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What are the most typical signs of stupid… aka low or no intelligence?
First off, what do I consider intelligent?
Intelligent, if you look, has a certain appropriateness. Flow. Fitting. Maybe even elegance. Maybe even grace and ease. Workability. Life working.
Nowadays we hear a lot about AI, artificial intelligence chatbots. Notice that they don’t call it artificial smarts… It’s intelligence.
First the AI recognizes the question. Fully. Even its hidden dimensions, so it doesn’t only react to its surface, but it sees what the question doesn’t say. The intent. The possible confusion, the misunderstandings. And then looks to solve the problem set up… or asks clarifying questions.
Now let’s pit it against a human:
One of the shoulds sent to me today:
I should disengage from my conversation with my husband. I should have known better that he was just looking to rant and not want to talk, so I should try to listen and be interested, even if it’s the same rant over and over again.
If it were the AI, from the lack of question it would get that it is a stream of consciousness, a person who just wants to be heard. The moment the complaint is heard, the issue disappears. Nothing needs to be fixed… no question to answer.
I am putting this here, because this is, maybe, the most frequent sign of low intelligence.
Not clarifying the purpose of the communication.
So it becomes a should. or a should have… an afterthought. recognizing something for what it is AFTER the damage is done.
So what do we call this aspect of intelligence? We call it astuteness. Astuteness is recognizing/identifying something accurately. Acute in perception and sound in judgment.
In Landmark Education I learned that mice is more intelligent than homo sapiens.
You set up a maze of tunnels for the mouse. Put cheese in one of the tunnels. The mouse finds it, eats it. Wonderful. Next day you put the cheese in a different tunnel. The mouse goes to the ‘yesterday’s tunnel’. No cheese. So he continues visiting all the other tunnels, finds the cheese and eats it.
You put a human in the same kind of maze. It finds the cheese, it eats it, and it’s happy. Next day it goes straight to the same tunnel. It doesn’t find any cheese. It cries, complains, ponders. And it says: there should be cheese here. He sets up house in the tunnel. He wallpapers it. Watches TV there… NEVER LOOKS IN ANOTHER TUNNEL FOR THE CHEESE.
This is true about every single human on the planet. The more true it is the less intelligent is the person.
This is what Einstein meant when he said: the measure of intelligence is the ability to change. Change what you do. Change how you do it. Modify your attitude to match reality…
But a ‘normal’ homo sapiens will expect the cheese to be there.
- They expect to be important if they act important often enough.
- They expect to be deserving if they do their heroic sh!t and act eager often enough.
- Hell, they expect to know even if they don’t even understand fully what it is.
- They’ll expect to be respected even if they don’t respect themselves.
All the invisibles prove that homo sapiens is not intelligent. It may be very smart… but not intelligent.
Looking back, I could track as my intelligence rose by how long, how differently, how wide I was willing to look. By how long it took before resignation kicked in. How persistent, how consistent, how flexible I was in doing something that I used to do like a homo sapiens.
Shabby, sloppy, so-so, distracted, dutiful, jumpy, hopeful, cock sure, overconfident, all-knowing…
In my case overconfident and shattered that it didn’t work.
Or doing slash slash… tish tush… jumping without looking and losing everything.
The past got into my eyes… The Peanuts cartoon is the apt description of the human condition.
Any change can start making you more intelligent.
- Starting to see that all shoulds, for example, are not interacting with reality… but staying in the mind.
- Realizing that all shoulds are an effort to feel smarter than you are
- Getting out into reality and ignore all the shoulds… and start doing what there is to do… without distracting yourself with self-soothing.
Intelligence is doing what there is to do in the environment there is. Doing the ‘right’ thing, for the right amount of time, with the right intensity, for as long as it takes.
If you actually looked, you’d see that you may be ‘smart’, but to become intelligent, you have a long way to go.
One of the things I did, when I was a beginner in becoming a human being was notice when I expected ‘cheese’ by doing what I had always done, and there was no cheese.
I could say: ‘NO CHEESE!’ and own that ‘NO CHEESE’ had everything to do with me. That I expected something to go as it went once… or maybe the way it was supposed to go, should have gone. That I didn’t look before I did what I did. I did what I had done many times before with the exact result.
It does take a lot of convincing yourself to believe that your expectation doesn’t influence reality.
So whenever you find a should, for example, track the disappointment, the dismay, the disgust. They are signs of that expectation.
Expecting a different result.
And either stop expecting, or start acting differently.
This is the next assignment in the Reality Challenge.
I have a hunch that quite a few people reading my articles are trying to prove me wrong. Prove that they don’t need me, don’t need my frickin’ challenge… that they are good on their own.
This is the reason I am including the Reality Challenge assignments in my public communication. For those people.
I hope you succeed. I hope you feel good about yourself. Really, I hope that your desire for the self alone makes you happy. That this attitude (tunnel) has cheese for you…
I hope that the context ‘I can do it. I don’t need Sophie’ is an empowering context for you, and it will be able to take you all the way.
But if it isn’t, maybe it is time to learn that your context is decisive. Decisive of your behavior and ultimately your outcome.
So what is the default context for the mouse and what is it for homo sapiens?
- The mouse’s context is: If there is cheese I’ll find it.
- The homo sapiens’ context is: I know the cheese is here. I know…
Your astuteness measure in your Starting Point Measurements is a good way to know how close you are to be the mouse. Mine is 91%. The average of my students and clients is 1%. The average of humanity: 0.125% and it’s getting lower.
What surprises me most is that homo sapiens doesn’t take feedback at all. At best they take it as make-wrong… but not correction…
In the Health Measurements report I measure organ health, and then I measure what is the likely cause of death or a debilitating illness… if any.
The measures are feedback.
Feedback is like someone shouting: don’t go there!
A measure of 10 in the report means, the health of the organ is acceptable… 1 is a sign that death is coming. 3 is a loud warning.
A client asked for her health measurements back in April. Her ovaries and pancreas health measured 3… a loud warning. The cause I indicated was illness.
So she did nothing. Didn’t ask what illness. I don’t answer that question unless someone pays me to do so… even though I knew what it was. And I always do. I want to know. Because I care.
By May both measures were down to 1. She still didn’t ask what the illness was.
By December the growth felt incurable. A probable almost certain future of suffering, pain, and early death. And she still didn’t ask what the illness was.
Why? Because of the human condition. She knew.
And so do you. Know everything… except that if you actually knew things, life would work. But it isn’t working, is it?
It has always bothered me why people would ask for a report if they are not open for the feedback.
No cheese is a feedback… A feedback you habitually ignore, like the little optimistic kid who got a room full of horseshit for his birthday. He happily digs mumbling to himself: ‘this much shit… there must be a pony there somewhere!‘
I train my astuteness while I am doing other things.
I observe, make a guess, and when I get the feedback, I say… OK. And I get better eventually. About everything.
Food, energies, healing, the neighbors traveling habits, the weather, my clients. Everything.
Do you? Instead of that, you spout shoulds and should nots… and never learn.
