11. Intellect Vs Intelligence🔗

Our entire educational system is based upon evaluation of information, not intelligence. It is driven by intellect and verbalization, not visualization. When you try to move on the basis of information you lose the ability to be intelligent. In fact, if you are logically logical you will understand that logic itself is not logical. Life is not logical. It cannot be explained with the mundane logic and intellect. It happens in a plane much higher than the intellect.

The intelligent person lives moment to moment, not through logic. He does not believe in borrowed answers. He sees the challenge of the situation and directly responds to it.

The intellectual person is like a photograph, he has the imprint of the past on him. The intelligent person is like a mirror, he reflects and responds to reality and is therefore spontaneous.

The intellect is a beautiful mechanism but only as long as it remains a tool. It should not become the controlling factor. When you put your intellect aside, a deeper intelligence awakens inside you. You start functioning from your center instead of from the periphery. Your center is pure intelligent energy.

Intelligence can be rediscovered. The only way to rediscover it is meditation. Meditation destroys all the barriers and blocks which society has created, that prevent you from being intelligent. Like in a flowing river, it's as if meditation removes the rocks so that the water can flow smoothly.

Intelligence needs tremendous courage. It needs a love for adventure! When you are always going into the unknown, then intelligence grows, it becomes sharpened. It grows only when it encounters the unknown every moment. Intellect is only a mental game, it cannot be creative. Intellect is imaginative, but not creative. Intelligence is creative because it is a part of the divine energy.

A small story: Once, two adventurous hunters decided to go hunting for rare animals in a dense forest in a remote area away from their homes. They chartered a plane to fly them into the forest where they captured and killed many animals. A few days later, the pilot came back to pick up the hunters and the animals.

He looked at all the animals and said, 'This plane will not be able to take the huge ox and both of the zebras. You will have to leave one of them behind.' The hunters replied, 'But we took animals exactly like these in a plane the same size as this one, the last time we came here!'

The pilot was not sure but since the hunters insisted that they had taken all of the animals on the plane the previous time, he thought maybe the plane could handle the weight after all. So, the plane took off with all of them along with the ox and the two zebras.

The plane had hardly gained some height when it came crashing down after some distance. The hunters and pilot escaped unhurt. They stepped out of the plane.

One of the hunters rubbed his bruised forehead and asked the other, 'Where do you think we are?' The other hunter looked around the surroundings and replied, 'I think we are a few feet from where we crashed last year.'

If you see your life, if you have the habit of keeping a diary, you will understand that you have been making the same types of mistakes for so many years! For the last twenty to thirty years you can see that you have been making the same type of mistakes. Maybe the scale is different, the place where you do it is different, or the time when you do it is different. But the mistakes will be almost the same! We need to have intelligence even to do new mistakes!

Another small story:

A man came to the doctor with burns on both his ears. The doctor inquired, ‘How did you get burned on both your ears?’ The man replied, ‘Actually, I had left the hot iron on when the phone rang. By mistake I picked up the iron instead of the phone.’ The doctor was surprised and asked, ‘Oh! But what about the other ear? How did that get burned?’ The man replied angrily, ‘The man called back!’

When you live intelligently, you will never do the same mistake again. Because when you are intelligent, you bring in awareness and learn the lesson the first time itself.

There are two important statements I would like to make now that you need to understand. The first is, whatever you think of as the world is made of the same stuff of which your dreams are made.

This is an important statement. If you understand this statement, you can use it for any purposes. If you know how to use the power with which you create your dreams, with that same power, you can express your dreams. Your dreams are the energy out of which your real world is created.

The second is, whatever you see has been created by you, so you have the capacity to change the whole thing also! We always think our life is an accident. No, it is not an accident, it is an incident. If you understand this one statement, your life can change in so many ways. It can change your visualization, your thinking pattern, and your imagination which creates your dreams.

Most of the time, we create dreams that contradict themselves, that cause confusion. The energy wasted in unnecessary dreams, if it is conserved and put to proper use, the reality that you can create will be much better than the reality you live in now.

You will have the important ability or power to realize your dreams, and more importantly you will realize that everything you see as reality is also just one more beautiful dream!

These two things together can transform your life – the capacity to make your dreams into reality and realizing that all reality is nothing but a dream.

The power of intention, the power of creative visualization, and the power to use your dreams, are very important in creating and achieving whatever you want in your life. These powers can create the energy and mood to live your life with complete fulfillment. But that is only one side of the coin.

The important thing that science has missed is the intelligence to realize that whatever you see as reality is nothing but your dream! Only when you understand that, you can settle down with yourself in deep relaxation. Till then, you are with a continuous feeling of non-fulfillment all the time. It is this feeling of non-fulfillment that keeps you in a state of subtle irritation.

The very source of intelligence is clear visualization. You need to plan only when you don't have complete and clear visualization. Pure and clear visualization expresses the total concept in one glimpse. If we don't have such visualization, we do linear planning or step by step logical processing.

Enlightened masters don't have inner chatter, in other words they don't have the continuous train of thoughts going on in them. So they experience the pure and ultimate visualization.

Anybody with clear visualization does not require planning. Spontaneity is enough to do the job. Events happen spontaneously around such a person. Any updating or development that is required also happens automatically. Even if events change they will beautifully fit within the framework initiated.

Only a person with pure visualization can create a real, tangible program and update it constantly with spontaneity and intelligence.

We see so many examples of this in our own organization like in our ashram in the temple town of Tiruvannamalai⁷ in Tamil Nadu in South India. Tiruvannamalai is home to the sacred, mystical hill Arunachala.

A once empty piece of land near the base of the mountain was converted into a full scale ashram in a record breaking time of 18 days! At the end of 18 days, it had one dozen deities installed, 1008 Shiva lingas⁸ (dome shaped representation of the male and female energies of creation) consecrated, as well as accommodation and food facilities. Over a hundred thousand people witnessed the inauguration and stood testimony to the play of spontaneous intelligence at work.

Work on solving your problems boldly and with simple awareness and you will see that a higher intelligence comes into play. One lesson you will learn is without your knowledge, the higher intelligence comes in to do things for you. When you become sensitive to this happening, your awareness will take a quantum jump. Then you no longer need to work to dissolve your problems. Problems will simply dissolve with the play of spontaneous intelligence in your life.

Just try this for the next 48 hours. Consciously decide you are not going to think about your problems. Drop your intellect which continuously tells you that you do not have enough intelligence to solve your problems spontaneously, that you do not have the capacity to produce that much spontaneity.

Exercises: