"My Intellect Has Come to a Halt"

Have you ever looked up at the night sky and felt so overwhelmed with wonder that your questions had no words? What if the most profound form of prayer isn’t an answer but a question?

There is 20th century literary work that asks this very question. Akash na Ghadnar is a poem written by Kavi Dula Bhaya Kaag, lovingly known as Kag Bapu. I recently had the pleasure of witnessing this poem being sung by Hardik Dave at his Shabad event. The fundamental question asked in this poem, is less of a question and more of a statement toward the cosmic.

The repeating stanza in the poem mournfully states -

એ જાણવા જોવા તણી દિલ ઝંખના ખટકી રહી
બ્રહ્માંડ માં ભટકી રહી અંતે મતિ અટકી રહી

Translation:

To know this, to see this, a longing stayed in my heart. It searched through the cosmos, but my intellect came to a halt.

The poem compares things of greater significance with small-scale metaphors. Like who created the home of the one who made the sky? Or how big would be the well from which the furrow of the ocean is filled? Or where is the potter who turns the wheel which made this earth?

Kag Bapu keeps asking the same question with different words. Where is he? What does he do? There is a repeating pattern of order and duality. Everything is in order. The rise and fall of the sun and moon, the poison of snakes, the creation of animals, the herding of cows, the falling of rain. Every single thing is decided and its order is fixed.

The force talked about is non-judgemental, impartial, beyond our understanding. It does good, and it does bad, but in a decided, solid manner. In the end, he says that the same selfish force also created humans. The fundamental statement is turned on itself. While the force was everything I mentioned before, when it created humans, it became selfish. It gave us consciousness, a sense of ego, and put us into the worst position we could have had. We spend our whole lives longing to understand creation and our purpose in life, all because the creator could not give us the same natural order that he gave to other beings.

The rest of the creation simply exists. Humanity longs. We long for meaning, for connection, for answers to the very questions Kag Bapu is asking. This longing, this endless search, is the divine burden placed upon us. The “selfishness” of the Creator, in this poetic sense, was the desire to create a being that could, in turn, seek Him out.

He gave us the power of creation, the power to understand our own self, maybe because he wanted to see someone in his own image. Or not, I don’t know why. But now we roam this world trying to figure out the unattainable. This reminds me a quote from Rust Cohle, a character from the TV show True Detective,

“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.”

He sees consciousness as a tragic evolutionary bug. His solution is logical but bleak: if the game is rigged, the only honorable move is to stop playing. It is a philosophy of rejection.

While Kag Bapu, he sees consciousness not as a bug, but as a divine, albeit painful, feature. The longing and confusion are not a misstep to be erased but the very engine of spirituality. His solution isn’t to reject the “raw deal” but to surrender to its mystery. The answer lies in the poem’s refrain: to accept that your intellect will fail, and in that surrender, to find peace and awe.

What does it mean for us, today, to accept that our intellect will halt?