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Head meets heart in Hong Kong
A brief meeting between a rationalist and a mystic leads to contemplation of human potential. Daleena Samarajiwa reports

The people
It was a hasty meeting between ultra-rationalist Tony Buzan and his polar opposite Sri Swami Vidyanand in a suite of a Hong Kong hotel. The swami had 45 minutes to spare. Buzan, on a brief visit, was equally busy. Ordinarily, it would have been enough time for two people to talk. But this was no ordinary meeting. The two had very different ways of communicating. Ask Swami Vidyanand a question and he closes his eyes and retreats into silence before giving a cryptic reply. Ask Buzan a question and his answer is precise, backed by scientific evidence. If we were to search for metaphors, Tony would represent the head, intellect, and the Swami the heart, intuition.

Tony Buzan, founder of the international mental literacy movement, was on a brief visit to Hong Kong last October for a book signing at bookstore Dymocks, which had stocked his latest title, Multiple Intelligences, and to open the local branch of Buzan Centres Asia. He was also holding a workshop at the Hong Kong Management Association. Swami Vidyanand had a heavy schedule of yoga and meditation at a local yoga school.

Throughout his life, Buzan has explored the potential of the human brain in relation to the way it learns, retains and recalls information. Unwilling to accept the norm that human beings use only about 10 percent of the brain, he dedicated his life to learning how to tap the unused 90 percent.

Born in London, Buzan was fascinated by the brain even in childhood. In primary school, he discovered that the brain, like a muscle, could be exercised to improve performance. At 13, unhappy with a speed reading score of 213 words a minute, he trained his eyes to scan text more quickly, increasing the score to 400. He began serious research into the brain at university, where he earned double honours degrees in Psychology, English, Mathematics and General Sciences. Struggling with information overload, he searched the library for ways to manage learning. He found it of little use. So, he began to play with his notes and developed the now-famous, non-linear note-taking system known as Mind Mapping. He also mastered mnemonics, the memory system of ancient Greece and developed his own method of speed reading. The BBC published his first book, Use Your Head, more than 25 years ago. It was the first of five BBC titles with sales topping three million across 100 countries. Buzan went on to author 82 books, published in 50 countries in 20 languages.

Buzan's surprisingly simple system has been adopted by organizations, universities and schools around the world. He has also used it to successfully coach "impossible learners". His international lecture circuit is extensive. At 60+, he coaches the British Olympic Rowing Team and the British Olympic Chess Squad, and holds the world's highest "creativity IQ". He also co-founded an Olympics for the Brain, the Mind Sports Olympiad.

Swami Vidyanand (Swamiji) is the son of a respected Brahmin priest, the late Yoga Acharya Sri Harihar Goswami, founder of the yoga mandir in his hometown, Datiya, one of India's 17 sacred centres of tantra. The eldest son, he broke tradition by refusing to follow in his father's footsteps, opting to forge his own yogic path. His father was a Bhakti yogi, master of devotional yoga. At 14, Vidya, his given name, had already earned a reputation for his knowledge of the Vedas. Seated next to his father, he would talk to the devotees who flocked to the mandir. But Vidya was frustrated. "I was talking about a supreme consciousness, the ultimate goal of yoga, without having experienced it. I yearned to experience it."

Vidya's father took him to Datiya Wale Swami, a legendary tantric yogi. The master, visited by thousands each month, was delighted to have a student who only wanted to experience supreme consciousness. He invited the boy to understudy him. Vidya diligently visited the yogi daily, sitting and observing him attend to visitors, most of who sought help to solve problems.

The education took place psychically. Often, neither master nor student exchanged a word. Gradually, there was a shift of energy from master to student. At the end of the apprenticeship, the master declared that his young protégée had achieved self mastery, bestowed on him the title 'Swami' and added 'anand' to his name. He advised the young man to master other forms of yoga, notably hatha yoga, which promotes physical strength. Six years of study under various masters followed. He spent a year learning hatha yoga from Parmahansa Sri Satyananda, founder of the Bihar School of Yoga, where he received the title Sri, indicative that he had reached an even higher level of self-realization. He also travelled intermittently to the Himalayas where he learnt various yogic techniques from enlightened anonymous holy men there. He sat in the freezing cold to conquer temperature and in graveyards to conquer fear. He became capable of some superhuman feats.

Years later, when teaching yoga at the Hyatt Regency in Delhi, he noticed that a student, "a simple girl", emanated an aura purer than that of his teachers. After class, he asked the woman who her teacher was. She said she did not have one but visited daily a shrine that contained relics of the Indian sage Sri Aurobindo and his spiritual consort, Mother Mira. He too began to visit the shrine daily, sometimes meditating beside it for hours. Gradually, he achieved the state of divine consciousness. Mother Mira became the inspiration of his future work. As a voluntary yoga teacher at the ashram, where he taught for 15 years, he began to develop his own signature system, Integrated Transformational Yoga, capable of bringing about rapid results in practitioners. A simple sequence of exercises, breathing techniques and chants, his system allows practitioners to bypass the long years of practice that students of classical yoga must follow to achieve self-mastery.

The meeting
Swamiji walked into Buzan's suite at the hotel. Short of time, we began a quick photo-shoot. Soon, the immaculate Buzan had assumed the classic Rodin Thinker pose on a stool with Swamiji in the meditative lotus position at his feet. It was a perfect 'head meets heart' setting. When the shoot ended, the two began to talk, still seated in Head meets Heart position. In halting English, Swamiji explained his views. It seemed that the two shared common ground.

Buzan's latest books veer away from intellect towards the emotional, sexual, physical and spiritual intelligences. Swamiji's philosophy encompasses the physical, emotional, mental, psychic and spiritual intelligences of the body's subtle energy field, a dimension of consciousness recognized in the yogic sciences. And although Buzan approaches the subject using knowledge and reason while Swamiji searches his psyche for the answers, Buzan often allows himself to be guided by the heart and Swamiji turns to books to confirm his insights.

"Your brain is more powerful than the fastest supercomputer man has ever built. It is composed of millions of cells, each an amazingly complex being capable of independent intelligence. Each contains thousands of points that can instantly connect to neighbouring cells, and the number of patterns of thought that can flow through your brain is greater than the number of atoms in over a hundred universes like ours," Buzan says.

Buzan describes his system as the instruction manual of the brain, knowledge he terms mental literacy. "We pour billions of dollars worldwide into enhancing our mastery of verbal, numerical and other forms of general and business literacy, while ignoring the most basic and important alphabet of them all - the alphabet of the human brain," he said. Mental literacy, knowledge of how to make the best use of the brain, will provide unlimited ability to learn well into the senior years.

Swamiji works with the body's psycho-energetic intelligences, intuition. The seven main subtle energy centres, known in the Vedic sciences as the chakras, are situated along the spine. "They are capable of immense intelligence at five levels: physical, emotional, mental, psychic and spiritual. If the chakras are functioning, we become very intuitive at each level and are guided in the right way. On a physical level, for example, they can help us discern whether the food we are about to eat is good or bad, or the words we hear are sincere. Intuition is a wonderful guide."

Swamiji says all individuals are born with strong intuitive abilities that are progressively blunted by unhealthy lifestyles. His system aims to simultaneously achieve results in all five levels and in this way, differs from other yogic systems that may improve one or two levels while neglecting the rest.

"The energy centres are blocked by the time the individual reaches adulthood. On a physical level, unused calories from overeating, for example, block the flow of energy from the earth chakra which governs physical health, causing heaviness and sluggishness. Unexpressed emotions accumulate in the emotional chakra causing imbalances like excessive anger. These blockages affect natural wisdom. If all the chakras are clear, the individual is intuitively conscious of what is best and is centred."

The sharing
Buzan grew tired of sitting in the Thinker position and settled on the floor. He commented that the world was too focussed on negativity. When words failed him, Swamiji resorted to sharing his system of yoga. "Come," he told Buzan. "Now, 10 minutes of chanting." The sound of chants filled the room. Swamiji's goal is to awaken individuals to their own source of pure energy, a resource available to all, but hardly used because of the importance placed on intellect.

"Intellect is associated with ego and is the biggest obstacle to realization of the intuitive self, the closest one can get to being one's true self," he says. Buzan recalled his own spiritual awakening. "While at university, I had hardened my views on the supremacy of logic and the weakness of spirituality and emotion. I relished a good intellectual argument. Imagine my delight when a frail middle-aged lady rang my doorbell one day and announced that she had come to save my soul," he recalls.

He set about proving her wrong. When she returned with senior missionaries, he gleefully locked horns with them and succeeded in devastating the woman and those she brought with her. Despite the victory, Buzan could not get the memory of the woman's distraught face out of his mind.

"I realized then that there is more to intelligence than logic, words, numbers," he said."Learned knowledge is important," says Swamiji. "However, true wisdom comes not from the head but the very centre of the heart. In the vedic sciences, we learn that the heart chakra is the most powerful chakra. You have to follow your heart, and use your head to support it."

There is growing global awareness of this imbalance. "Increasingly, people in affluent societies are growing tired of the shallowness of their materialistic lives and are searching for a new set of values by which to live... In recent times, and for the first time in history (in the West), more people seem to be moving from the big cities to the suburbs, and further away because they feel they are losing touch with their souls," says Buzan.

The parting
The meeting ended and we moved the furniture back into place. Swamiji and Buzan bade each other a warm goodbye. Between the two, head and heart, there was the promise of the awesome potential that we carry. We can be Einsteins or magicians if we wish. Why aren't we? As the two men may say, search both your heart and head for the answer.

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