44. Natural Intelligence

Intelligence is not something to attain. Every single being is endowed with intelligence. Every one of us has intelligence. It is an inherent, inborn quality of life just as fire is hot and ice is cold.

I am reminded of a joke on 'intelligent' people:

Once there were four men travelling in a private airplane. Suddenly, there was an emergency as the tail of the aircraft caught fire. Unfortunately for the four passengers, there were only three parachutes available.

The first person in a panic took a parachute saying, 'I just got married. My wife is waiting for me,' and he jumped.

The second person declared, 'I am the most intelligent person on earth. Planet earth needs my intelligence.' He jumped as well.

One of the passengers was an old man. He told the other remaining person, 'I am old already but you have your whole life ahead of you. You take this parachute and jump.'

The young man quipped, 'You can also come, Sir. We can both go. The most intelligent person on planet earth just jumped off with my back-pack!'

Most of us have lost touch with our natural intelligence. That is why we are not able to live life to its fullest potential. We mistake our acquired knowledge for intelligence, we are like the man who jumped with the backpack as a parachute!

Every single being in nature has been endowed with inherent intelligence. Birds have a natural intelligence that enables them to fly. It is amazing to see the migratory birds travel thousands of miles in the sky with no map or guide and retrace their paths back when the season changes!

From the caterpillar to the chimpanzee, every animal lives its life beautifully using the natural gift of intelligence. Plants and trees have natural intelligence, this is what enables them to produce food directly from the sun. Man also has tremendous natural intelligence. He is a more evolved, higher form of consciousness than birds, animals or trees.

Patanjali, an enlightened master from India and father of the ancient science of yoga* , says that man has in him the intelligence of all the lower forms of consciousness such as the trees, birds and animals.

Man has the capacity to produce food just like trees. He has the capacity to live by himself right from the time he is born, just like animals and birds.

Patanjali explains: when you were a tortoise, all of your past life memories of all the births that you took before that birth as a tortoise, were stored in the tortoise body. When you became a higher level animal, all the memories of the past lives before that life were stored in that animal body.

As you gradually evolve to the level of human beings, memories from all your past lives are stored within you. If you know the technique, you can actually tap into any of those memories at any time.

By nature we have all the intelligence in our human body. The difficulty is we strongly believe we are limited. We have been conditioned to think that we have only limited capabilities, that 'we cannot…' so we have forgotten how to use these capabilities. Because of this, we are not tuned to the technique to tap into all the dimensions of our being.

For example, human beings have the capacity to swim without any training. In Japan they did experiments to test this, the moment the child was born, it was put in water and it was seen that the child started swimming automatically!