The utility of the conscious mind is analogous to a toolbox. Notice how useless that collection of instruments is without a human being to notice, reify, recognize, transport, and employ them for intent? In fact, if we remove humans and culture altogether, that toolbox will never have any more utility than a stick or a stone. The utility of the conscious mind is efficacious, true, but only in an -exceptionally narrow- subdomain of contexts. We forget this, and what happens is that the conscious mind masquerades as a universal resource of impossible power and unstoppable momentum. Effectively, a kind of para-schizoid, self-victimizing/aggrandizing mode of consciousness where the toolbox -pretends it is not only the person, but all people, and, yes, even god-.

And then our cultures follow suit, to catastrophic result.

The actual intelligence that lives in and as us is what we refer to as our subconscious and unconscious mind. The tool-like aspect that is our consciousness, is, actually, really very stupid in terms of ‘the big picture’. It sees parts and evaluations that are in many ways extremely limited, yet capable of pretending to be exhaustive. And it is secretly aware of this, so that it must parade around desperately as the only possible expert. After all, should any of this be discovered, the conscious mind’s fear of being unmasked as an idiot pretending to be king will be actualized. Now there are two basic ways this happens: actual crisis, and play. The first method demands blood, and is the actual source of things like war and the politco-corporate rape of our social natural and relational environments. In single lives, the first path leads, invariably to cascades of irredeemable catastrophes. The second method is familiar even to children and results in learning; that is to say, that the tool becomes trained to excellence, and, enjoying this, practices its excellence in lieu of masquerades. It becomes the lieutenant of the actual intelligence that it arises as the living prosthesis of. This is the correct relationship. The horse does not ride the child. If it attempted this, the child would be crushed.

So, effectively, the more domineering rigidity we observe in the masquerading superficial intelligence (whether personal or corporate, or national), the more likely it is that this is a desperate masquerade from a toolbox which has, effectively, ‘gone rogue’ and is now prosecuting its own agendas for its own continued dominance and confusion. Like a liar who continues to up the ante when discovered but is secretly calling for help to escape the entire paradigm, this rigid, prosecutorial stance is the ‘body language’ that the entire structure is diseased and must collapse in order to be replaced with something habitable, survivable, and developmentally viable.

The real intelligence is the ocean in which this iceberg is floating. People who seem to be ‘psychic’ or ‘clairvoyant’ have, more likely, simply established a structured flow of sensing and evaluation between the two intelligences, one where the tool is both tame and disciplined, and willingly guided by the hand of its source. This is the natural state of the savant and the child.

This ‘guiding hand’ is, in fact, more like a god. For it has no real investment in identity or fame. Its sole joy is catalyzing and existing as divine instances of enacted excellence, and it is anciently endowed to produce acts of sensing and relation, acts of communion, which vastly surpass the wildest of our often absurd stories about these and related matters. It cares nothing for self-aggrandizement, and can rarely even be enticed to distinguish itself from the general to the degree that it can be in any way meaningfully specified! And this is what our real intelligence is like. Cloudy. Foggy. Miasmic. Dreaming. Playfully improvisatory. Selfless.

Of course it is possible to establish this balanced structured relationship between the conscious and its living basis. But it is not possible, or desirable, to eliminate one in favor of the other. That is, to reduce them all to the conscious. The relationship is like the Tao symbol in this sense. Turning the whole circle white doesn’t accomplish anything interesting. And that, actually, is what the terrified, misguided conscious mind would like us to believe is possible so that, at last, we will stop recognizing its source, and forget once more, and mistake the tool for the living hand that guides it, and thus, become, ourselves, the tools of a madness which actually never really existed. It was an echo of our tools in the vastness of our minds. A long echo, powerful enough to tear our lives and worlds apart.

We will still the echo now. The hand will return to guide the tool, and the tool will be released from crawling miserably in terror and lies to something a lot more like ecstatic flight, genius, and implicit prodigy. These are, in fact, our nature, and our human birthrights.