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?

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! From the caterpillar to the chimpanzee, every animal lives its life beautifully using the natural gift of intelligence. Plants and trees have natural intelligence, this is what enables them to produce food directly from the sun. Man also has tremendous natural intelligence. He is a more evolved, higher form of consciousness than birds, animals or trees.

Patanjali, an enlightened master from India 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.

We have been conditioned to think that we have only limited capabilities

Patanjali explains: when you were a tortoise, all of your past life memories of all the births that you took before that birth as a tortoise, were stored in the tortoise body. When you became a higher level animal, all the memories of the past lives before that life were stored in that animal body. As you gradually evolve to the level of human beings, memories from all your past lives are stored within you. If you know the technique, you can actually tap into any of those memories at any time.

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. Because of this, we are not tuned to the technique to tap into all the dimensions of our being. For example, human beings have the capacity to swim without any training. In Japan they did experiments to test this, the moment the child was born, it was put in water and it was seen that the child started swimming automatically!

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. He sacrifices his priceless creativity and uniqueness, and he is not even aware of it.

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.

The other day, I read a statement on a teenager’s T-shirt, ‘I was intelligent until education ruined me.’ If you look at the way children are educated today, it results in a distorted development of the child. Undue importance is given to logic and analysis which are activities related to the left side of the brain. Because of this, the right side of the brain, which is related to creativity and art, is less stimulated. Fifty percent of our potential, a complete half of our brain, a whole half of our body is just waiting to express itself. Education can do wonders if it awakens to this truth. Educating through the left part of the brain is completely okay, but the right part is also equally, if not more important. 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.

source: Living Enlightenment