1. 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 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 yoga¹, 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!

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. 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.'

If you look at the way children are educated today, it results in a distorted development of the child. Undue importance is given to logic and analysis which are activities related to the left side of the brain. Because of this, the right side of the brain, which is related to creativity and art, is less stimulated. Fifty percent of our potential, a complete half of our brain, a whole half of our body is just waiting to express itself. Education can do wonders if it awakens to this truth. Educating through the left part of the brain is completely okay, but the right part is also equally, if not more important. 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!

Just look in. See if you are really bringing up your children or just teaching them to be driven by greed and fear. Take a deep look at yourself and see if simply running the rat race gives the feeling of real fulfillment deep within you. Are you doing what you are doing because that is what you really want to do? Or are you doing it because that is what is expected of you by your family, friends and society? 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. One child may be good in science and another may have a natural talent for music. But both are graded on the same scale in science, and both are graded on the same scale in music. Now, how do you decide which child is 'more intelligent'?

If the intelligence is measured based on performance in science, the child with an interest in science will be declared more intelligent. If the intelligence is measured based on musical performance, then, naturally, the child with a flair for music will be seen as more intelligent than the child who has the aptitude in science. Say you choose science as the benchmark for intelligence. Then, the child poet gets the idea that he is not as intelligent as the science based child. Consciously or unconsciously, the poetic child starts suppressing his natural intelligence and tries to imitate the scientific child. 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.

As the situation differs, the dimension of intelligence that responds to the situation also differs. The scientific child responds to a particular situation from a particular dimension of intelligence, whereas the poetic child responds to another situation from another dimension.

The swimmer responds to yet another kind of situation from yet another dimension of intelligence! Everyone is born intelligent, it is a question of just discovering each one's unique dimension of intelligence.