Birthday of an Indian Mathematician Shakuntala Devi

Born on 4 November 1929, Shakuntala Devi was an Indian mathematician and author, notably known as the ‘Human Computer’ – agreeing with her unprecedented abilities to solve hefty mathematical problems in mere seconds. She was a child prodigy who became the sole breadwinner of her family at the tender age of 6 after the University of Mysore inducted her to display her extraordinary arithmetic talent. Devi’s intellect flew her to London in the mid-1940s where she continued to dazzle scholars and scientists – gaining more and more opportunities toward fame.

Devi was posthumously granted a world record in The Guinness Book of World Records in 2020 for solving 13-digit multiplications in less than half a minute. Outside of her mathematical ambitions, she was a prolific writer and an advocate of homosexuality.  Her book “The World of Homosexuals” is considered the first study on homosexuality in India. Devi also wrote books titled Astrology for You, In the Wonderland of Numbers, and Puzzles to Puzzle You.

Osho mentioned Devi while speaking about intellect in His discourse – “There is a woman alive in India, Shakuntala, who has toured all around the world and has been exposed to the greatest mathematicians. She is only a matriculate and knows nothing of higher mathematics, but even Albert Einstein was puzzled by her. You just write any figure, howsoever big it is doesn’t matter; tell her to multiply it by as big a figure as you want — and before you have finished writing that second figure down, the answer is there. Einstein said, “If I had done it, it would have taken at least three hours.”

But what is happening to this woman? She knows nothing about it. She says, “Just simply looking at the figures that have to be multiplied….” All that happens to her is a kind of silence; in that silence, figures start coming up, and she starts speaking, “Write down this figure… I don’t know how it comes.” It seems from birth she has had a very sharp intelligence so that within a flicker of the eye something happens in her mind. And this is not the only case, there have been others.

… …

Intellect can be sharpened; there are ways to sharpen it. Modern psychology is trying to measure it. I say don’t be foolish, don’t waste time in measuring it — what is there to measure? The average person remains at the mental age of thirteen; he may be seventy but his mental age remains thirteen, and he uses five to seven percent of his intelligence…. Now why waste time in finding more accurate methods to measure it? Why not use methods which can sharpen the intellect? That is what I have been teaching you.

If you doubt, your intellect will be sharpened. If you believe, your intellect will get rusted, it will start gathering dust: you are not using it. Doubt is bound to sharpen it, for a fundamental reason: you cannot remain at ease with doubt. You have to do something about it; you have to find the answer. Till you find the answer the doubt is going to harass you, nag you — and that’s the way doubt sharpens your intellect.”

Osho Says……

When your unconscious and conscious meet because there is nothing repressed in the unconscious — and that is the moment of their meeting and their merger. At that very moment another great opportunity opens up for you because you are no longer involved with the lower; your whole energy is available for the higher. You are in the middle, the conscious mind.

But because the unconscious is there, you remain involved in repressing it, you go on repressing it. It is not a question that once you have repressed it you are finished with it; you have to repress it constantly, because it is coming up again and again. It is just like bouncing a ball; you hit it and it comes back to you. The greater force you put into hitting it, the greater is the force with which it comes towards you. The same is the situation with instincts; you repress them, and the more energy you put in repressing, the more energy they will have coming back to you. From where can they get energy? It is your energy. But when you are completely free from the unconscious and its involvements, it is clean and silent; then your whole energy is available.

Energy has a fundamental principle about it: it cannot remain static, it has to move. Movement is its nature. It is not a thing that you put somewhere and it remains there. No, it has to move — it is life. So when there is no reason to move downwards, it has only one way to move — upwards. There is nowhere else to go. It starts hitting your superconscious, and just its hit to the superconscious is so pleasant and such a joy that all your sexual orgasms simply pale.

You cannot imagine it because it is not a quantitative difference such that I can tell you that it is ten thousand times greater in quantity. The difference is of quality.

So there is no way to imagine it. How to compare it to your sexual orgasm? But that is the only thing in your life through which something higher can be indicated. When your energy starts hitting your upper world, of which you were not even aware up to now there is a constant showering of joy. The sexual orgasm is so momentary that by the time you know it is there, it is gone. You only remember it in memory; you don’t really realize when it is there. Because of this momentariness you become more and more addicted to it, because you remember there was something, something great was happening, so, “Let us go into it again, let us go into it again.” But there is no way…Before it comes — you know it is coming because the bell starts ringing in your head. It is really a bell which starts ringing in your head: it is coming. You know that it is coming… you know that it is gone. The bell has stopped, it is not ringing any more, and you look like a fool! Between the ringing of the bell and the stopping of the bell, you look like a fool. Perhaps man feels more ashamed; that’s why after making love he simply turns and goes to sleep. Woman is not that much ashamed for the simple reason that she is not an active partner; the man looks foolish because he is the active partner.

Just the energy touching your higher level of consciousness, the superconscious — just the touch, and there is a shower of joy which continues. Slowly the energy goes on hitting and makes its way to the center of the superconsciousness. You have nothing to do: your work is finished when you have stopped repressing and you have cleaned your unconscious. Then you have nothing to do; then all that has to be done is done by your energy. And when you reach the center a new faculty starts functioning in you which is intuition. At the center of the unconscious is instinct. At the center of the conscious is intellect. At the center of the superconscious is intuition. Instinct makes you do things, forces you to do things even against your will. Intellect helps you to find ways if you want to do a certain thing, or to find ways if you don’t want to do a certain thing. Intellect’s function is to find a way.

If you want to go with the instinct, intellect will find a way.

If you are a so-called religious person, a pseudo-religious person, and you want to go against your instinct, intellect will find a way. They may be strange ways, but intellect is at your service: whatever you want it will do. It is not in favor of or against anything, it is simply at your disposal. If a man is sane he will use his intellect to help his unconscious be fulfilled. The sooner it is fulfilled the better, so that you are free from it. Fulfillment means freedom from it. If you are some kind of crackpot, Catholic, Protestant, any kind — there are all sorts of crackpots available in the world. You can choose what kind of crackpot you want to be: Hindu, Mohammedan, Jaina, Buddhist — all kinds of varieties are available. You cannot say, “The variety I want is not available,” you cannot say that. In thousands of years man has created almost every single variety of crackpot. You can choose, you can have your choice; but whatever you choose it is the same.

Nobody has told you how to use intellect to fulfill your unconscious, your nature, your biology, your chemistry. They are yours. What does it matter whether it is chemistry or biology or physiology? They are part of you and nature never gives anything without reason. Fulfill it, and its fulfillment is going to make a path for the higher potential. All religious people are hung up with the lowest part of their being — that’s why they look so sad and so guilty. They cannot rejoice. Jesus goes on saying to these people, “Rejoice,” and on the other hand he goes on saying to them, “Remember hell.” He is creating a dilemma for people, showing them the way to hell — the way to hell is to fulfill your nature and the way to heaven is to go against your nature. But to go against your nature creates hell here on earth.

I want to create paradise here, now. Why postpone such a good thing? Things which are not worth your attention you can postpone — but paradise? I am not ready to postpone it for tomorrow or for the next second. You can have it here and now. All that you need is a clean unconscious: fulfilled, contented, biology settles; chemistry settles and gives you all the energy that was involved in those planes. The energy shoots upwards by itself, and it stops only at the very center of your superconscious mind. And there intuition starts functioning. What is intuition? you have asked. Intuition is in some ways like instinct, in some ways absolutely unlike instinct; in some ways like intellect, in other ways absolutely against intellect. So you will have to understand, because it is the subtlest thing in you. Intuition is like instinct because you cannot do anything about it. It is part of your consciousness, just as instinct is part of your body. You cannot do anything about your instinct and you cannot do anything about your intuition. But just as you can allow your instincts to be fulfilled, you can allow and give total freedom to your intuition to be fulfilled. And you will be surprised at what kinds of powers you have been carrying within you. Intuition can give you answers for ultimate questions — not verbally but existentially. You need not ask, What is truth? Instinct won’t hear, it is deaf. Intellect will hear but it can only philosophize; it is blind, it can’t see. Intuition is a seer, it has eyes. It sees the truth — there is no question of thinking about it.

Instinct and intuition are both independent of you. Instinct is in the power of nature, of unconscious nature, and intuition is in the hands of the superconscious universe, the consciousness that surrounds the whole universe, the oceanic consciousness of which we are just small islands — or better, icebergs, because we can melt into it and become one with it.

In some ways intuition is exactly opposite to instinct. Instinct always leads you to the other; its fulfillment is always dependent on something other than you. Intuition leads you only to yourself. It has no dependence, no need for the other; hence its beauty, its freedom and independence. Intuition is an exalted state needing nothing. It is so full of itself that there is no space for anything else. In some way intuition is like intellect because it is intelligence.

Intellect and intelligence are similar at least in appearance, but only in appearance. The intellectual person is not necessarily intelligent and the intelligent person is not necessarily intellectual. You can find a farmer so intelligent that even a very great professor, a very great intellectual, will look a pygmy in front of him…I have watched it, meeting thousands of people, that mostly, intellectual people are not intelligent because they don’t have to be intelligent; their intellect, their knowledge is enough. But a man who has no knowledge, no intellect and no education has to find some intelligence within himself; he cannot look outside. And because he has to depend on intelligence, intelligence starts growing. So intuition has something similar to intellect but it is not intellectual. It is intelligence.

The functioning of intellect and intelligence is totally different. Intellect functions through steps, step by step. It has a procedure, a methodology. If you are doing a question in mathematics then there are steps to be followed. In India there is a woman, Shakuntala, who is still alive and who has been around the world, in almost all the universities, exhibiting her intuition. She is not a mathematician, she is not even much educated — just a matriculate. Even when Albert Einstein was alive she was giving her demonstration in front of him. And her demonstration was strange. She would sit with a chalk in her hand before the board: you would ask any kind of question about mathematics or arithmetic, and you would not have even finished the question and she would have started writing the answer.

Albert Einstein gave her a certificate — she showed the certificate to me when I was in Madras where she lives. She showed me all her certificates, and the one from Albert Einstein says, “I asked this woman a question which I take three hours to solve because I have to follow a whole method; I cannot just jump from the question to the answer. I know that nobody can do it in less time than I can, and that is three hours. Others may take even six hours or more, but I can do it in three hours because I have done it before. But the whole procedure has to be followed. If you miss even a single step….” The figures were so big that it took the whole board for her to write the answer. And before he had even finished the question, she started writing the answer.

He was puzzled, absolutely puzzled because it was impossible. He asked, “How do you do it?”

She said, “I don’t know how I do it — it simply happens. You ask me and figures start appearing before my eyes, somewhere inside. I can see 1, 2, 3, and I just go on writing.”

That woman was born with her intuition functioning, but I felt really sad for her because she became just an exhibition. Nobody cared that a woman who is born with intuition functioning can become enlightened very easily. She is just standing on the border; one step and she becomes the ultimate in consciousness. But she is not aware because this is just some freak of nature…Intuition functions in a quantum leap. It has no methodological procedure, it simply sees things. It has eyes to see. It sees things which you have never even thought of as things — for example, love. You have never thought of it as a thing. But a man of intuition can see whether there is love in you or not, whether there is trust in you or not, whether there is doubt in you or not. He can see them as if these are things. In my religion intuition holds the highest place. That’s where I am trying to push you.

An unclean unconscious is hindering you. Clean it; and the way to clean it is to satisfy it, to satisfy it so much that it starts telling you, “Please stop! It is more than I needed.” Only leave it then. And with that, your intellect is filled with such a fresh flow of energy that it turns into intelligence. Then the energy goes on rising and opens the doors of intuition. Then you can see things which are not visible to your physical eyes, things which are not even things. Love is not a thing, truth is not a thing, trust is not a thing, but they are realities — much more real than your things. But they are realities only for intuition, they are existential. And once your intuition starts functioning, you are for the first time really a man.

With the unconscious you are animal. With the conscious you are no longer animal. With the superconscious you are man.

I love to quote a Baul mystic, Chandidas, because that man, in a simple statement, has condensed my whole religion: Sabar upar manus satya; tahar upar nahin. ‘Above all is the truth of man, and above that there is nothing’. This man, Chandidas, must have been an authentically religious man. He is denying God, he is denying anything above human flowering: Sabar upar ‘above all, above everything’; Manus satya ‘the truth of man’; Tahar upar nahin ‘and beyond that I have traveled long — there is nothing’.

Once you have reached to your human potential in its total flowering, you have arrived home.

Source:

This is an excerpt from the transcript of a public discourse by Osho in the Lao Tzu Grove.

Discourse series: From Misery to Enlightenment

Chapter #4

Chapter titles: Above all, the truth of man – beyond that, nothing

References:

Osho has spoken on scientists and mathematicians like Aristotle, Chamberlain, Copernicus, Darwin, Descartes, Eddington, Edison, Einstein, Euclid, Galileo, Leibnitz, Kepler, Newton, Ptolemy, Pythagoras, Ramanujan, Rutherford and many others in His discourses. Some of these can be referred to in the following books/discourses:

1. What Is, Is, What Ain’t, Ain’t
2. One Seed Makes the Whole Earth Green
3. Sufis: People on the Path Vol.1-2
4. The Sun Rises in the Evening
5. The Empty Boat
6. Dang Dang Doko Dang
7. Beyond Psychology
8. Zarathustra, the laughing prophet
9. From Personality to Individuality
10. From Ignorance to Innocence
11. Beyond Enlightenment
12. The Golden Future
13. Philosophia Perennis, Vol 1, 2