Love has a complex beauty. What do you love or hope for? Who or how do you love in the now, and for how long? Don’t run away! This is going somewhere growing. I’m not talking just about fleeting feelings. I’m introducing you to the stable depths of your intelligent love.
That tricky word ‘intelligence’ is used differently in ways that may embarrass people, except that in recent years people-thought-leaders seems to have rediscovered its healthy roots. Following the work of Howard Gardner, there are multiple intelligences now being talked about, which are greening up nicely and growing to become quite useful and inclusive – yes, you are included in this process.
I looked at a few sources of the word’s meaning. You may like to see the roots of the word yourself, the etymology, for example at https://www.etymonline.com/word/intelligence. The core concept not to miss is the huge tap root that runs deep into the source of your life. Be patient, because first I need to unearth this word’s two main roots before describing the tap root. These are the Latin inter- = between, connecting with legere = to choose, select, or pick out. So, intelligence is someone’s ability to choose between. That means your ability to discern one thing from another. Being able to do so means also that you can appreciate how things or movements or processes or people are different. There’s nothing embarrassing about that capacity. Differences between people’s types of intelligence are largely about which of their senses or sensitivities or movement capacities they tend to me most discerning with. You could apply this to yourself to enhance your focus on healthy self-respect.
Now, the huge tap root that makes the processing of intelligent love so important as even to be the root of life itself (even unendingly so because of life’s potential for renewal in constant turnover) emerges in that legere bit of ‘intelligence’. That word meaning ‘to choose or select’ in Latin has its deeper root of leg- in an earlier ‘Proto-Indo-European (PIE) morpheme’ meaning to collect or gather. It can also mean to speak, in the sense of gathering words together to make sentences, but that is not where this post is going. The more important focus of attention for now is to notice how active a process is collecting and gathering. It reaches out into our ecology, and in to our inner reorganisations. Both go together in a feedback cycle of life.
Intelligence is not a mere possession that some people have and others don’t. Intelligence is the discerning selection of features of our ecology or environments (physical, social, mental, spiritual) that we can choose to gather to construct ourselves – body, mind, inner heart, soul, spirit – with family, friends, neighbourhood, Internet, communities, landscapes and waterscapes. There are some branches of science and philosophy that have followed a fashion to deny that there is human free will in the midst of this process of collecting and gathering. They have clothed themselves in a narrow-minded ‘belief’ that scientific method and logic can provide a full account in a linear time sequence of life’s adaptability in the face of changing circumstances. They would say it all happens ‘automatically’ because of energy flows, which our conscious reflections follow, rather than have the inner capacity to direct. But… by noticing the root meaning of intelligence, we now can confidently say that this fashionable belief in the dominance of energy-matter and information processing misunderstands the nature of human intelligence. It focuses narrowly on the leg- bit and forgets the inter-, the between. It omits the balance established between inner and outer life, between the inner reorganisation through the biophysics-biochemistry of memory recall and the outer predictability of inorganic physics-chemistry shaping environments.
And here our story of the sap rising through life’s tap root must gather together and then branch out into the light as we discern how intelligent love is life-enhancing.
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Love’s complex beauty is the patterning of movement reshaping life’s diverse forms from within, like sap rising through a tap root, in ways that hold inner states and radiate their harmonies vibrationally into resonances that connect all remote processes into one potentially responsive unity that is synergically creative. (That’s too long a sentence, but difficult to shorten.) Love, then, truly is liberating rather than controlling. This is true because the synergy of creativity diversifies life unpredictably from within and radiates its potential for resonances into the wide unknown.
Firstly, some of that resonance will gather responsive processes that behave predictably (deterministically) as the inorganic physics of energy-matter. That is a rather detailed way of saying that the inner human heart (and the thoughts unfolding informationally from the inner human heart) resonates with matter. Hold on! What am I saying here?
There are no ‘particles’ in physics, only more or less stable patterns of movement that are given fancy names and algebraic gobbledygook for onlookers. I am not a fan of the Greco-Roman fashion to talk about ‘mind’, preferring instead the Middle Eastern concept of the inner heart or core of life. However, to use that Greco-Roman language, I can confidently say that the New Science (of vibrational quantum gravity and of dynamic adaptive systems of movement among those vibrational patterns) is showing scientists, and hopefully everyone now, that mind and matter are not separate. They are simply moving with different patterns. And it is love that holds them together with harmonic resonance; and it is intelligence that collects and gathers the organic patterns of life into unpredictable movement patterns of life out of the more predictable patterns of physical substances.
Secondly, some of the resonance of love’s complex beauty will gather responsive processes that behave unpredictably, as living forms respond with organic biophysics at intuitive or sensitive levels of resonance with these wider contextual movements of energy-matter-information. All living patterned forms are continuously on the move within, even when from the outside they seem still. This is because they are hiding their informational patterns of life, probably because they are afraid of the partially unpredictable motives of predators.
A close synonym of ‘intelligence’ is ‘to comprehend’: from the Old French com- = with; prehendere = to grasp, to seize, take hold of. Both intelligence and comprehension point to a feature of conscious life called understanding. Understanding is the ‘with’ (inter- or com-) of the between that is mind-matter process unity. We stand in the gap, supporting the dialogues. Narrow-minded scientists and philosophers forget the ‘between’ when they mentally separate mind and matter into distinct concepts. To a scientist, the mind is something intangible (ungraspable) when observed from outside another’s embodiment. The scientific materialist’s mind is an unpredictable inner living state of energy-matter-information that is full of surprising responses when probed experimentally. Those separated scientific concepts, of matter, energy, and information, which together are the unitary process states of living and inorganic substance, I integrate and call informenergy.
Mind-matter is movement of inner states among wider informenergy, repatterning its many diverse radiances that are… intelligent love. The Eastern philosophies call this same notion of inherent motion mindfulness. David Bohm called it holomovement. In my Celtic Christianity mode I call this depth of intelligent love the grace of God. Some Buddhists may call it Tao, but of course, like the Hebrews they will say that this depth is beyond all names. The process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead described our engagement in this between as a process of prehending, by which we understand life. He wisely saw that we humans, indeed all living forms, call forth uniquely our concepts from this wholeness by changing our focus for responsiveness. We thus selectively gather movement’s synergic informenergy into a repatterning collection of embodied ideas that we believe is truth.
Truth is personal, not factual. It is our living relationship with the source of intelligent love. And… the truth is that we have the freedom of choice to turn our backs on it and focus elsewhere, if we want.
But if we want, we equally have the power of choice to turn towards the enlightening source of intelligent love, whereupon its life-enhancing synergy has the potential to green up our repatterning growth as we explore life together.
Photo by Nandhu Kumar form PxHere
