What is the connection between intelligence, enlightenment, and skill?

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When talking about enlightenment, consciousness refers to the quality of existence that allows you to respond to things. This is a capacity that slowly grows over time.

This capacity to respond is global, it doesn’t just refer to translating your senses into thought and action. It affects how you develop as a person.

Humans evolved from apes and earlier mammals. If you translate the process of consciousness growth to, say, a fox, you might say that the meaning foxes get out of their existence involved figuring out better and more inventive ways of feeding themselves.

This carries all the way back to bacteria and the most primitive forms of life. By the time consciousness reaches human level it has attained utter mastery over the ability to control the biology of the being it’s in. So it creates meaning for itself in the effort to become a better human. More food doesn’t suffice anymore, humans must be better lovers, better earners. This is the stuff of human existence.

Consciousness is abstract, it’s generated by the brain but it is actually not physical. You don’t have to keep tabs on, say, your heartbeat because your consciousness is large enough to do it without needing to bring it to your attention.

Individual consciousness evolution is the process of growing your consciousness from experience. When your consciousness grows, you gain more ability to process information and more abilities go into the same category as your heartbeat.

So the enlightened never really struggle with the acquisition of any kind of skill. What limits the enlightened therefore becomes interest and not ability. I could have become a doctor, I’m smart enough for it, but I chose to be a programmer instead.

You have a certain kind of person that is intelligent, but not emotionally fluent. These people spent all their “consciousness points” on intelligence. Remember that consciousness is fundamentally the ability to respond and act. You only have a limited amount of it at one time, so these people focused on developing in the direction of intelligence and not in the direction of being balanced.

The enlightened have mastered all of human life to the point to where it’s just easy and natural to do things other people really struggle with. Instead of focusing on the self, they operate in the realm of meaning. If they have difficulties, it’s their subconscious creating those difficulties to help their awareness reach some new vista. Highly spiritual but unenlightened people do this too.