Intelligence is Preverbal

Do you feel completely relaxed at any time?

I mean when the body drops to zero. When the earth bears all of you. When you feel nothing, and yet feel more alive than ever.

I hope it happens to you in deep sleep. For most people, it never happens awake.

The body stays taut. You bioengineer your way through the medicine cabinet, fueled by pseudo-knowledge from Reddit. For some, it is yoga. For others, Pilates, gyms, parks, drugs. The elusive zero remains sparse.

And it is excruciating.

It fuels an ever-raging frustration at not feeling comfortable. Every honk, every rage, every anger, every hate, every jealousy, every envy. All external manifestations of the inner frustration.

You need to wake up.

But before committing to four hours of sitting practice, you need to survive ten minutes of sitting. Actually, you know what, for God's sake, do not do more sitting practice.

Parents of children who are students, who themselves were students at various esteemed, or forever-shall-remain-unnamed, educational institutions: do you see how unnatural it is to lock down your children and force them to memorize and obey, all while sitting in the most unnatural positions?

Just because you are used to it does not mean you cannot call it what it is.

Education as we currently enforce it is useless, harmful, hilarious, and horrorful.

And then, when you are sufficiently educated, you realize, to your horror, that the rest of your life is more of the same.

Most career paths let you lord over the juniors, so there are obvious perks. But lording over some also means being lorded over by many. One side of that relationship is always more crowded.

And let me tell you this: nobody is happy here.

Because we live such unnatural lives.

And you will never be rid of this by effort. No matter what you try. There is nothing you can do to stop it, because to stop it there must be some intelligence. And it is hard to hear the nightingale while the alarms are going off.

Reality itself is not confused. The universe is not anxious. It is magical, precise, and indestructible, no matter what thought projects onto it.

Thinking is why you perceive confusion.

When you see someone die and immediately foresee your own final end, that is thinking. It is an application of memory.

This thought, without doubt, helped us live longer. It shielded us from many of the vagaries of nature. But when most of what it could do was done, it overstepped into the world.

It created time.

The idea of time is an artifact of thinking. Today is Friday. This is east, west, north, south. All ideas. If you can utter it by exhaling air noisily through your mouth, it is an idea.

Thinking is also an act of splitting.

Most of what we call rationality, or the study of any natural order, is an exercise in classification and naming. Somehow, thought cannot help but create boundary.

Once thought created you, it also necessarily had to draw a line separating you from the world, isolating you from it.

This boundary is not real.

But if you insist on it, then you are witness to the power of thought.

Thinking, although critical for survival, has become the bane of one's existence. It does not allow a moment's rest.

Even our machines now think better than we do, at least in the narrow sense of calculation, classification, and recall. Good. Let them have it. Let thought become a tool again, not the tyrant of the organism.

There is something preverbal.

It is here now, for me, for you.

Not just now. It never left.

Intelligence is an apt word for this preverbal inquisitiveness, this unbroken zero.

Anything experienced from a point of view is false.

The point is a mirage.

By the way, this continuous pain is an artifact of continuous thinking.