How did you become intelligent?

Home - Quora Link

Hi Narinder, keep giving me these fun A2As.

Ordinarily I’d give a joke answer, but because I’ve devoted a lot of personal time already to answering this, I’ll just give a real one.

So, there’s this thing I call consciousness. You can have more or less of it. The more consciousness you have, the more ‘points’ you have available to put into various traits. It’s like an RPG video game but it’s way more difficult to figure out the rules to because we are characters in it, and the rules are way more complicated.

As you spend more time amongst your various lifetimes, your consciousness grows. As far as I’ve been able to determine, nothing makes it go faster or slower, it’s just a stable, solid thing that happens to everyone.

Intelligence is one of those things you can ‘buy’ with consciousness.

The real complicating factor in all this is that the perspective a being has when it is not incarnated is very different than the perspective the being has while he is here. For example, when you’re ‘out there’ you might not think of, say, nobility or riches, as particularly interesting. While you’re ‘in here’ of course you might think differently.

This is because you have all the perspective and ability of God to see what you need the most. Also I don’t think a lot of human-level consciousnesses are really conscious enough to have much of an existence in the Unmanifest. You just jump from lifetime to lifetime until you accumulate enough consciousness to take an active hand in your consciousness development.

I’m still trying to work out exactly how various traits work. Everything from physical beauty to the characteristics of your parents to the amount of luck you have can be influenced by consciousness. But intelligence seems like a fairly straightforward one. Consciousness takes root in the brain, and has the most ‘visible’ effects on it. But I’m sure there are still aspects of it that I haven’t considered yet.

One thing most people don’t consider about intelligence is that it doesn’t stay put. Most people think of it as something you’re either born with or not. But with hard work, or lack thereof, you can make yourself smarter or lose smarts you were born with. Consciousness doesn’t just manifest itself at birth, it’s there with you your entire life.