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?

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

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. 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. And because of this, we are not tuned to the technique to tap into all the dimensions of our being.

A small story:

One boy came back from school and told his mother, ‘You said the school dentist would be painless but he was not!’ His mother became worried and asked him, ‘Did he hurt you?’

The boy replied, ‘No, but he screamed when I bit his finger!’

Children are born intelligent. They are so spontaneous and enthusiastic. But the family, society and conventional school destroy the natural intelligence within the child with the undue importance they pay to logic, memory and competition. The price the child pays for education is too heavy as he sacrifices his priceless creativity and uniqueness and he is not even aware of it.

The other day, I read a statement on a teenager’s T-shirt, ‘I was intelligent until education ruined me.’

Allow your complete being to simply express itself - and you will see your natural intelligence flowering beautifully. This is what I call being integrated and fulfilled.

We think we are very intelligent and so we try to mould our children to become intelligent like us. When we start this process, we first teach the child the logic of running in life driven by either fear or greed.

Either he has to do something to achieve more, or he has to do something to prevent what he doesn’t want to happen. When you

want something to happen, it is greed. When you are afraid that something will happen, it is fear.

Either he has to study so he can get better grades and win admission in a good college - this is being driven by greed. Or he has to study so he is not left behind in his future professional life - this is being driven by fear.

The motivation for the child is greed or fear, never inner fulfillment. Naturally, the child gets into the rat race and just keeps running - with no time to even look whether he is running for what he really wants. He does not even know that he can enjoy the run! He has been taught that with any other diversion, precious time will be wasted in reaching the goal.

But how many people have felt fulfilled after reaching the ‘goal’? When you reach the goal you have set, you realize the goalpost is no longer there. It has moved further and you want something else now!

Understand, if you are living your life based on just seeing what others are doing, you are just wasting your precious life. This is what they call ‘herd mentality’ – joining the rat race because everybody else is a part of it. You may even win the rat race but you are still a rat!

Can we measure intelligence? Is there a standard to measure intelligence?

Right from school, we use standard benchmarks to determine a person’s so-called level of intelligence. In the grading system used from elementary school through college, we compare and grade all children for various skills and aptitudes.

We need to understand an important thing here: one kind of intelligence is needed to be a scientist and another kind of intelligence is needed to be a poet. To be an Olympic swimmer one needs yet another kind of intelligence! Intelligence is the ability to respond to a situation or challenge. Everyone is born intelligent; it is a question of just discovering each one’s unique dimension of intelligence.

You have a natural, spontaneous intelligence inside you. You have tasted it as a child.

As a child, you looked at things in a very simple, straightforward way. That is why you were so spontaneous. What took away that spontaneity as you grew up? The societal conditioning that has been telling you right from when you were a child, ‘You are not enough…’ Because of this, you are constantly trying to become something else, prove something to others. By constantly thinking that you are not enough, you try to imitate others and waste the wonderful natural energy bubbling inside you.

Death will be accepted as an excuse, but we would like two weeks' notice, as we feel it is your duty to teach someone your job prior to your death.

Note: this new benefit program began yesterday.

If you blindly imitate another person's performance or behavior instead of acting from your own inner spontaneity, your own intelligence, you will be cheating yourself out of wonderful possibilities.

Once there was a statistics student who, while driving, would always accelerate before coming to any junction, and then drive fast past the junction and slow down again once he passed the junction.

One day, he was travelling with his friend. They passed a junction in his usual way. The friend asked him in surprise, 'Why do you drive so fast across junctions when you are actually supposed to slow down?'

The statistics student replied, 'Well, statistically speaking, you are more likely to have an accident at a junction, so I just make sure I spend less time there!'

Knowledge is good only when applied intelligently. It is intelligence that gives the real result, not the knowledge itself. When knowledge is applied in the right place at the right time, it is intelligence. Spontaneity is when we easily express our knowledge in the right place at the right time; in other words, using our intelligence.

A small story:

One boy was learning a lot of new things at school and home. One day, he told the teacher, 'Yesterday I killed three female and two male flies.' The curious teacher asked, 'How did you know which were males and which were females?'

The boy replied, 'Simple. Three of them were on the mirror and two were on the cigarette box!'

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 function. Living every moment in total awareness is what meditation is all about.

A small story:

Once, a sergeant in his training session asked the recruits why walnut wood was used for making the rifle. The recruits thought hard and one of them answered, ‘Because walnut is harder than other types of nuts.’

The sergeant brushed him off saying, ‘Wrong!’ Another recruit ventured, ‘Because it is more durable.’ The sergeant’s voice boomed, ‘Wrong!’ A third person tried his luck, ‘Because it is waterproof.’

The sergeant, tired of the answers by now, replied, ‘You boys surely have a lot to learn. Simple reason: that is what is laid down in the rule book!’

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.