Intelligence is not to do with the information that you have or receive. That is only intellect. In other words, intelligence is not the totality of your experiences, but the lessons learned from those experiences.

Understanding happens only when you are open and spontaneous without prejudice. If you are with prejudice, the complete understanding does not penetrate you. If you are open, then the complete understanding penetrates you and you become intelligent.

For example, a person touches a burning matchstick and learns that it burns. Next, the person touches a gas flame and learns that it burns too. Next, he touches a blazing fire and finds that it also burns. If that person waits for learning this way, from experience, it will take him ages to learn the lesson that fire burns. And when he finally learns, it will be time for him to go to the burning cremation grounds! The intelligent person figures after touching the first fire of the matchstick, that any type of fire burns. But the even more intelligent person does not even wait to touch the fire of the matchstick, he learns even when he sees another person touching it!

There is a beautiful story from the life of Buddha:

Once a philosopher came to Buddha and asked, ‘Without words, without the wordless, will you tell me the truth?’

Buddha remained silent.

The philosopher bowed down to Buddha saying, ‘With your loving kindness you have cleared away my delusions and I have entered the true path.’

After the philosopher had gone, Ananda, one of the closest disciples of Buddha, asked Buddha what the philosopher had attained.

Buddha replied, ‘A good horse runs even at the shadow of the whip.’There are three types of horses. With the first type, unless you beat him he will not move even an inch. If you beat him, he will move forward a little but then again he will stop and he has to be beaten again to get him moving again. With the second type, there is not as much coaxing needed. If you even threaten to hit him he will start moving. The third type of horse is the most intelligent. This horse does not even need to see the whip, just seeing the shadow of the whip is enough to make him run!

It was similar in the case of the philosopher who came to Buddha. The urge to know the truth was burning so much inside of him he only wanted the truth and nothing else. He had had enough of words and techniques. That is why he wanted the truth from Buddha in neither words nor wordlessness. So, in the silence of Buddha, the philosopher saw the shadow of the whip and got his answer.

Your emotional attachment to the past is the first and the last problem in life.

Your past can become part of your intelligence if you allow it to teach you, if you approach it with pure consciousness, with a witnessing mood, without having positive or negative emotional attachment. Positive emotional attachment means love for that memory. Negative emotional attachment means hatred for that memory. Either way that memory will continue to haunt you.

Understand, memory of the past itself is never a problem. Only the emotional attachment to it is the problem. If it is love for that memory, then you will put it in the ‘favorite’ file and constantly you will be seeing it. If it is hatred, you will put it in archives or trash. Even if you put it in trash, just because of your hatred for it, it will again and again come back to you in the form of guilt.

Be very clear, your emotional attachment to the past is the first and the last problem in life. If you look around there is continuous intelligence and energy that exists to solve your problems. If you have lived for fifty years, by now you know from your own experience that you can handle your problems in life. You can surely live without worrying for another fifty years based on your experience.

Bliss provides energy to face and solve problems. When you are not blissful, that energy is used to create more problems. That is the problem! When you are blissful, you disconnect from worries and use the energy to solve problems.

In a physiological sense also, researchers have found that when the ‘bliss’ chemical dopamine is released into the body, the frontal lobes in the brain which are primarily responsible for intelligence and wisdom start working much more efficiently. When you are really blissful you work with higher intelligence. That is why you will find when you are very happy and without worry for a few minutes, many creative and exciting ideas are expressed from inside you.

source: Living Enlightenment