Intelligence is a gift you were born with. It is a tool for actualizing your heart’s desires. While most people use intelligence only to survive threats and solve problems, the real gift of intelligence is to free your attention from a limited mind-set and, to connect you to your creativity. Intelligence in service to love and life fulfills the human desire for true happiness.
What is Intelligence? Intelligence is the capacity to gain and apply knowledge and skills to all of life circumstances, situations and changing conditions. Higher intelligence exits to create something new and maintain well-being. Lower intelligence is ruled by survival drives while higher intelligence serves expanding states of being such as love, joy, and happiness.
Higher intelligence is essential for a successful life. For example, to adequately deal with unexpected challenges and complex life situations such as family dynamics, career changes and health challenges, you need to be able to reason without the distraction of negative emotions.
One way to know how much of your inner resources you are accessing is to determine your level of stress, your degree of well-being, your general satisfaction with life, the abundance or lack of love in your relationships and how much you enjoy performing at work. High stress and low satisfaction means you are not responding to your life circumstances with all the intelligence available within you. Living life at a fast pace where one thing always follows another without time to enjoy is unintelligent.
1-Intellectual knowledge: the power to reason and understand information objectively. For example, traditional school learning.
2-Experiential knowledge: knowledge gained from engaging life situations. This type of knowledge is what saves your life when you face a dangerous situation. This knowledge can be an instinctual reaction or a conscious response such as becoming present and accessing your common sense.
Thinking, the ability for complex abstract reasoning allows for self-reflection. This mental ability has the potential to evolve into Self-Awareness.
Self-reflection is the ability to think and think about thinking, which produces a mental and emotional identity, your ego. Thinking eventually overshadows subjective awareness, the knowingness that you exist. Knowingness precedes thinking.
Dis-identifying from your ego begins the journey of true Self-discovery. This maturing stage of development marks the beginning of adulthood and requires new core values that go beyond safety and comfort. This requirement engages higher intelligence. A definition of maturity is the willingness to transcend individuality and include others and the ability to expand self-identity. Everyone has the potential to realize they are part of something greater when they choose to serve others for selfless reasons.
Self-awareness is the capacity to know yourself by being yourself. Learning to pay attention consciously develops this capacity. Paying attention is not thinking in the form of analysis and comparison as the ego does. Paying attention is your natural ability to witness and observe life without the ego’s commentary, criticism, judgments and opinions.
Self-awareness leads to an identity grounded in Presence instead of thinking. This expanded identity is what can acquire new resources to embrace whatever life is presenting in every moment. Presence increases intelligence because it is free of the ego’s concepts and limited beliefs.
Brain physiology, functioning & intelligence
Brain functioning depends on constant blood supply and an electromagnetic pulse from the heart. Without the heart the brain cannot function.
Brain activity produces a subtle electrical current that is directly affected by your emotional states. Strong emotional states direct blood from the cortex and send it to the mammalian and reptilian brain for fight or flight response. This means strong emotional states decrease your intelligence. Strong emotions deactivate the part of the brain capable of logic and reason.
For all components of the brain to function in unison there must be a proper electro-chemical flow amongst brain cells. The healthy electrochemical flow changes when the brain perceives a threat and reacts by releasing hormones for fight or flight response. Hormones generate strong emotions.
Modern life style has adapted to high levels of stress that resemble an almost continual state of fight or flight. When intelligence is reduced to automatic survival mechanism people are coping with their life instead of creating their life.
Brain electrical currents have been classified according to brain wave frequencies:
Beta: from about 15 to 40 cycles per second. This is the “normal thinking” state. This frequency is when people have intense mental analytical focus as in work, play and when relating to each other with little awareness of love. Instead, Beta frequency encompasses the world of emotions.
Alpha: Between 9-14 cycles per second, “relaxed and alert”. This is the ideal state for loving, learning, contemplation and meditating. It is a state free of emotions. Romantic intimacy, parenting, taking a break from work, going for a walk in nature, enjoying classical music are examples of normal alpha functioning. Surgeons, fire fighters, professional athletes are examples of people performing important tasks without traditional beta functioning.
Theta: 5-8 cycles per second, this is a state of “deep relaxation” where creativity and daydreaming take place. Here there is a tendency to loose track of time and because the mind is not thinking there is receptivity for new ideas and inspirations. The runners high and the loss of conscious attention while driving are examples of theta functioning. In Theta activity becomes automatic without the need for conscious attention. Theta is the state for active dreaming during the sleep cycle.
Delta: 1.5 to 4 cycles per second. This is the “dreamless sleep state” that we all experience every night. Very advanced meditators can remind awake and experience Delta frequency brain waves. These individuals report a super expanded state of awareness with no content of mental impressions.
Intelligence is easily accessed in the alpha and theta brain frequency states because there is an absence of negative emotions.
How negative emotions decrease intelligence
It is normal and natural for humans to be emotional after all, we are sentient beings. However, a sign of maturity is the capacity to contain and transform strong emotions into their pure essence. This is mastered by acting on what you know regardless of your mind being agitated.
When your mind is agitated for example, by anger, then knowledge of what to do becomes more limited as the anger intensifies. Anger has a range of expressions: irritation, frustration, anger proper, rage, fury and hatred. The pure essence of anger and all forms of aggressive energy is strength.
Strength is strong with an open, calm and resourceful mind. Anger is tense with a closed and agitated and limited mind. As the intensity of this emotion increases blood pressure goes up, blood leaves the organs and goes to the muscles, heart rate increases and attention becomes more and more fixated on the object we are angry at. By the time you become furious you are no longer thinking of any consequences to your behavior, your reasoning fades away and, you become irrational and blind to perspectives other than your own. In other words you are only interested in your point of view.
When there is no longer attention to other perspectives to a situation your only resources are fight or flight. In most instances when people experience this level of intensity there is no real physical threat only an illusory psychological threat to their identity. A person that becomes so immersed in their emotions has lost contact with being present to objective reality.
Fear is another good example of how intelligence decreases when you need it most. Fear can be transformed into courage that turns into strength witch turns into Self-confidence. The range of expression of fear goes from nervousness, anxiety, worry, doubt, fear proper, panic and finally to terror.
As fear increases a person feels weaker because their aggressive energy is being diverted to make their fear strong. This is the opposite of what higher intelligence does. By the time a person goes into panic they no longer consider the consequences of their actions and easily hurt themselves and allow others to control them. When a person experiences terror they become paralyzed and can no longer take action.
Summary: The higher the intensity of your emotions the higher the frequency of your brain waves and the less access to intelligence there is to deal with a given situation. The sooner you decide to calm down and relax the quicker you have access to more knowledge and skills.
Overcoming strong emotions and becoming intelligent
To increase your intelligence choose to be loving. Love has its own intelligence that encompasses justice and common sense. Love is the stage of personal development that emerges after we become rational beings. Reason without love cannot access win-win situations in human interactions including your relationship to you.
The most significant challenge for human beings is to love and value themselves. This is the result of how you were treated. A person that has a tendency to feel afraid or angry does so because they have learned to treat themselves that way. You get angry with others because you get angry with yourself. Likewise you are afraid of others because you scare yourself. The light of awareness illuminates these blind spots in your internal relationship with yourself.
It is natural and appropriate for children to be emotional when they feel threaten. Their brains have not fully developed until the age of around 12. Children are not capable of abstract reason to solve complex difficult situations. It is natural and appropriate for adults to be rational and compassionate in the face of stressful circumstances because we can!
Why are adults not capable to consistently handle difficulties rationally and lovingly? Because most adults have not matured emotionally to see other perspectives, when it matters most.
Childhood emotional survival strategies are unconsciously incorporated into your ego identity. This is why when you are confronted with a difficult situation you react emotionally. For example, most human being carry some degree of the belief “I’m not good enough” that comes from being harshly criticized and over corrected. The emotional survival reaction for this painful, shameful and fear filled belief is to become insecure and doubtful about your own value and capacities and to behave how you are expected.
The adaptation to cope with lack of self-worth is to either become angry, rebellious and controlling or fearful, submissive and hesitant. A person that only affords themselves these two options for dealing with confrontations and disagreements is living their life in a state of survival.
To access your higher intelligence there needs to be a shift in your self-identity. Your task is to shift from negative self-images to the presence of your Being. This shift in self-identity is a process of healing and integrating your past history. To truly have inner peace, be authentic and have trust in you requires learning to be present to love and being willing to be loving.
Presence is experienced naturally when you focus your attention here and now. For example, moving your attention from the constant fear of not feeling safe and the need to be valued by others to, paying attention to what is in front of you right now. As an adult your attention is more intelligently used when you engage in relationships that are meaningful and require that you be creative.
Intelligence is greater when you are passionate about something that you desire to experience or create. What compelling desires do you have in you? Will you commit your intelligence to create it? When?
Written by Osiris Montenegro
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