You have other intelligences.

The below article is a transcript and extension of the speech I gave as the keynote speaker at the graduation ceremony of the Cresta School of Management, Science and Arts, Mysore – 2024 graduating class.

I’ve been given a really important job today, which is to say something that will connect to all of you at a juncture when your adulthood is really supposed to begin. I’m going to bring in the energy of the topic that’s closest to my heart: finding your purpose as an individual, becoming a unique person who does your best at something only you can do. A person who expresses and shares the wisdom you’ve acquired through your ancestors, your experiences, your innate nature, tastes, and ways of thinking.

Everyone around you has probably told you how big your life should be, what it should look like, and where it should be built. But how often does anyone ask us what kind of life we actually want to live? Have you ever asked yourself what your true purpose is? What the universe wants you to do and where it’s trying to fit you? Not the meaning of life itself, but what do you want yours to mean? How will you—uniquely you—leave a mark on this world that benefits your community, your country, and beyond?

A large portion of my job is helping people discover their true purpose in every aspect of their lives—as professionals, spouses, friends, and members of their community. A common theme I see is that they were guided to'make it' by following paths set by elders—parents, teachers, mentors—who believed these paths would lead to stability and happiness. However, the world today is very different from the one our parents or grandparents grew up in. Our ancestors faced hardships from colonialism, partition, and a newly liberalised economy, and this shaped their approach to life. Though well-intentioned, their advice comes from a world the youngsters will never experience. And the older we get, the harder it becomes to change our view of the world. For many of us, the prospect of living a life that we don’t find meaningful, that doesn’t make use of our unique gifts, and that doesn't help us love the weird parts of ourselves feels like too big a sacrifice to make.

Which is why many of these clients eventually realise they’ve lost touch with themselves. They often tell me things like:

• 'I don't know who I am anymore. Every day I do things the old me wouldn’t do, and I no longer feel connected.'

• 'It feels like my body is a robot—going to work, making money, coming home, and watching TV.'

• 'I know in my gut I’m on the wrong path. The money is good, but what’s the point if I have to drink myself to sleep every night because my heart is breaking?'

I’ve dedicated my life to studying how important feelings, sensations, intuitions, and instincts in the body are. I have found that they might even be more important than thinking. While our neocortex is a relatively recent system evolutionarily, the other intelligences in our body have billions more years of integrated evolution. These are guides; they give us real-time feedback on our experience of life and how we’re being affected by it. They show us how our bodies, which are profoundly intelligent, are responding to what is going on. For those of you who have some experience with data science, this feedback is the data, and our thoughts are the statistical models we run on them. If you ignore how you feel, you are discounting the most powerful samples in your data set. How can you expect your model to function accurately?

I have also found that there is a consciousness to nature—she operates intentionally and teleologically. She makes wise, patient choices to build complex systems that interact with each other in interesting and creative ways, and the recursive intelligences in these systems interact with each other to create something joyful, something beautiful. Unfortunately, we’ve lost our connection to the emergent wisdom of our great mother.

But she does speak to us, using our bodies. Our bodies tell us when we’re somewhere we don’t belong, as if the magnet of goodness within us is in distress. If we look deeply enough, we can sense that we’re in the wrong place and that the path we’re on will only lead to more suffering. But the structures and people around us make it so difficult for us to go in the direction our hearts are pulled to, which will really take us to the newness nature wants to create. We are taught to discount the heart completely, completely disconnected from the ancient knowing within our bodies that the heart is where all of our intelligences integrate with each other. It is where what is to the highest good is stored—whether we can act according to it or not, I have come to find that somehow we must involve it.

I used to be a computer science student at the 4th-best university in the world. Around the same time, I had also started to practice meditation extensively. With time and practice, I started to see the different intelligences in my body speak to me. I saw confident and irrefutable knowledge that my reasoning mind couldn’t observe on its own. I saw that the reasoning mind lives in its own world and functions as much in its virtual reality as it needs to be comfortable—that I had never fully introduced mine to the real world.

As I began to trust my embodied wisdom, I started to realise that what I’m trying to build technologically would not benefit human beings on a personal level. This was so undeniable that it broke my heart, because at this point the costs were so sunk that it was impossible for me to study something else. I discounted this wisdom, listened to reason, and tried to soldier on.

But the truth never budged on its stance: It showed me that I grew up with a knack for intuitively knowing what was happening in the inner worlds of my loved ones. I supported them through their most difficult times in a way that was difficult to fathom for someone of... my "level of experience." This brought me immense joy; I knew I was of benefit to this world by doing something that I was gifted at. But when it came to my career, I chose computer science because it was the more profitable path. I wanted the money; I wanted the prestige. I wanted to give my parents the pride of saying that their son works in Silicon Valley. I wasn’t a bad coder; I could have probably made it there, but my soul never wanted to go there. My soul wanted to help people.

So something so far beyond myself that I don’t know what to name it intervened; it showed me I had lost the will to continue living on this path. My whole body shut down until I listened to it say, “You are making the greatest mistake of your life. You have been shown your purpose, and you’re refusing to see it. And then something insane happened, which to this day I call divine intervention: I had a gym accident that led to me losing the use of my right arm. Because medical costs are practically more expensive in the US than university is, and because my mother’s intuition knew that things would only get worse if I returned... I moved back to India.

And in the complete silence and desolation of losing everything I’d built, I actually felt so free. My entire body, without even asking for my mind’s permission, pulled me toward studying psychology. There could be no other reason why all this happened. Although what I was experiencing was looked at like a complete failure by most people, within myself, the war had stopped.

Today, the people I would have worked with in Silicon Valley are my clients, who share their heartbreak with me about how unhappy they are with the world they are creating through their work and that they want out. But the money is too good; this is what they have spent most of their lives “aspiring” for. How can I destroy and abandon something I believed I wanted? They know there’s more to this than money, and the consequences of their work won’t benefit the world; that the promise of contentment was a scam, but there are so many sunk costs now. I wish for all of you to never experience this suffering and make your way through it if you do.

As Indians, we’re now being told to become self-reliant, to reclaim our heritage as leaders of the world in knowledge and capital, and to build a modern world that’s still informed by indigenous wisdom. And there is no other culture that has so systematically studied the inner world of a human psyche.

We have known for thousands of years that meditation and introspection are how to get to your own truth instead of relying on external input because, most of the time, we know the answers; we’re just too scared to listen to them. I’m on some Master Oogway shit here, but there’s a reason we love him. Your grandpa wasn’t just acting old when he told you to do pranayama. It works, and there’s brain scans proving it does. These “ancient” but eternal practices show us that there are deeper instincts, intuitions, and visions that show the confused reasoning mind what nature is constantly communicating; meditating and working through your emotions helps you access that knowledge. The intelligence of life will never stop providing feedback. Our job, through the training of our awareness, is to find where we fit, what to do, and how to flow with the river we belong in. In doing so, we benefit ourselves while benefiting everyone else. This is why the best decisions often come from knowing in our bones what is right without being able to explain why.

But the world we live in today is so driven towards resources, "practicality," and logical reasoning that we have completely become disconnected from these deeper senses, these senses that don’t use language as a tool. In my journey with meditation, I saw that all of our contemplative traditions, whether it is Upanishadic Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sufism, or mystical Christianity, stress observing our inner world to discover the truth. They advise us to shut off our senses and only listen to inner consciousness, because that is where our truest self speaks to us. The European colonial project reprogrammed our minds to believe that their way of looking at the world is correct and ours is wrong. They put reason and logic above all else and, over time, convinced us that we are just our brains. But my friends, don’t take my word for this; investigate this yourself; you are not your mind. Your mind is an instrument you use to understand the world. And its logic is not the only form of intelligence that you have access to. We must, as a fundamental practice, find our inner voices—that voice that is more knowing than speaking, truth without thought. It shows up as a gut feeling, an aching in the chest, or a calm understanding. All this happens in your body, but we are taught to only trust our minds and not take the rest of our intelligence seriously. Your body is the wisest person you know; it’s been evolving for billions of years. In psychology, we talk about a bodymind, where every part of your body has its own intelligence.

Your experience of being alive and your knowledge of your world come from brains not just in your head but also in your heart, gut, pelvis, in your connective tissue, brains, ALL OF IT. And these brains can’t speak, but they can make you ill, depressed, anxious, and fill you with self-hatred to show you when you are not on the right path. When something feels wrong from the depths of your body, something is wrong. And there are consequences to not listening to this guidance.

For many of us, this misalignment from our path shows up as overthinking, depression, anxiety, drug use, and, at worst, suicidal ideation and execution. We can’t bear the feeling that something is deeply wrong, and we never know how to fix it because nobody taught us to look within.

For some, it shows up as confusion and desires to break away from the norm, which causes a great deal of friction in the family. They are told that they lack clarity, it’s too risky, you’re spoilt with choices, and you’re being wrongly influenced by your friends and social media. This feeling of misalignment, when shared, is invalidated; shut down.

And I speak to you now, parents—I understand how scary it is. If you weren’t lucky enough to find fulfilment and happiness in the work you ended up in, you still had so few choices and so many responsibilities that you learnt to ignore how you were feeling and carry on. Even if you felt misaligned, you were happy enough raising your children and showing up for your family with the success you got. But I invite you all to truly accept that your children don’t live in the same world you do and don’t have your bodyminds. They are literally the new generation—they are the next stage in human evolution, and their bodyminds are more complex. They carry all of your wisdom and intelligence, but also your unconscious memories, traumas, fears, and unfulfilled dreams of complete joy. And their intuition, guided by nature, or God, or whatever you want to call it, is trying to guide them to be of service and create something in a way that only they can, even if it has nothing to do with what you expected of them. I understand that you might feel lost about how to support your children in creating their own path through the woods. But I request you from the bottom of my heart: when this dissatisfaction arises, help them look within, and don’t force them back on the path that is making them feel like they’re losing their souls. Can you have the courage to trust that maybe they’re not stupid and childish, they’re actually feeling something you can’t imagine, that it is true, that nature is pushing the new generation to evolve in a whole new way that may not make sense to you but is profoundly necessary? Can you trust that the same intelligence that created our entire natural world also created them and works within them—that your job is to help them connect to it?

And now to you, students, who’ve just finished a major milestone and are about to see who you’ll become and how you succeed: It’s okay if you don’t have the clarity you wish you had. You have come a long way, and you should be so proud of yourselves. All the knowledge you have amassed through your education and through lived experiences gives you the resources you need to find your path, however unfamiliar it may seem. But this clarity can only come through if you learn how to connect to your inner voice, so it can guide you on how this education can be harnessed. To find this connection, you will have to temporarily set aside all of the external advice you’re receiving and fully focus your attention on the internal sensory experience in your body—especially your heart and gut. This non-thinking intelligence somehow knows how to suggest the right direction for you in this moment because it’s always in conversation with the flow of life. So sit down, close your eyes, focus your attention on your chest and belly, and just BREATHE. Feel the sensations in your body, and allow your body to process them. Spend time tuning out of all the reason, and instead listen to quiet advice from your own heart. In our culture and in our poetry, the intelligence of the heart was always put first. Trust that when you truly find this path and start to walk it with authenticity, success will come because the Earth is rewarding you for helping her do her job and taking care of her children. Find the parts of who you are that make you unique and most benefit those around you and your society. And when you truly know which way to go, you will find the path automatically clears out for you, and things almost magically start to fall into place. I met my therapy mentor and my now business partner in music class—a Greek lady who was my only classmate. Once you trust your heart in seemingly illogical decisions, that’s when the magic begins. So set aside the ego-based ideals of chasing social status and bank balance, and instead try and surrender to where your deeper intelligence wants you to be. Let your uniqueness, your weirdness, be of benefit to your tribe. Follow your soul’s guidance by learning to connect to it every day through doing things you love that help you feel your emotions. For me, it’s meditation and singing. For you it may be sport, painting, journaling, like screw what it is, but something that makes you feel like a creator, connected to CREATION. If you don’t listen to its advice, your body-mind-spirit will be forced to make you ill to show you you’re off track, and then you’ll have to give me a call.

All I know is that 7 years after I trusted those experiences and switched from a track that I knew I would be burnt out and unhappy in, not a single second I spend working feels like work, and the understanding I bring the people who seek my help makes me fall asleep with a smile. Being your own boss really helps that specific thing, and I wish, from the bottom of my heart, for every one of you to feel the joy in your work that I feel in mine. You all deserve that as much as I do.

Now, to you—the teachers of this new generation—you may have the hardest job of all because we, as a society, entrust you with the responsibility for our children's success. Your ability to educate them is crucial, as this education is invaluable for driving change in the external world. However, before the Industrial Revolution and colonisation shifted schooling toward learning for the purpose of generating capital, the role of a guru in this country was equally to guide children in understanding their internal worlds, helping them grasp the true nature of their own being. The systems and structures that have evolved in India’s modernity make this difficult for you, and perhaps nobody helped you with your internal environment either. But will you allow me to request that you be psychologists as well? To validate your students by helping them process and manage these internal environments, to respect the challenges and flow through them. You can help them tremendously by simply acknowledging that these inner challenges are as important as the challenges they may face in the subjects you teach them. They need you for much more than the subject, and they cannot connect to the subject without connecting to themselves, you know what I mean? They can’t love what they learn if they can’t love themselves, and they can’t love themselves if they don’t know what they’re doing here in life. These are real challenges for the next generation of the human mind. We can’t speak to it like it’s crazy! Mother Nature is telling us it’s time to answer these questions now.

India is going to be one of the main economic powers of the next global power cycle. I want for all of us, especially your generation of graduates, to set aside the senses of separation that have held us back for hundreds of years and truly experience yourself in your bodies as Indians. Guided by your own intuition of what role you have to play, can I request that we all set aside the differences of language, state, religion, caste, background, all of that other made-up bullshit that makes us forget that we’re humans on the same team, and truly build this country together so that we can all enjoy the development we accomplished as a team? It’s time for you all to wake up to the deepest colonial crime of them all: how they divided and conquered. Why are we still playing the coloniser’s game by continuing to see each other as enemies when we’re all Indians? Let’s get out there and make this the greatest country this world has ever seen—TOGETHER. I wish for each and every one of us to find our true path and create a wonderful future for our nation, guided by compassion, care, community, and the comfort of all, not just ourselves.

Congratulations on graduating! I’m so proud of you all for making it here.