"It is a question of bridging the opposites, not putting them together in one place.

"Both are important, immensely important. Neither analysis can be discarded nor intuition. Discard analysis and you become outwardly poor, starved, unhealthy. And when one is outwardly poor, starved, unhealthy, how can he go inwards? It is impossible.

"The outward poverty prevents the inward journey. You are so obsessed with food, clothes, shelter, you don't have time and space to go in, to think about the higher things of life.

"In the Upanishads there is a beautiful story:

"Svetketu, a young man, came back from the university full of knowledge. He was a brilliant student, he had topped the university with all the medals and all the degrees that were possible, available. He came back home with great pride. His old father, Uddalak, looked at him and asked him a single question. He said to him, 'You have come full of knowledge, but do you know the knower? You have accumulated much information, your consciousness is full of borrowed wisdom – but what is this consciousness? Do you know who you are?'

"Svetketu said, 'But this question was never raised in the university. I have learned the Vedas, I have learned language, philosophy, poetry, literature, history, geography. I have learned all that was available in the university, but this was not a subject at all. You are asking a very strange question; nobody ever asked me in the university. It was not on the syllabus, it was not in my course.'

"Uddalak said, 'Do one thing: be on a fast for two weeks, then I will ask you something.'

"Svetketu wanted to show his knowledge, just a young man's desire. He must have dreamed that his father would be very happy. Although the father was saying, 'Wait for two weeks and fast,' he started talking about the ultimate, the absolute, the brahman.

"The father said, 'Wait two weeks, then we will discuss about brahman.'

"Two days' fast, three days' fast, four days' fast, and the father started asking him, 'What is brahman?' In the beginning he answered a little bit, recited what he had crammed, displayed. But by the end of the week he was so tired, so exhausted, so hungry, that when his father asked, 'What is brahman?' he said, 'Stop all this nonsense! I am hungry, I think only of food and you are asking me what brahman is."