these wishy-washy people, very often women, who use intuition. Let’s just say, ‘How do you know that's going to happen?’ And she would say, ‘Intuition.’

This distinction between knowledge and wisdom is crucial, and as we explore the depths of what it means to truly understand, we begin to see that the intellect, while a magnificent tool, is not the end-all-be-all. It's one pathway, but not the only one. And as we delve deeper into this, we start to appreciate the various ways of knowing, beyond just the rational or the logical.

There’s a kind of knowing that comes from direct experience, from being fully present in the moment. This is the wisdom that doesn’t necessarily rely on facts or figures, but on a deep, intuitive understanding of the world and our place in it. It’s a wisdom that’s grounded in compassion, in empathy, and in a connection to something greater than ourselves.

As we navigate through life, it’s easy to get caught up in the pursuit of knowledge. We live in a society that places a high value on intellectual achievement, on being able to prove what we know through tests, degrees, and certifications. But in the process, we often lose sight of the importance of wisdom—the kind of wisdom that can’t be measured or quantified, but is felt in the heart and soul.

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