"Aliveness". Intelligence and the intellect that would have you divide IT.

Aliveness by its very nature strives to transcend words and thinking by living directly in the moment; by BEING centered in the DOING. It is a meditation in movement and therefore one of dynamic relationship and exchange. With Aliveness, idle contemplations are transformed into sudden realizations and entire collections of theory and possibility are expanded or collapsed through direct experience and awareness alone.

Aliveness by its very nature cultivates intelligence and coherence. Within Aliveness, both thought and action coincide and are through Aliveness, reconciled. Aliveness values involvement and not abstraction, direct
immersion and not diluted references. It is not intellectual but experiential, not about possibility but actuality. You won’t find it in scientific theories nor in secular faiths, but you can feel it in grounded experience and in the
billions of years of evolution’s being and doing.

How does Aliveness then ever become the confined property of debate, multiple definition, and categorization? Where then does Aliveness find itself divided, dissected and shelved alongside the antiquated and dead rituals and traditions of the past and passing? The answer is actually quite simple. Only by the intellect and in the intellect alone is Aliveness ever misunderstood, ignored, and ultimately betrayed. How so you ask and for what reason? Well, I’ll begin with the how and let you be the judge of the why and by what on your own. Hopefully that answer will be as clear as my definition of true intelligence and that of the all too often crippled imposter of intelligence that the intellect has become.

Aliveness is born of and bound to intelligence. What intelligence is that? That of nature’s very own first impulse to evolve. The intelligence found in every living organism from a single cell on up to the hierarchy and complexity of the entire planet itself. Intelligence as nature’s pinnacle achievement. It’s intelligence defined as the capacity of any living organism to function and operate for its own well-being, integrity, and wholeness and that of its species. It’s the great awareness in every living cell to respond, adapt, and evolve to change by becoming subservient to the collection of living cells it co-habitats within. The more intelligent the more it incorporates, becomes complex and structures multiple systems of awareness. It’s nature’s prime directive, it is its will to attain and sustain systems and its evolutionary impulse to adapt to and transcend threats to that very same intelligence. Ultimately, it’s intelligence defined as nature’s wisdom and universal awareness.

Aliveness therefore can only ever be discarded or divided by the intellect. The intellect defined as the ability to analyze, create abstraction, and exists in pure meaning alone. It’s intellect defined as the isolated reasoning and mechanistic logic that exists solely in and of its own self-referencing; semantics. It’s the awareness of pure left hemisphere processing with little or no connections physiologically or otherwise to the emotional, cognitive, and relational brain let alone the sensory motor brain. The intellect as pure neo-mammalian processing which spares no appreciation to the 100 million year old intelligence of the sensory motor and limbic structures that relate specifically to movement in space on up through to emotional cognition and relationship in and with the environment. It’s thinking free from the "reasoning" of intelligence to act and feel in accordance with its billions of years of evolution and cosmic awareness. Ultimately, it is the thinking knowledge of man and his civilization cut free from his active participatory relationship, role and responsibility to the larger collective of life and the planet.

Interestingly enough though, intelligence and the intellect are not differentiated from one another in any dictionary and yet in our spoken language there is clearly a defined distinction. Where we all have overheard or perhaps stated that a particular dog, cat, bird, rat etc were very intelligent we have never heard or said a particular animal was very intellectual have we? There is a difference. By the same token, how often have we read about or known of a brilliant genius with not a trace of common sense? How many intellectuals with their degrees and conceptual collections do we each know who make the most idiotic of mistakes with their own lives and ruined relationships by being completely oblivious to them? Indeed how much of all our recourses worldwide go to funding our military’s research and development which in turn supports the largest collection of our finest
intellects and creates the vast majority of our greatest technological achievements?

How truly intelligent is any intellect that would for pure intellectual understanding of a concept, create something that is to be used to destroy the entire reality that supports it? Certainly because something is possible does not make it appropriate and yet man divided, does just that, acts simply because he can or wants and not because he should or must. Quite immature an awareness isn’t it? Perhaps because intellect itself is new and quite young in the universe you might say. It is indeed nature’s latest addition to its intelligence you might think. After all, if we were to generally state for the sake of simplicity that intelligence is what governs a living organism’s best response to the environment’s demands then the intellect could well just be its most refined adaptation to date.

Yes, if the prime directive and impulse for nature to survive, thrive, evolve and operate for it’s own well being from the cellular level on up is being met. No, if for some type of cellular or system’s breakdown the prime directive and impulse is being ignored or denied because a system, structure, or cell is suddenly functioning solely for its own sake and by its own accord with no regard to the fate of it’s own neighboring cells or governing systems. This type of spontaneous, radical, and malignant expression would by all definitions have to be classified a cancer.

- Luis Guitierez

Copyright © SBGi. All rights reserved.