From Faust to Sisyphus to Bodhisattva: The Intuition Beyond Intellect

I took this photo in 2018 in Leipzig, Germany, inside Auerbachs Keller— a restaurant made famous in Goethe’s Faust. Mephistopheles, emissary of the Devil, stops for dinner with Faust before leading him into the underworld on his pursuit of eternal knowledge. As you can see here, outside the entrance stands a bronze sculpture capturing one of the play’s most iconic scenes: Faust and Mephistopheles entangled with drunken revelers in a moment of magical escape and escalating chaos. The figures seem caught between thrill and confusion — an emblem for humanity’s own entanglement with the seductive yet destabilizing pursuit of power and knowledge. The visit felt personally meaningful to me, not just because of the literary reference, but because I, too, had dinner there and have been on that same journey — a search for knowledge, mastery, and meaning that mirrors Faust’s own. I prefer Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, written nearly three hundred years earlier, maybe because it ends with Faust’s damnation — a fitting metaphor for our modern condition, where the endless pursuit of knowing often leads to disconnection, disillusionment, or destruction.

The Faust legend grew from stories of Johann Faust, a real 16th-century alchemist rumored to have sold his soul for forbidden knowledge. By 1587, the Faustbuch had collected these tales into print, turning them into a cautionary narrative about pride and overreach. Marlowe’s version dramatized this with a clear bargain: twenty-four years of knowledge, power, and pleasure in exchange for eternal damnation. Goethe, writing in the early 19th century, reimagined the tale in more psychological terms. Faust becomes a symbol of human striving — deeply dissatisfied with the limits of reason, hungry for ultimate truth and experience.

We humans are compelled to dissect. It’s how we manipulate nature, how we create comfort and predictability. But it is also why, despite all this intellect, we stand at the brink of ecological collapse. We have gained knowledge but perhaps lost wisdom. For many of us, the journey becomes Sisyphean—rolling the boulder of knowledge uphill only to find more questions at the top. Solve one problem and ten more emerge.

This story mirrors a tension we all live with today. The modern world is built on the power of intellect — the sharpness of analysis, the ability to model, label, measure, and explain. But what has all this intellect truly given us? Yes, it has made our lives more comfortable, but perhaps at the cost of our inner balance, our planetary health, and even our collective survival. We cut deeper into the fabric of reality with more powerful tools — telescopes that show us distant galaxies, particle colliders that reveal smaller building blocks — but the deeper we look, the more elusive the answers become. The universe keeps escaping us. There is no final pixel, no endpoint. 

Alan Watts captured this paradox well:

“There is no end to the minuteness that you can unveil through physical investigation. For the simple reason that the investigation itself is what is chopping things into tiny little pieces. And the sharper you can sharpen your knife, the finer you can cut it. And the knife of the intellect is very sharp indeed. And with the sophisticated instruments that we can now make, there’s probably no limit to it.”

In other words, the intellect dissects endlessly — but can never touch the whole.

And yet ancient traditions understood this. In the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali (compiled around the 3rd or 4th century CE from far older yogic traditions), citta is defined as the mind-stuff whose fluctuations (vṛttis) must be stilled for true perception to arise. Later commentators expanded on this by describing the inner instrument of mind, or antaḥkaraṇa, as comprising multiple facets: manas, the sensory and reactive mind that takes in impressions; buddhi, the discriminating intellect that analyzes and judges; ahaṃkāra, the ego or “I-maker” that gives rise to identity; and citta, the deeper field of consciousness that stores impressions, memory, and the roots of intuitive intelligence. Citta is not logical in nature — it is integrative, pulling from the body’s cellular memory and subtle wisdom, forming the foundation of insight that arises without effort. Unlike modern science, which often privileges intellect alone, the yogic sciences developed ways to integrate all these layers — intellect, memory, identity, and intuition — into a unified path of knowing.

This reverence for intuitive knowledge isn’t unique to India. Sufi mystics like Ibn ‘Arabi spoke of ma‘rifa — a deeper knowing that arises not from reason, but from direct inner unveiling. In Taoist philosophy, it’s called ziran — the spontaneous intelligence of nature. In Buddhism, prajñā points to the same effortless clarity. Across traditions, the deepest wisdom often arrives through surrender.

Some of humanity’s greatest discoveries emerged not through calculation but through intuition — and only later did the intellect come in to make sense of it. Einstein, for example, described riding on a beam of light in his imagination, long before formulating the theory of relativity. Newton sat daydreaming under a tree when an apple fell, leading to the idea of gravity. Srinivasa Ramanujan, one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the 20th century, received entire mathematical formulations in dreams and claimed they came from his Devi — his goddess. Yet his mentor, G.H. Hardy, a product of modern rationalism, could never quite accept this. He needed proofs. He needed logic. But intuition came first — and only afterward did the intellect arrive to explain what had already been seen.

There are limits to what intellect can give us. We still do not know how consciousness arises. We can describe how a motor impulse travels from the cortex to a muscle, but we don’t know where the original will to move comes from. Did you decide to decide? Did you choose to want? The first impulse is hidden from analysis. And yet something in us is connected to it — some deeper layer that still knows. Not intellectually, but experientially. In medicine, there are metabolic conditions where patients unconsciously develop aversions to substances that harm them — a kind of learned avoidance, without conscious thought, rooted in the body’s deeper intelligence. This is citta at work — that quiet, integrating force behind our most authentic insights.

Science, for all its power, remains a mythology — a modern one, no doubt, but still a system of meaning built to organize the chaos of experience. Like the myths before it, it cannot answer everything. And eventually, some come to see this. The deeper you go in search of answers, the more the universe escapes your grasp. For some, that leads to frustration. But for others, something shifts. The path becomes less about conquering and more about returning. These are the ones who walk the way of the bodhisattva — those who understand the limits of knowing and choose to come back, to serve, to help others. And for those of us who are physicians, that is perhaps the highest form of practice: not endless intellectual mastery, but compassionate return.

And that is why Goethe’s ending still matters. Unlike Marlowe’s tragic damnation, Goethe transforms the legend into a celebration of striving human spirit, where salvation is granted by grace because of the unending quest itself. At his death, demons come to claim him, but angels intervene. They declare that Faust’s endless striving toward higher ideals, despite error and sin, reflects the divine spark of humanity. And that, perhaps, gives us hope too.