Things are happening faster as time progresses, and so we need a fast track in the direction of freedom of intelligence.
How are we going to handle the "islands" of intractable stupidity and wrong-headedness that beseige us, that put the brakes on our ability to integrate and grow, to adapt and innovate, in response to the needs of the times?
What we would do well to understand is that we are not in a state of "not enough", but that we are in our own way. I'm now going to talk about, "being in our own way."
The usual approach to problems is to reinforce our current ways of doing things or to search for an alternative. Those seem to be our only alternatives. The amount of effort goes up, and with it, the amount of frustration.
Then comes a hardened state and a "getting used to" the hardened state: desensitization. We become insistent, demanding -- and stupid, entrenched in our arbitrary ways and orthodox beliefs. We search for answers along familiar lines and avoid anything much different.
And at the root of this stupidity is being in our own way and not knowing it. The mind densifies and becomes persistent with less and less time between thoughts, the density of thought increasing, the rapidity of thought increasing, and a loss of clarity -- not only of thought, but also of speech.
Remember that next time someone fast-talks faster than you can understand because they don't articulate their words, clearly; you can hear this fault in many movies, as actors strive for "realism"; at airport boarding gates, in technical support interactions, and in casual social settings.
Mental density manifests as confusion, excessive forcefulness of speech (including hype and volume level) and impaired ability to change, inability to listen well, inability to teach well, and in inability to speak well -- in run-on sentences, poor listening, the tendency to interrupt, and indistinct (slurred or poorly articulated) speech.
The person may become a juggernaut who barges forward -- or intends to -- to get their own way, desperately unintelligent, boxed in, and insistent upon more of the same -- or upon a "something else" that they can't quite articulate. They become like political party -- if only a party of one.
All self-reinforcing, in their own own way, not knowing it, and looking for relief from others and the world -- sometimes by force.
Because they/we know of no better way, we are loaded with ourselves, our story, our history, and driving forward according to what we see in the rear view mirror of memory.
Our resources and capacity may be about used up, but that's how we tend to do it -- to little benefit.
It's time to reclaim our freedom from the burden of ourselves, so we have more capacity to speak, listen and hear; time to recapture some of our intelligence, to make room for imagination to provide a cornucopia of resourcefulness that otherwise, too often, becomes similar to what hasn't worked, before.
How can we change? What would have to happen?
A shift from tumult and circumstance, regathering our power of attention and intention, is what we need.
With that motive, resources exist.
There are a huge variety of offerings of instruction toward that end, and much "popular wisdom" that isn't wise.
What the abundance of conventional offerings shares in common is that, at their foundation, they employ and deploy the potentialities of the four expressions of intelligence -- imagination, attention, memory, and intention.
But, they deploy one or two of those four expressions of intelligence required to make a good change.
It's a little like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic than expressions of intelligence.
The more of a person's intelligence is available, to them, the easier things are.
When all four are integrated at comparable degree of coherence, a curious thing happens: the person comes to a restful balance with their faculties operative and available. They become more capable of creativity and of change.
There are such teaching streams. This is one.
One "product" of this process is "flexibility space": space to create something new and more effective.
It is not sufficient to "know what things are", to "know a thing or two" -- or to know a lot.
At best, such knowledge is a helpful hint where to look for various kinds of experiences and abilities. Knowledge may "get us to the ballpark," may "get us to the batter's box", but, when all bets are in, it's what happens in the batter's box that counts -- and that can't be predicted or assured by knowledge.
The "different approach" involves getting out of our own way through a process, not of addition (of knowledge, for example), but of subtraction: release of the binding quality of familiar ways of seeing and of doing things -- and accepting "not knowing" ("beginner's mind") as the foundation of action intended to produce new results.
