What is an Intelligent and Rational Person?

By Peter Shepherd

Our schooling usually serves to develop only limited aspects of our intelligence - we have more to do to really understand life and develop the full capacity of our potential, such that our rationality is multi-dimensional and serves both ourselves and others, and expresses our true inner self with great integrity.

The reading-writing-arithmetic education we get at school focuses especially on developing our left-brain intelligence - analytical and sequential - a logical and scientific way of thinking. Of course, these skills are needed in the workplace - but if isolated this approach has limitations, it emphasizes separation, and it tends to serve egotistic mentality, making oneself right by making others wrong, reaching the top of the mountain first. Our culture is largely built on this approach and for a revolution in consciousness to take place, we need to move forward.

The right-brain has equal importance but is often neglected in our society. This is about a view of things that is beyond words, it is a picture of how our experiences relate to each other, how our understanding interact. It is the basis of our intuition, our feelings derive from this source, and from here we move into action, we connect through our heart to the body.

Connecting with the body mind, we find the built-in instincts, the fight-flight response that is informed by our fearful memories, and our heart-felt sense of knowing what we truly want. And also, crucially, when we are well connected - left-brain / right-brain / body-mind - we are better able to tap into our spiritual resources, our inner guidance that is informed by our essential loving nature.

What distorts the practical rational approach we learn at school is fears, regrets, fixed ideas (defenses) and prejudices. Transformation occurs when existing solutions, assumed truths and past decisions are exposed as unrealistic and self-defeating. Those fixed ideas shatter, and it's painful at first because one is exposed, but wiping the slate clean makes it possible to create a new and better design.

Intelligence of the heart is lacking in our culture, so that all too often, instead of responding mindfully, with integrated reason and feelings, we react with the emotional maturity of spoilt children. But emotional intelligence isn't fixed, it's a vital attribute we can continue to develop throughout our life, as we learn from mistakes and understand better the value of empathy and compassion.

There are many kinds of intelligence that depend on the combined resources we have at our disposal - emotional, spiritual, creative, social, logical, intuitive, literate, mathematical, scientific, the list goes on. And when we recognize the value of education, and the gaps that our career-based schooling has left unfilled, hopefully we recognize the value of ongoing self-directed education. Most importantly, this includes our personal development; this empowers us to break through our comfort zone and live a happier and more fulfilling life, through exercising free choice, seeing objective truth and realizing the highest degree of purpose.

Therefore we need to work on emotional intelligence and life skills, and we teach them in many of the Trans4mind site resources. Trans4mind's motto is: “Minds, like parachutes, function better when open” - free of cultural conditioning, free of trying to please others to meet their expectations, and motivated by caring instead of fear.

Inner peace is already there awaiting us, in our being, in our soul.