2. Spontaneity – straightforward 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, to 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.

I read a funny one-liner on a company's notice board: 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.

When you don't use some thing, slowly you start forgetting the very art of using it. In the same way, when you don't use your intelligence, slowly you start believing that you don't have the intelligence to handle whatever is happening in the moment and you start relying on others or on your past experiences.

Intelligence is the ability to respond to new situations. It comes from your very being, not from knowledge which comes from the mind.

A small story: A small 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. With deep awareness you are in the present moment. When you are in the present moment, you are alive and alert, what you call as intelligent. Your intelligence by its very nature is spontaneous. There is no training, no learning needed for it. It is only a question of awakening it from within.

The first step is to watch yourself and see how you unconsciously react to situations.

See how your actions are rooted in your attitudes and conclusions from past experiences. Watching yourself with awareness is the first step. The good news about awareness is, it is the only step that is needed! Most of the time, we continue to live in the dead past and miss the wonderful dimensions of life, or we get angry over what has happened and feel hurt. Either way, we are escaping from the problem by going to one extreme or to the other. Instead, if we just look with deep awareness into the problem, energy will awaken, the energy of intelligence which is enough to bring about the solution. The very awareness is enough to awaken and break free even from the past conditioning, and we can act intelligently. This awareness will simply kindle the spark of intelligence that has always been a part of you. 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 h a r d e r 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. You say you are obedient, but you are actually shirking the responsibility of owning up to your actions. This is a dangerous and age old habit of following the rule book. It is dangerous because sometimes you are not even aware that you are missing responsibility and intelligence.

You become a parrot, repeating the same thing for years together because someone told it to you. Talking about responsibility, a small joke on how people understand responsibility:

Living every moment in total awareness is meditation.

Once, a convict was scolding his lawyer, 'You are a useless lawyer. You don't even u n d e r s t a n d 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!

Because you do not live every moment with awareness and take responsibility for your words and actions, you do so many things unconsciously. Then, when the effects of these actions happen, you claim you don’t deserve the results! Acting out of your own intelligence is taking complete responsibility for what you do at all times.

For example, when you obey someone else you feel that you are being subservient to that person. But when you disobey that person, you feel guilty because a part of you feels that you should obey him or her but you are not obeying. The way out of this conflict is to follow your intelligence at that time with the clear understanding that you alone are responsible for your action. Then you will not hurt anyone including yourself. And you will be responding intelligently to the person you are disobeying as well.

A small joke: A salesman called up a prospective client and asked him, ‘Is the boss in?’ The new office assistant asked, ‘Are you a salesman, bill collector or a friend of his?’ The salesman, thinking quickly, replied, ‘All three!’ The assistant said, ‘In that case, he is in a business conference, he is out of town, step in and see him.’

The answer depends on the person asking the question! 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. But we are too lazy to act intelligently because responding to the present requires us to be continuously aware and alert.

Living in the present moment is living in utter insecurity. It needs courage and intelligence. Actually, even the idea of security in life is an illusion. How can you predict what will happen even in the next moment?

Anything that you predict can only be based on the past, something that you have seen. But the future is yet to happen. It is an unknown gift, so it can never be predicted.

Intelligence is being open to life. It is being welcoming to people, situations and everything in life. Many times you can see that you have your own expectations and ideas of how things should be. You are afraid to receive life with open arms. Can you put conditions on how the weather should be tomorrow? No! Then why do you put conditions on how the ‘weather’ at home, the mood of your wife or child, should be?

Understand, there are two things that we can do. One is collecting the data, making the argument and making a judgment. The second is forming a judgment and then collecting arguments to support that judgment.

Most of the time we have already formed the judgment and then we pay attention only to those incidents that support our judgment. For example, you have formed an opinion of your husband or wife. By now you know what your husband will say if you ask him to come shopping with you. By now you know what your wife will say if you ask her to join you in watching the Sunday football match. Based on just these few incidents, you would have made so many more judgments about them.

You don’t credit him or her to have an intelligence that gets updated from every moment of life. The problem is, you don’t even credit yourself with having that natural intelligence. That is why you can’t believe others can become updated.