What Is Intelligence?

Intelligence is consciousness moving through patterns. In a process of reflection, correspondence, comparison, and extrapolation, consciousness forms a picture of itself through which it can contemplate its own nature. Once established, the patterns and the energy moving through them constitute the entity we call mind.

At the dawn of the 20th Century, mystics became enamored with the scientific discovery of unseen forces – electromagnetism. The spiritual literature of the day reflected their fascination. Great controversies arose concerning the nature of these energies – “animal magnetism” vs. Spirit, etc. Today, the analogy is computers. It is easy for us to envision patterns of intelligence held within shifting frequencies of light. In not too many years from now, computers will vanish. The technology will be so embedded into ordinary objects that it will be almost invisible. Touch a piece of paper, and it will become a newspaper. Speak to a wall, and you will enter a virtual conference room. Push on a chair, and it will transform into a table. Physical reality is merging with imagination. The electromagnetism of yesterday has become the handmaiden of the mind.

Patterns plus energy plus movement constitute intelligence. Bring in adaptability (the ability to change the patterns as conditions change) and you have adaptive intelligence. Adaptive intelligence can be self-replicating; it can “learn” as it adapts, because inherent in the pattern is memory. Memory is always dynamic, because in order for a pattern to persist it must have energy flowing through it. The printed page of a book has patterns of intelligence, but it is nothing without a reader. Is it so much of a stretch, then, to see patterns of intelligence in gravitational fields, or fields of magnetism, or in the interference patterns of light? In each of these is a matrix, a sequence of “events” that interrelate, that reflect, that “remember.” Intelligence is everywhere – in every atom, molecule, organism, system, social-structure – everywhere. It is the “body” of God.

Physical manifestation is but the stepped-down version of the dynamic patterns of intelligence we call mind. We know this to be true because every piece of physical substance is rife with intelligence – patterns of energy held in powerful bonds of electromagnetic force fields called “matter.” In reality, matter is mostly empty space. Even the interstitial “particles” are themselves nothing but packets of light. So, realistically speaking, there is no such thing as “matter.” Energy is all there is.