“The mind, often mistakenly identified with intelligence, is neither its origin nor its expression. This distinction, far from being a mere nuance, dismantles a deeply rooted convention: the assumption that knowing is equivalent to seeing, as if accumulating data and information were a guarantee of understanding. Under this illusion, the mechanical operation of the mind is confused with the act of understanding in the full sense. But the mind, in its ordinary functioning, does not create: it only reproduces. It does not invent: it only stores and reorganizes what has been accumulated. Its agility, however sophisticated it may seem, responds to a previously calibrated mechanism that executes and repeats familiar forms with programmed efficiency. Even its apparent lucidity is nothing more than acquired skill.
The intellect—often exalted for its capacity for rigorous analysis—does not radiate clarity: it reflects it. Rather than opening a path to reality, it travels along already mapped routes, manipulating borrowed images with admirable precision. It does not proceed from a living source, but from an alien structure that imposes its forms. In most cases, its functioning does not spring from direct or spontaneous experience of the present, but from a system of previously established references. The mind, as it usually operates, does not create from itself, but resorts to learned patterns, linguistic, cultural, and logical patterns inherited from others. It thinks from habit, not from the freshness of perception. It consists of thinking dressed up academically, but lacking its own perspective. Hence, in this light, the figure of the intellectual does not assert itself as a creator, but as an interpreter, closer to the custodian who protects an archive than to the one who challenges or burns it from within.
Intelligence, on the other hand, does not need to repeat patterns or organize materials into recognizable sequences. Its appearance predates conceptual order, and for that very reason it does not act: it manifests itself. It does not divide, classify, accumulate, or store. Its nature is not technical, nor does it respond to a process of study or learning. While intellect demands external validation—authorities, doctrines, protocols—intelligence appears without warning or backing, like a vision that does not ask permission to be seen. It does not analyze problems from the outside: it pierces them with a gaze that dissolves their apparent consistency. In that silent gesture, it deactivates them.
Intelligence is not acquired or obtained, it is not accumulated or stored like knowledge. It cannot be taught or perfected through repetition. It reveals itself—or not—when the mind ceases its self-indulgent activity, when it stops revolving around its own conceptual ghosts. Its presence alone transforms. It does not construct inferences: it understands without transition. It does not reiterate the known: it transcends it without fanfare. It only becomes visible when thought retreats and the self abandons its insistence on making sense. For intelligence is not a mechanism that reasons, but a flame that burns.”
Prabhuji
