What is Intelligence?

I’ve been pondering on this thought lately, and it has come to my mind during past few weeks. What is intelligence, not the one with which you get marks or impress others by knowing one fact or two. What is true intelligence? The one which is not just limited to us, which is not just limited of our experience but is infinite, which is always there.

When you look around you find all these people with certain opinions of their own and when you observe closely everyone’s shielding their opinions which are not even theirs’s to begin with. We are a result of our environment; we live and die in it. And no matter how hard we try, we resemble that only. But, our understanding of the environment we live in is also very limited, that is where the conflict begins. Because we think something is true, we cling on to it even if we don’t understand it completely. After a while we start associating that very thing with our identity and that is where the biggest issue lies. The lack of understanding of environment limits our beliefs and opinions and that limitation itself gives rise to limited identity. That limited identity is false, and when we come across someone or something which also has this false sense of identity, conflict happens. Because there can only be a conflict between two false things, and never between truth and false. So, how do we get out of this conflict to begin with?

I am also a human being with limited understanding so are you, the only way we can actually start the inner revolution is by questioning everything and everyone, without having a presumed answer in our minds. We should start removing our biases, learn to accept that in every argument we think we are right, and we are arguing because we think other person is wrong which puts ourselves in the same spot. We are also defending our identities at all times; can we dissolve that identity time and again? Can we be free of it and realize that we are more than our identities which arises from lack of understanding of the environment. That way you start developing intelligence when you know that everything you know is very partial which means you don’t understand it in its entirety. So, the very need to defend it vanishes, the very need of having concrete opinions diminishes and the space to ask open questions to oneself and others manifests. From there you can know what true intelligence is, and when you think you know it, dissolve it as well because even then you will have further depths to reach. It is never a goal ultimately because it is not limited, it is infinite. So never stop asking.