Venanzio Ciampa: Nietzsche said that sometimes the more you dig in profundities, the more bad things you find.

Sri Chinmoy: In India, if you want to get a beautiful lotus, you have to step into the pond because the lotus grows under the water. If you step into the pond, your feet will sink into the mud. Now, what will you do? You will go into the pond, take the lotus and then clean off your feet.

If you want to take a rose from the garden, you cannot just take the flower. You also have to take the stem so that the rose will look beautiful. When you pick the stem, you find thorns. But you can remove the thorns and still keep the stem and the beautiful rose.

Venanzio Ciampa: But how does one have the knowledge to remove those thorns?

Sri Chinmoy: There is a difference between knowledge and wisdom. If you have wisdom, you can do anything. Wisdom does not come from the mind; it comes from the heart and the soul. From the mind comes intellectual reasoning. The mind’s greatest achievement is the intellect. But much deeper than the intellect is wisdom. Real wisdom comes from the soul’s light. Similarly, there is something called will, adamantine will. That will does not come from the mind; it comes from the heart, from the soul.

To human beings, wisdom means having studied the great philosophers or Keats and Byron and Shelley. I come from a poor Indian village. Someone will say, “Oh, he needs wisdom. Let him go to Oxford or Cambridge, and somebody there will give him wisdom.” But that wisdom is no wisdom. It is only jugglery of the mind. Real wisdom is in the heart.