Posted on
Sat, 01/19/2013 - 18:34
One afternoon I asked Physicist David Bohm, what is intelligence? To begin I suggested that intelligence is innate, not learned or accumulated, a spontaneous movement towards wholeness that permeated every cell of the body. David added, and all of nature. Since nature included everything intelligence be - everywhere. David went on to describe how intelligence is beyond description. Being the invisible ground of everything, anything we can describe is abstracted from this. The abstracted fragment cannot contain the whole. Each thought is a fragment. Thought cannot contain the whole. Thought is not intelligence. For thought to consider itself intelligence is a supreme act of misguided hubris. Hubris means extreme pride or arrogance. It often indicates a loss of contact with reality, an overestimation of one's competence or capabilities.
Long ago Howard Gardner proposed there are different forms of intelligence, linguistic, music, emotional, kinesthetic, etc. David Bohm was describing something deeper, something whole, before fragmentation. Joseph Chilton Pearce has devoted the last fifteen years to describing what he calls ‘the intelligence of the heart,’ which is not sweet sentiment but a universal movement towards coherence and wholeness, health and wellbeing in relationship. The universal intelligence of the heart can lead and inspire intellect and imagination to tremendous creative acts of wholeness. When intellect-imagination is cut off from this ground, it has only itself as a reference and quickly sinks into madness.
