You are Intelligence🔗

To be free from the fear of death, which is really the fear of losing our identity, we need to be aware that we are something more than this body and mind. We need intelligence to understand this. We then come to these questions: What exactly is intelligence? Are some of us more intelligent than others? Can we increase the level of our intelligence?

NATURAL INTELLIGENCE

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

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 intel-ligence; 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!

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.

Intelligence is being aware and spontaneous. Understand an important thing: when you are deeply aware, you cannot make mistakes!

With awareness, you don't rely on what others have taught you. You don't rely on the past conditioning that has gone on inside you for many years. You act just out of the fresh intelligence that comes with awareness.

The light of awareness is enough to remove the darkness created by years of living by habit. The whole key lies in being aware so that your intelligence can func-tion. Living every moment in total awareness is what meditation is all about.

In life, because it is easy to place responsibility on others, you blindly follow other people's directions instead of relying on your own intelligence.

Talking about responsibility, a small joke on how people understand responsibility:

Once, a convict was scolding his lawyer, 'You are a useless lawyer. You don't even understand your responsibility of when to raise an objection.'

The puzzled lawyer asked him, 'I don't understand. When do you think I should have raised an objection that I did not?'

The convict replied, 'When the opposing lawyer spoke, you objected. But, when the judge declared me guilty, you kept your big mouth shut. That was the time to do all the objecting!'

It is always easy to put the blame on the whole world for what happens in your life. But, if you just look a little deeper, you can see how you are completely responsible for what is happening in your life!

Being intelligent requires the effort to be yourself, which you are not used to. So you choose to react based on your past experiences.

Usually, we only react like programmed machines; we do not respond to situations. Someone insults you and you become angry even before becoming aware of what you are doing.

A beautiful story from the life of Buddha, an enlightened master from India:

Once a person insulted Buddha openly. His disciple Ananda said, 'I was getting so angry with the person. Why did you keep quiet? At least I would have given him a piece of my mind.' Buddha calmly replied, ‘You surprise me. What he was saying was completely irrelevant and you know that. Then why are you getting angry? You are punishing yourself. It is foolishness. When somebody else has made the mistake, why are you suffering for it?’

Moving with time, flowing with life, becoming a fluid process instead of being a solid ego is called intelligence.

Operating with intelligence is the process of going back to the innocence you were born with. It is not a process of becoming. It is not attaining some-thing new; it is discovering your very being. It is the true door to knowing you as you truly are.

When you are intellectual, you operate purely from the head, from logic.

A small story:

A man was working on his doctorate in philosophy. He was so involved in his studies and research, his wife thought he would forget her if he was not reminded of her once in a while. So one day, she casually mentioned to him, ‘Honey, what is the one reason you love me so much?’

The man asked very seriously, ‘When you say ‘so much’ are you referring to the depth, quality, quantity or mode of expression?’

When you are too caught in the head, you start thinking that your logic, your head, can understand the whole of life. You try to frame everything in this universe with your head.

Another small story:

Once, a student had freshly graduated in a course on plumbing. He went with his friends on a sight-seeing tour to Niagara Falls. He took a look at the huge Falls and said, ‘I think I can fix it!’

Your knowledge gives you the false illusion of knowing everything that exists. It keeps you firmly rooted in the head.

When your intelligence awakens, you drop from the head to the heart, from logic to love. Then, you operate neither from pure intellect nor from pure senti-mental love. You operate just from loving intelligence, and you automatically radiate compassion to all of those around you.

After the stomach, the food passes into the small intestine where the majority of the digestion takes place. It is actually a long structure but so efficiently fitted in a small area with many folds which increases the surface area of absorption. Most of the nutrients get absorbed in the small intestine. The main function of the small intestine is absorption of nutrients. The complex products like carbo-hydrates and proteins are broken down into basic elements and absorbed. The nutrients that are absorbed are carried to the liver for further processing.

Then the food moves into the large intestine where mostly water absorption occurs. Then, the food that cannot be absorbed, like fiber for example, is mixed with other waste products from the body and thrown out as waste matter. This is just a basic explanation of digestion. But in the body it is such a complex, well-organized and adaptive mechanism.

The human body starts from a single cell which replicates and becomes about 250 different types of cells.

Imagine, one cell transforms into so many different specialized cells that form the complex parts of the body! Not only do these cells do their specialized job, their very maintenance needs millions of things to be done in a second. And all their activities have to be coordinated for the body to function as a single organism. It is the best example of distributed intelligence.

We have been taught that the center of our intelligence is in our brain. We think that we control the body through our brain. Science has all along been saying that the brain controls respiration, digestion, blood circulation, and all such activities of the body.

Now, cutting-edge research has given rise to a new field called epigenetics. One of the pioneers in this field, Dr. Bruce Lipton, an eminent biologist, has been doing research in the field of epigenetics for over ten years. In his book, The Biology of Belief, he states that our brain does not control our body. In fact, there is evidence of intelligence in every cell, even in the cell's membrane!

Recent research at Sandia National Laboratories, USA, supports cellular intel-ligence theory. Scientists there studied how cells responded to a harmful substance called an antigen that attacked the cells in the body. They concluded that even the cell membrane had a beautiful and complex structure to fight the antigen, and that the cell membrane was not as simple a structure as it was earlier believed.

Our body is not a simple centralized system of intelligence controlled by the brain. The human body is a highly evolved distributed system of intelligence beautifully and seamlessly orchestrated.

Right now, you think you need to interfere with your intelligence in order to run your life happily. But the truth is the intelligence with which you came down to planet earth, the intelligence which created your very body, can run your life beautifully for you.

The intelligence or the energy based on which you created your body at birth, is called your bio-memory. You need to understand this important truth here: it is you who designed your own body to enjoy specific things, to live for a particular number of years, and to do particular things.

When you take birth, you decide your life, your enjoyments, whatever you want to do, based upon what you think is the 'juice' of life. That same bio-memory has enough intelligence to live, run and expand your life. That tremendous intelligence is operating every single moment whether you believe it or not, whether you accept it or not. But our limited understanding prevents us from realizing this – and we constantly feel that life has to be different from what it is at the present moment.

Trusting that intelligence and relaxing is what I call devotion. Surrendering to that higher intelligence is true surrender. Living in harmony with our natural intelligence is living a spiritual life.

This may be a surprising revelation, but the truth is that universal or cosmic intelligence responds to every thought of ours.

Interesting research by Japanese scientist, Dr. Masaru Emoto shows this point very clearly.

Dr. Masaru Emoto did experiments on water. He collected water samples from different sources and exposed them to various kinds of thoughts. Then he froze the samples and studied their crystalline structure through a microscope with the help of high-speed photography. Thousands of these crystals were studied under tightly regulated conditions of temperature, cooling time and lighting.

He did various experiments on these water samples – playing different types of music to the water, talking to the water, reading out from ancient life teachings, praying with a certain intention etc. He found that when the water samples were exposed to healing music, the water crystals that formed were very beautiful and graceful. The water exposed to negative feelings or thoughts did not form crystals but rather an irregular structure which reflected the emotions of the person handling them.

Our body is about seventy percent water. Planet earth is covered with over seventy percent water. After studying the effect of mental thoughts on water, just imagine the tremendous effect our thoughts, words and intentions have on the planet and us!

Another real incident from history:

When India was under British rule, the British soldiers found that when they carried water from England to India in their ships, the water got spoiled even while on the ship. But when they carried water back from India to England, the water not only stayed fresh through the voyage, but also remained fresh until they consumed all of it back in England! When scientists studied this surprising phenomenon, they found that this fresh water was from the sacred river Ganga in Calcutta which was worshipped by millions of people from around the world. It had the natural properties of neutralizing harmful bacteria and purifying itself.

Billions of people have been praying to Ganga for over thousands of years. Naturally they have left their prayerful thoughts as imprints on this water which is so energizing and self-healing.

Even in Egypt, the river Nile has been studied by the Egyptians over thou-sands of years by measuring its flow, level, turbulence etc. They have found that many times these parameters reflected the calamities like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis, that have happened or are about to happen in even distant parts of the world.

What makes us become insensitive to nature? The moment our ego comes into play we become insensitive to nature.

There was a beautiful story I was reading about a poet who in his young age used to go and play with the wild animals near his house. His father used to warn him that he should not play with the wild animals because they might harm him.

But, he still used to go and sit with the wild animals when he could. He would say, ‘When I was self-conscious and afraid that there was a possibility that the animals might harm me, they would never come near me; the communication never happened, the relationship never happened.

But, whenever I had courage or I was in a very playful mood, whenever I did not have the fear or the self-consciousness, the communication and relationship used to be so strong. I could feel very clearly the animals were connecting with me and I was connecting with them.’

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