Intelligence Is Relation

Dear Friends and Family,

I came upon an old memory this week, wondering about weeping as I walked along the river. In the reflections that follow, the memory winds around a thread of inquiry on intelligence and instinct, which we began last week in “Weeping Is So Visceral: Is It Absent Intelligence?”

I suspect this week’s reflections may offer further insights. . . .

I wish to say a few words about passages here or in other letters that may seem difficult. (I can only imagine that statement will encourage you to keep reading!)

There is nothing that I write here that you, of your innermost, do not already know. Therefore, let the mind rest, and let that inner luminous knowing meet these reflections, cogitating little but experiencing what the words shine a light on. And always feel free to ask if you wish for clarification. If you are wondering, chances are, others are, too.

Ever in gratitude and with love,

Renée

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When I was a child, my mother and father, who were not church-going people ordinarily, would, from time to time, take to seasons of going. I cannot say for certain why. Over the years, I have come to see these times as a form of prayer for my mother, perhaps even a quiet pleading with a God she hoped I would come to know, and a momentary place to rest. Ours was not an easy home.

One such season during Sunday school, I was given the homework of finding, committing to memory, then reciting next Sunday a verse from the Bible. The task immediately sullied my spirit. I was not a child of the indoors between sun up and sun down. Once home and free from the confines of church clothes and how a lady must sit when in a dress, I was sure to be in the woods or water or liminal zone between the two, wandering the edge of the lake where, by fragrance alone, I would know when I had come upon a bed of fish eggs, this bed only days shy of innumerable sacks bursting life into warming pools. Always, the wonder: how do they all know all at once it is time to go?

I soon got wind from a friend that there was one verse in the Bible of just two words. I was shy, and I did not want to cheat and so, I must have whispered interest to this friend with the hope that if she shared, it would only be that I had received and did not take. The words came tongue in cheek from my friend as if they were mere things. I heard them this way, as objects liberating me from the bondage of unnecessary things occupying my mind. That was all. Soon, I was back home back in the woods, giving little thought, I thought, to the verse. Who could have known this verse would grow in me for fifty years and wind its way into this week’s wonder?

. . .

Jesus wept.¹

Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus, his friend and brother of Mary—Mary of Bethany, believed today by many to be the woman who elsewhere is named Mary of Magdala, who

came with an alabaster jar of perfume. As she stood behind [Jesus] at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them.²

Tears come through “the intensity of the inner life,” wholly bodying forth the inner within manifesting beyond the manifest, spilling the oceanic unseen of you and me into the seen, lending one to an Other even when an Other is not near.³ Weeping comes unbidden and is inescapably human but not only human. Weeping is a way of Love, an expression of being’s affinity for being.⁴ Tears may be, in the wolf, the midnight howl of belonging. Tears may just as well be, in rain falling, the sky’s yearning for the inner feeling of being green.

Inside the inter-scape of Love is inner innocence unmarred and there, unhurt hope ever reaching toward. And inside every touch of Love is an equal and inverse touch of loss—already. Weeping gives away both, the yearning and the sorrow abiding already in life’s first breath. In Love, the inner is made outer and the outer is made inner, and weeping comes as an inner recognition that we indwell the living tissue of this endless inter-scape.

. . .

Thus the outer characteristic of those who choose the . . . mystical way . . . of the God of Love is that they have the ‘gift of tears’.⁵

In these words, one word turns us back to the final passage from last week’s letter. It is the word, choose. We closed last week with the following:

There are things that intelligence alone is able to seek, but which, by itself, it will never find. These things instinct alone could find; but it will never seek them.⁶

To seek is to go in search of, endeavoring to find. Endeavoring so, being—my being, your being—must necessarily transcend itself. We must go beyond the inner within as express relation with the world of things and other beings. We could say that what we seek beseeches us. What is beyond calls us toward. This, we might call the gift of intelligence: the inner within answering the ever-present pull of that which is always beyond.

Do you see? Intelligence is relation.⁷ Nothing more. Nothing less. It is what intelligence does that garners such human attention.

Answering the pull, self transcends itself, i.e. it goes beyond; and in so doing, intelligence transforms the beyond that calls.⁸ In the earliest apparent human acts, the intellect transformed what was immediate: two sticks gave fire and became ash; mud cupped into the hand, a warming vessel; a stick and stone, the arrow to pierce an ox; grasses, the baskets to bring leaves and shoots and berries to share. Every act of the intellect is an act of transforming the ever-extending immediacy of the world.

But the inner within must be blessed already with a certain knowing that itself is so, and with an inborn inclination to continue to be so. Of this knowing and inclination, the inner within must already know that the world is and the world is in support of one’s being.

Of the inner within, we are referring to an inborn impulse to live. Some call this vital impulse soul, the dimly lit kernel of divine origin in every living being.⁹

Every primordial impulse comes into the world with a certain knowing already that the world will support its life and how to turn to the world for this support and how to recognize this support as just that. This, we might call the gift of instinct: the primordial inner knowing answering to the origin/al desire to be.

You may recall from last week’s letter Aristotle’s obsession with the human soul as unique from all the rest, namely, as intelligent. Can there be any seeking (i.e. intelligence) without volition?

What is volition—at its very essence—if not the expressed impulse to live (i.e. instinct)? We come to see that intelligence and instinct are an unfolding. Together, they reveal a difference in volition of degree and not kind.

. . .

If we could peer into the inner within of all life, we would no doubt encounter instinct from the beginning, and of this, we would not be surprised.

But here’s where what we would see would differ from what we may believe. It is not that we would suddenly stumble, in ‘complex’ life forms, upon intellect as a divergence from instinct. It is that we would encounter glimmers of intelligence from the very beginning. All life, within its most inner within is already reaching toward. Life, by nature, is unceasingly transcending itself.¹⁰

And so, we come again to the word, choose. To choose is to answer to preference: I choose chocolate over caramel, this book and not that one. I choose the one I call my beloved. (You can see that in choosing, I am also chosen.) We can seek and we may find, but to choose is to let the inner within respond with feeling.

. . .

Could it be that weeping offers something vital we humans have forgotten about the inner essence of our being?

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A little PS

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1. New International Version, Luke 11:35.

2. New International Version, Luke 7: 37–38.

3. Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, trans. Robert Powell (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2002), p. 388.

4. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1959).

5. Tomberg, Meditations, p. 36.

6. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), p. 167.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York: Bell Tower, 1999), p. 79. Berry writes: “That such a vast complexity of functioning should have some unifying principle, known traditionally as the “soul” of the organism, is immediately evident to human intelligence.”

10. Teilhard, Phenomenon.