You are Intelligence
Living in harmony with our natural intelligence is living a spiritual life.
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 intelligence. 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 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!
Patanjali, an enlightened master from Bharat 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.
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.