We have made rapid strides in technology and the human brain has proven beyond doubt the enormous potential that resides within it.
Are you aware of the fact that on daily basis there are two kinds of intelligence that are operating within you? One is your intellectual intelligence utilizing the knowledge and experience you have garnered so far and the other is the body’s instinctual intelligence or body wisdom.
When you inadvertently jump out of the way of a speeding car, it’s your “body intelligence” at work. When you decide your food preference based on your mind conditioning it’s your “intellectual intelligence” operating. What we call “common sense” is a small aspect of our intellectual intelligence. For some people it is common sense to invest in a house while for some it would be ridiculous to do so. The way you were brought up, and your mind conditioning, will dominate your intellectual decisions and attitudes.
Now more than ever there is an urgent need to develop trust in our body’s wisdom and overcome the unwholesome practices developed by our mind conditioning and intellect. We have to consciously take this step to overcome the challenges facing the human race today.
How did we develop intellect?
In order to make a clear demarcation we can say that intellectual intelligence stems from the knowledge we gather from three sources
1. Study materials or Media
2. Word of the mouth
3. Self experimentation
Study materials such as books, internet, Tv (yeah that too!) have an huge impact on influencing our beliefs. Academic knowledge and know-how learnt through other media like magazines and newspapers, serve as references for our decisions.
Word of the mouth is what you hear from people around you and is the single largest source of your information on day to day basis. Most of your mind conditioning comes from what you hear from other people as you grow up.
Self experimentation is quite rare because it entails a lot of hard work and an open mind. If you are willing to test a belief for your own, before accepting it, you fall in the relatively minor category of “open minded” people. For centuries it has been the norm to accept blindly what has been told to us, or what we have read, without any self experimentation on our part.
Our intellectual intelligence is close to nothing compared to the immense wisdom of our body. In fact many scientists who use their intellectual intelligence to determine the source of our body’s wisdom have failed. It is not possible to understand the infinite using the finite. We can come to certain ambiguous conclusions but can never know the whole truth – only a subset of the whole truth can be understood using our intellect. But we strive nevertheless to fathom the unfathomable.
Where does this immense body wisdom arise from? No one knows for sure. Does it come from the cells or the cell matter? Does it come from the DNA present in our cell matter? If so what activates this intelligence? What is this thing called life force? There are too many questions which can’t be answered with confidence. The limitation being that the brain itself is just a small part of the body.
What is the purpose of our intellect?
Frankly our intellect serves a very limited purpose – that of living in a society. That’s all. Nothing more than that. Using your intellect you can go about your business on day to day basis – you can catch the right trains, use the right presentations, influence the right people, operate with individuality, procure food/shelter based on society norms and meet your needs for entertainment.
Unfortunately our need to be a part of the society has limited our reasoning powers. We blindly follow the herd. Take for instance the habit of coffee drinking. Your body clearly opposes coffee. The stimulation you feel after you guzzle a cup of coffee is actually the nervous disarray the body goes through to cope with the toxin. But we drink coffee because everyone drinks coffee. If I were to ask a kid to drink coffee for the first time – he or she would spit it out due to the bitterness and foul after smell. The other apparent side effects of coffee are stained teeth, bad breath and fatigue (due to enervation). So why do we drink coffee even after knowing all this? Because it’s a society thing.
Misguided Intellect
Most addictions became popular as a “society thing”. Cigarettes were in the vogue back in the early nineties. It was considered a manly thing to do. So most men would start smoking quite early; some even in their childhood. The first few cigarettes feel disgusting but then they “acquire” a taste (I can speak from my own experience). It took several lives to determine that cigarettes were causing all sorts of problems in the body starting with heart problems, digestive problems to cancer. But even then we still continue smoking, influence by our peers and role models; in many cultures it’s even considered a “normal” thing to do.
Our body has a keen sense for what is toxic and what is beneficial. It revolts immediately when something toxic is introduced. It violently coughs out the toxins of cigarette smoke the first few times but once the person start smoking regularly it becomes numb. It has not adapted, it has just been beaten into submission. Our intellect makes us believe that we can make our body adapt to any of our bad habits but the truth is far from it. The body does not adapt to toxins it just loses the vitality to fight back. It’s comparable to hitting a drowning man on the head to stop him from struggling!
Our intellect pushes us to work late into the nights, imbibing coffee to keep us awake, when the body is clearly shouting for rest. We think we know better. It’s only after we have a nervous breakdown do we understand that it would have been prudent to follow the body’s instinct.
The tremendous wisdom within the body
We breathe unconsciously but we do it without fail. Who does it? The body’s intelligence
Our heart pumps continuously close to 2,000 gallons of blood everyday. Who takes care of that? The body’s intelligence
10 million blood cells are created every second. Who does that? The body’s intelligence
If a piece of glass pierces through your body, it will be removed on its own without any manual intervention. What ensures this? The body’s intelligence
I could go on, because there are close to one million processes being performed in our body in a very methodical and precise manner to ensure our survival. One million processes!
In fact the chemical processes that take place within each cell in your body would put the most complex chemical factories to shame. Each cell is an organism in itself and coordinates with 125 trillion other cells to keep the body functioning. In fact the brain, composed of specialized cells, takes care of the coordination part using nerve paths.
Ever wondered about the speed at which impulses are transmitted to the brain and received back? How long does it take for you to remove from hand when you touch a hot stove? If the transmission was slow you would end up burning yourself badly. Signals are sent back and forth continuously in the form of electric impulses. Your body is the most complex electric grid you will ever encounter.
If you want to get a visual picture of the amount of coordination performed by your brain on day to day basis just imagine 36,000 earths each with a population of 4 billion being controlled by a person and operating with lucid efficiency. There is no room for error inside the body and there never is an error. Everything works in coordination and perfection.
I’ve not come to close to doing justification to the enormous intelligence of body. The complexity is mind boggling and the perfection of operation can only be looked at in awe. Suffix to know that compared to our intellect the body’s intelligence is equivalent to infinite.
Why do we offend the body’s intelligence?
In spite of knowing that our intellect is far inferior (not even comparable) to our body’s inherent wisdom, we sometimes arrogantly assume that we know better. We think that our body needs our intellectual help to function properly.
You might argue that there are times when the body does need our help. If you are talking about procuring food and shelter as a help you are providing, you can rest assured that the body can manage well without a nice apartment and car. If you are hinting at the medicines and drugs you pump into your body in the name of healing, you’re are wrong – the body is hampered rather than aided by your efforts at curing it (shocked?).
A good part of our intellect is geared towards helping the body meet its needs like food, warmth and security. These basic needs can easily be met without disturbing the fabric of the universe, but then there is the “other part” of the intellect that operates based on mind conditioning and cultural influences. This “other part”, in most cases, is the culprit responsible for the disarray of our body inside and our world outside. Using our keen intellect we have messed up even the basic intakes of food, water and air. Most people eat against a human body’s biological adaptations, drink sweetened water and breathe carcinogenic fumes of cigarettes.
Metaphorically speaking our intellect is like a babe in the woods. Our body’s intelligence is like a mature old man’s wisdom. There is no comparison. A person who has the common sense to leave the body’s intelligence alone will fare much better than the one who thinks he knows better.
Do you honor your body’s intelligence or are you steeped in the arrogance of believing that your learning is far superior to your body’s inherent wisdom?
Answer a few questions below
1. If you are not feeling hungry would you skip your dinner or would you have something to eat because you think you should not sleep on empty stomach?
2. If you have a cold or fever, would you let your body take its time to heal or would you rather pump it with antibiotics or other new age medicines in an effort to expedite the cure?
3. If you are feeling tired and enervated would you take rest or have a few shots of alcohol to feel better?
Unless you are well aware of the healing power and intelligence of the body you would have answered on the “side of intellect” for all the above questions. You will eat because you “think” you should; you will partake of medicines “believing” in their curative powers over the body’s self healing powers; you will take a shot of alcohol because you “assume” your body needs a boost. And you would be acutely wrong in taking each of the steps you took.
Learn to trust your body’s intelligence
May be you never considered this perspective – What if you stayed in tune with your body’s instinct and stopped imposing your intellectual will upon it? How drastically would that change your well being?
For starters you will enjoy a great health. Take for instance, your habit of drinking alcohol. You can clearly see that your body hates it. It causes nervous depression. The slurring of speech, the un-coordinated movements, and the irrational behavior is due to loss of motor control. If you drink beyond a certain limit the body vomits it out to keep itself safe; that’s because alcohol in your body had reached fatal levels. If you follow your body’s instinct you will stop torturing it this way.
What about the junk food you are addicted to? Does your body give out warning signals that it is highly toxic? Digestive disorders, flatulence, acidity, ulcers and constipation are your body’s cry for help. When you don’t listen to any of it the final result is something fatal like a tumor or cancer.
Your intellect cannot assist the body it can only hamper it. By realizing this truth you will earn the gratitude of your body. You will stop eating foods which cause negative reactions, you will stop overworking yourself and listen to your body’s need for rest, you will stop subjecting your body to medicines and supplements in the name of assisting its healing process and you will respect its self-healing, self-preserving, self-maintaining and self-sustaining wisdom. It’s this wisdom that has helped the human race survive for so many years against several challenges that threatened extinction for other species.
The intellect has its place and it is a beautiful gift. It helps you reason out logically and pursue creative endeavors. But if your body is not healthy the intellect would be just as incapable or perverted.
There are several myths and wrong perceptions which are prevalent in our culture today. If we just look around us and see the various levels of degradation setting into our society, it would confirm our instinct that something is not right. Listening to people who are misinformed or who are intentionally feeding you wrong facts, like the agents of the milk industry and medical industry, will lead to disastrous consequences. Your only protection against them is your intellect coupled with the body’s wisdom. Use your intellect to think keenly, perform self experimentation and develop an open minded attitude. Close minded thinking will keep you enslaved to your mind conditioning. If you come across any information that resonates as the truth, have an open mind to test it and if it’s beneficial accept it.
Following my body’s instinct helped me move from an acutely degenerative lifestyle to a very wholesome one. The benefits I have accrued along the path are what I intend to share with you through this blog. I hope this post serves as a base for the future posts to come. Have an open mind, test everything for yourself before rejecting, follow your body’s instinct and don’t be hostile towards a new perception.
Your journey towards life requires a foundation that is securely built on the model of trusting the body’s intelligence over influences of misinformed mind conditioning.
