Meditations on Intelligence and the End of the World

Human intelligence is by its nature a force of destruction.

​Where there is no intelligence, there is life. This we observe to be blossoming, growth, development, and progress. See how it goes: flowers sprout from falling rain, animals chase each other and compete for survival, natural evolution puts new forms to try their hand in the game -- in these vignettes we see life.

We recognize purity and single-minded focus.

This purity is the essence of creation. For what we humans do not understand: creation is the natural state of reality. Left to themselves, organisms do nothing but create. Their existence and creation are inseparable. Every action is creation and life. Creation and inspiration is incarnate -- the breath of life flows through all forms to organize matter at its whim.

Overflowing creation and nobody is there to do it. This we observe.

And yet there is the writer at his desk, or the sculptor in his shop, or the engineer with his tools. They are stuck, deep in a search for creative impulse, leaning on their intelligence.

Yet they are just like stupid animals that spend hours attempting to swim upstream, constantly becoming discouraged when they look to the bank and see they have gone nowhere. The artisans, engineers, and dumb animals all three, only when they become tired and have no more energy to swim, find they begin to move effortlessly through none of their own doing.

Here we can see the value of our impulses, of our thoughts, of our desires -- they exist to busy us, and when they burn themselves out we go on creating, moving and living.

This we can say most generally: life is lived when no one is there to live it.

It is a great credit to our durability and adaptability that we humans have spread to every corner of earth, to survive in every environment and ecosystem. Surely the key to our success has been our ability to endure pain and destruction of predators and environment, but the key force of destruction we have evolved to tolerate is that destructive force of our own mind. This force we call intelligence, and is the antithesis of life, yet we have been born to tolerate it. Just as we break the body down to make it stronger, so do we break down the mind and strengthen it in exercising our intelligence.

The fact is, scientific research has concluded that our brains consume one fifth of the total calories we consume per day -- so high is the energy needed to combat the destruction that our intelligence creates for us.

Intelligence creates and does nothing.

Rather it cuts, divides, slices, analyzes. It imposes order on chaos, clipping off deviations like a mower removing overgrown grass. It creates rules that conflict with reality, leading us to attack and destroy.

But left out of the equation is the indisputable fact that reality cannot be destroyed. When we try to destroy it, we can do nothing but destroy ourselves.

Here now is the great perversion of our society in its implications for our well-being: It is precisely creation which we call destruction. It is precisely destruction which we call creation.

​ I regret to say that if that is not a recipe for calamity, I sincerely do not know what is.