Much of our actions in life are choices that boil down to the basic choice of exercising intelligence or stupidity.  The late spiritual master, OSHO, offered some interesting insight into what intelligence really is.  This article is an exposition of his thoughts on the matter, along with my own reflections.  This is a wake up call.  Is it your time to hear it?

We tend to think of intelligence as something having to do with the ability to remember things, to work with numbers, to perceive the workings of things.  Our formal education--for most of us--was based pretty much on our ability to memorize facts, dates, and ideas that were given to us to memorize.  But think about it: Some people have what we call photographic memories.  They see something and then they know it and keep it with them for ready access.  Is this intelligence, really?

Osho defined intelligence as "the capacity to live life according to your own nature."  I would add two factors to that definintion.  I believe that it is not just capacity, because millions have capacities that are largely unused.  If you're not going to use that capacity, it is wasted.  So I would expand the definition of intelligence to say that it is the capacity, willingness and dedication to live your own life acccording to your own nature.

Exercising this brand of intelligence often means rejecting how society would like you to act because it means being true to yourself.  Society would prefer that you live your life according to what it wants, what it sees as most supporting of it.  When you are a child, you are raised to please your parents and teachers.  You are raised to believe that it is much more important for you to feel like you fit in to society than it is to approach life in your own way, in ways that feel right and in flow to you.

So society and many of its institutions--most notably government and religion---like to indoctrinate people into a way of life in which we don't trust our own selves.  We are taught that we must believe certain things in order to be accepted.  This precludes trusting our own selves.

So much of what we learned as young people was not so much an education but an indoctrination.  We were told what to believe and we did at least pretend to believe it if we wanted to fit in.  We were told how we should define God, what was right, what was wrong, what we should be ashamed of, what we should avoid.  Our pretend beliefs, or ones that simply obliterated our earlier, more authentic beliefs, have contributed in a major way to our collective schizophrenia and incongruency: we say we believe in something, but we often act in ways or think in ways that do not fit with the belief.

But true intelligence is just flowing with one's nature, and being willing to be with that nature, to exercise it.  It takes trust of self, and it takes courage to express from your true self rather than from the insecure being who prioritizes their acceptance by society or their need for false power above the commitment to truth and authenticity.

Please connect with your internal pause button, and ponder this. 

By contrast, we can ask, "What is stupidity?"   While of course there are some people that are not as blessed in the brains department as others, stupidity is largely condtioned.  It has to do with blindly following others, imitating them, parroting their beliefs, obeying others without thought or self-consultation.  And, using this definition, the world is still full of people who choose to act stupid.   Stupid is about living as if other people's views are much more important than your own.  Stupid is telling friends that you agree with them when you really do not, but you don't want to risk their rejection.  Stupid is sticking with a religion because you fear how others might judge you if you didn't show up for the weekend services.  It distills to an unwillingness to take responsibility for one's own beliefs.  Will you wake up to this?

Any fool can  parrot somebody else's ideas and beliefs, not really thinking whether they are worth believing or whether holding on to such beliefs is worth doing.  And the bulk of the world's population  has taken the coward's route in accepting beliefs.   We can understand how children's minds are poisoned by false indoctrination.  Adults just generally seem to hold onto the false set of beliefs they integrated as children.  Rather than question beliefs, especially as adults, we look for that which is expedient, that which will not rock the boat too much, that which will not be too much work or promise too much rejection of ourselves.  And when we have unproductive beliefs, the Universe has  way of pointing this out to us, but we often will distract ourselves from seeing the lesson because we tell ourselves that truly seeing the lesson would be more painful than pretending not to see it at all.

We make the choice for purposeful blindness because we don't really want to see the truth.  We distract ourselves with food, sex, manipulating others, mindless television and novels, anything to keep from seeing the lessons that life wants to to teach us.  This is what true stupidity is.

We wonder how to find the intelligence that is true, the one brand of it that will let us truly be who we are.  If we look for this intelligence in the head, in the brain, we don't find it there.   Like the brain, the heart has neurons, along with electrical power much greater than that of the brain.  It helps, I believe, to identify ourselves as some combination of heart and soul, to subscribe to the idea that the heart has will and it has wisdom.

This is where true intelligence is found, and it is best integrated via the same ways we have in the past seemed to integrate the lies that the world has told us: repetition.  As we discover our deepest truths, it serves us to find ways to repeat them to ourselves, or to write them down and tape them to the refrigerator where we will see them frequently.  We learned to call truths things that were not at all true.  How to we move beyond that false thinking?
By creating clarity about our genuine truths--trusting the heart to guide us in this---and then finding ways to repeat the idea as a washing and infusing of or consciousness.  Please play with these ideas.  I believe they include key ideas to help people truly wake up.