What is the role of the intelligence in the metaphor of the mind as the software?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
I talked about how to manage the voice of the mind inside, but I will not talk much about the intelligence. See, different metaphors have different purposes. So, consider for example, the soul, the body, the car metaphor.
In the body as a car metaphor, the soul is considered to be the driver. So here, the purpose of this metaphor is simply to illustrate that there is something beyond the physical level of reality. Now, if you go to the chariot body metaphor, in that, the soul becomes the passenger, not the driver.
The driver is the intelligence. The chariot body metaphor is not meant to just talk about how there is a soul beyond the body. Chariot body metaphor’s purpose is to talk about how the soul interacts with the body.
Its focus is to illustrate the mechanism by which the soul and the body interact with each other. So, we could say at the level of the software and the interface, there is both the mind and the intelligence. Now, the metaphor which I used of the hardware, the software and the user.
This is just a contemporary metaphor which relates with our experience much more. How many of us regularly go in a chariot and use a chariot here? Very rarely, isn’t it? So, this is something which you can easily relate with. Now, in the software itself, if you see, the body is physical reality, the mind is subtle reality, and the soul is spiritual reality.
So, just like the hardware is something physically tangible, the software is not physically tangible, but still it’s real. The user is a different category of existence. So, the word mind is sometimes used generically to refer to the whole subtle level of reality.
So, matter, mind and consciousness. So, in this case, the mind refers to the subtle level of reality. The difference between the mind, intelligence and ego, it is more functional than structural.
That means, if you consider earth, water, fire, air, they are made of different natures. But the mind, intelligence and ego, all three are subtle. Consider, if I am using a computer, I have an operating system, then I have some program that I have installed, and maybe there is some virus which is infected.
Now, all three are software. But the way they act is different. The operating system can create the basic system or interface by a particular program that are there.
These are installed programs. They customize the software for a particular purpose that we want. And the viruses work in a negative way.
So, similarly, you could say that now, in this case, from a structural point of view, there is no difference between these various softwares. It’s from a functional point of view. So, similarly, in the mind, intelligence and ego, we could say the ego is like the basic operating system.
It’s a rough analogy. The intelligence is like the program that we have installed for doing what we want to do. But all the other unwanted programs that are installed, like the virus, the viruses are like the mind.
So, now, again, as I said, Krishna also says the mind can be our friend. So, it’s not that Krishna uses all of these at the same time. That means, in the third chapter when Krishna is talking about the hierarchy inside us, he talks about It’s about the body and the senses.
About the senses is the mind. About the mind is the intelligence. About the intelligence is the soul problem.
Here he doesn’t talk about the ego. Why? Because in this particular analysis, that is not relevant. He’s talking about how the mind and senses distort us and the intelligence we can use to control it.
So, each metaphor has its particular purpose. So, when I was talking about the metaphor today, I was basically, my focus was on understanding that there is a subtle level of reality. And that subtle level of reality distorts our perception.
Now, just as when a virus infects my computer, the virus is software. If I want to remove the virus, I have to get an antivirus program, which is also software. But it is functionally different.
rather than saying, earlier I said it’s a very rough metaphor to call the mind like a virus, because the mind also has positive impressions within it. So, we could say that the negative impressions at the subtle level, they are like the virus. And whatever positivity, positive impressions, positive instructions, positive directions, we get in the subtle body, that is like the intelligence.
That is like the antivirus program. So, from a functional perspective, we can differentiate between the mind and intelligence. But for this particular metaphor, my purpose entirely was to talk about how there is a subtle level of reality, which distorts our perception.
And the whole talk, as I said, its purpose was to nourish our intelligence. So, who is going to identify that the mind is doing like this? That is going to be intelligence. Who is going to say, this is not this important, let me focus on practicing bhakti.
That is the intelligence. Who is going to say, okay, instead of hearing the mind, hear the voice of guru. That is the intelligence.
So, it is at the software level, there is the corrupting software, and there is also the correcting software. So, we could broadly characterize the corrupting software to be the mind, and the correcting software to be the intelligence. But because the mind also has good things within it.
That is why, I just used the mind generically over here, to refer to the subtle level of reality. But the intelligence is, we could say, the part of the software that can correct the corruption within the software.