The four grades of mind

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Question: Acharya Ji, what is the most important lesson in Spiritual Wisdom? How to understand the mind of a commoner? How to understand a Spiritual mind? How to understand a scientific mind? What are the challenges faced in Spiritual journey?

Acharya Prashant:

One of the key lessons in spiritual wisdom — is to keep imagination apart from facts, is to not take your ‘personal world’, as ‘the’ world.

It is already bad enough that we take ‘the factual world’, ‘the world’ to be real. And it would become far worse if we start taking even our ‘personal world’, ‘the imaginary world’ to be real.

The mark of the commoner is — he lives in his personal world, and attributes to it the finality of Truth.

The mark of the scientist is that he does not live in his world, he does not care about subjective interpretations of the world, he lives fully in facts. So his Science is fully objective, and does not contain trace of personal subjectivity. The scientist is obviously an advancement over the common psyche.

And then the mark of the Spiritual mind is that — it does not lend veracity even to the factual world.