Intelligence is the accuracy of categorization.

The intellect is the faculty that helps us categorize phenomena. Moment by moment, we are sensing phenomena and categorizing them.

As you look around your surroundings, while lounging on a chair with your feet kicked up, on a beautiful sunny Sunday morning, you are experiencing varied phenomena and categorizing them.

The sunniness, the beauty, the warmth, the chair, the lounging—all of these phenomena are being categorized by you, as you appreciate the quietude of that beautiful Sunday morning. Quietude, Sunday, morning.

Moment by moment, we are presented with opportunities to improve the quality and accuracy of our categorization through challenges.

Challenging experiences challenge the categorizations that we hold in our mind.

When something happens in the external world that threatens our present categorization, we have two ways to respond to it.

One is to embrace the new phenomena and update our categorization system to encompass the phenomena. This is, truly, the scientific way, but this manner of being wasn’t born from science.

Another is to use our current categorization to reject the phenomena itself.

Such rejection is untrue, in that through that act of rejection, we are stuffing the new phenomena into a separate category in our mind that contains all the varied phenomena we have rejected over the years. It’s a poorly defined category.

It’s poorly defined because its definition is particular to the individual.

The Rejected category has guardians that protect our intellect from noticing the inaccurate categorization of all the disparate phenomena stuffed into it.

Let us illustrate this with an example.

My Politics

Let’s say that one of the categorizations you carry while walking around in your nation is that my politics is good, opposite politics is bad, which leads to a corollary: good humans belong to my politics.

And then you encounter a new human, who you instinctively categorize as good. Such categorization is often very instinctive, based on the felt sense of their energy that you experience. And then you start talking to them. The manner of your talking to them carries a subtle assumption that is hidden to you. The assumption that they must also belong to your political side, because you have already categorized them as good. And the category good subsumes the category my politics in your present categorization model.

As you continue talking, there are many moments that would reveal very clearly to a perceptive outsider that actually your politics and their politics differ in a manner that you don’t see, yet. Perhaps, it’s even quite evident to them.

Now at some point, let’s say they reveal this disconnect to you.

“Hey, just so you know, I hear what you are sharing but I don’t fully agree with you on the points you have raised” or a harsher or softer variant of that line.

That revelation turns into a phenomena that threatens your present categorization model. A challenge!

If one is not careful in such moments, the challenge to the present categorization model can be miscategorized as a challenge to the Intellect itself!

But actually, it isn’t.

In fact, it’s an opportunity for the Intellect to improve its categorization to make it more accurate.

Differentiation & Danger

We live in a differentiated universe. We are not in a blob of Oneness. We exist in differentiation. The differentiation is very profoundly complex!

The Intellectual path back to Oneness (you could call it Gyan Yoga) is to keep expanding the categorization models, allowing categories presently held to break when faced with new phenomena till the categorization is complex and vast! Uncountably infinite! That one has, no option, but to see the seed of God’s Work across all of these categories. The Uniqueness of each Category while also catching the thread of similarity across them all. Thereby merging back into the Oneness.

From uncountable infinity into unity.

That may sound fascinating to your mind right now indulging in this essay from the comfort of your digital device. But it can be a scary journey.

These categories—they offer a sense of stability and security.

The simplest way this shows up is say, when you enter a trailhead, scan and see that there is no phenomena that can be categorized as a bear, a category that is subsumed by the broader category of danger in your present categorization. That’s a relief!

These scanning mechanisms are always present, trying to protect you from harm and death, which is so beautiful, in a way. And yet, sometimes we forget that these mechanisms are made for us and instead we get enslaved to these mechanisms of categorization. We get enslaved to our current categorization. It gets rigidized in our body-mind.

Once anything gets rigidized, new phenomena that sit on the boundary of categories are evaluated as a threat because the rigidity is, inherently, fragile.

Consider a bottle of glass versus a blade of grass. One is more rigid than the other, and thereby more fragile than the other.

That challenging opportunity to pick between two ways of responding to new phenomena that threaten the current categorization lies the true test of Intelligence.

If you collapse in face of new phenomena, you’ve failed the test no matter what grades you can pull in standardized testing. Such grading is often a test of how well you are able to apply a learned categorization model.

It’s quite unfortunate that, that has become the prime mechanism through which the Intellect is tested. My friends, that does a disservice to the Intelligence you’ve been gifted by God.

That form of intelligence is actually the applier of it. Whereas, Intellect, itself is tested by your capacity to update (expand, or contract, mind you) the categorization of your mind to account for newly experienced phenomena

In my experience, that requires a different type of skill than does acing standardized tests.

It requires the skill of Breath.

The first gift from our Heavenly Father is access to persistent, comforting Breath. If you forget about this gift, and don’t prioritize it in how you live, you are more prone to collapse. In the face of that collapse, you are prone to incorrect, inaccurate categorization.

My Allergies

Let’s say you tasted a piece of bread a few years ago and had a reaction afterwards. Something changed in your body that was unpleasant to be with. It was a scary moment for you. Your breath got caught. Perhaps, your breath got caught, and then suddenly released, to set you off into hyperventilation. A panic attack.

As you made sense of that phenomena, your mind adopted a new categorization, from a place of fear or safety (as fear often masquerades).

I am allergic to gluten. A specific ingredient within the object that you had consumed from the external world: the bread.

Perhaps, it took a few such episodes for your mind to adopt that categorization.

Now such categorization influences how you respond to new phenomena in the external world.

Now you are in a different country, and the way they process the wheat there is different from the way they process the wheat to prepare the bread that you had in your country, where you had those handful of reactions.

It was a different season, time of the year. It was a different time of your life. Different past karmic seeds were fruitioning at that time of your life. The physio-spiritual body is so complex that reducing the complexity of a reaction like the one you had to this simple categorical principle: “When bread, don’t touch”, robs you of the fullness of your Intelligence.

That’s not to say you can’t be cautious. It’s okay to adopt caution from past experiences, in limited amounts. It allows you to embrace external phenomena in a slow and steady manner. But if you live rigidized from that experience with this simplistic categorical conclusion of an allergy, and then you catch another allergy to another visible substance like milk, and then you catch one more allergy, and now you are at this dinner gathering in a subculture that has truly embraced allergies and embraced the notion that inclusiveness requires us all to lead with neutralized framings of the challenges from our past like pronouns or allergies. And you’ve gone to this dinner gathering because you were feeling alone in the lonely, isolated modern life that we all have agreed to in the West, in service of our individuation. You’ve been wanting quality company. Quality company is often very attentive. So subtly, you’ve been yearning for some attention.

At the beginning of that dinner gathering, they announce: Please share the food you have brought and the allergens in them. The host, before they invite you, ask you: “What allergies do you have?”, subtly presenting the orientation of this subculture that has assumed that allergies are real and can be possessed. As real as bread and milk.

In that moment, you feel the care of the host for you. And incorrectly, you associate, unknowingly so, that care to this part of your identity that holds the allergy, which further strengthens the categorization of yourself as allergic to these visible food products, bread and milk.

And then, God forbid, you develop allergies to invisible items like mold, and it makes you even more susceptible to incorrectly categorizing phenomena where your breath catches. And you panic in response to an external stimuli because there’s something in you that is trying to leave you, and instead, it finds an avenue to stay within you as your mind categorizes that phenomena as purely caused by the external trigger, assigning full responsibility onto the external trigger: bread, milk or mold.

Now you happen to hear now and then stories from the New Testament of absolutely miraculous healing. Visible maladies like leprosy disappearing in an instant. Your mind, now, classifies these as miraculous, which lives synonymously with very unlikely in your mind.

Would these stories be categorized as miraculous, had you adopted caution while having refused the identity categorizations that this subculture upholds as real?

I don’t know. I truly don’t know.