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.

Operating with intelligence is the process of going back to the innocence you were born with.

Operating with intelligence is the process of going back to the innocence you were born with. It is not a process of becoming. It is not attaining something new, it is discovering your very being. It is the true door to knowing you as you truly are. When you are intellectual, you operate purely from the head, from logic. When you are too caught in the head, you start thinking that your logic, your head, can understand the whole of life. You try to frame everything in this universe with your head. Your knowledge (logic) gives you the false illusion of knowing everything that exists. It keeps you firmly rooted in the head. When your intelligence awakens, you drop from the head to the heart, from logic to love. Then, you operate neither from pure intellect nor from pure sentimental love. You operate just from loving intelligence, and you automatically radiate compassion to all of those around you.

You rely on thinking because you do not allow the natural understanding to happen.

So you see there is not much you can understand from past knowledge. You cannot think about something in the mind and try to understand everything about it in that way. You need to see it, to experience it in order to fully understand. It is like the man who saw the water of Niagara Falls in a bucket and thought he knew what the Falls looked like! You rely on thinking because you do not allow the natural understanding to happen. When you allow the understanding to happen, you don’t have to think any more. Only a person who has not understood needs the crutch of thinking.

One more thing: you can only think about what you have known, what you have experienced. Can you think about anything unknown? You may fantasize about what the unknown could be, but that is still based on what you have seen in the past. With thinking, the energy of intelligence and truth is not there, so the answer will be based on your limited experience and it will always lead to further questions and doubts. Understanding is intelligence, it is fresh and new. Intelligence is clear, so it gives answers and not further questions. It is the answer from your very being, so it is nothing but the truth. Even if the answer that comes is ‘I don’t know’, the ignorance is closer to the truth than pretending to know. Not falling back on the answers rising from the past memory but functioning from your present consciousness is called understanding.

source: Living Enlightenment