Ancient Wisdom 3: Four Levels, Six Intelligences

08:58

08:58

Ancient Wisdom 3: Four Levels, Six Intelligences

by In Memory of Trevor Lewis

Rated

4.5

Type

talks

Activity

Meditation

Suitable for

Everyone

Plays

171

This talk introduces four levels of perceiving reality and six different types of intelligence (hint: it's more than just intellect). These are part of a classical approach to education that provides a broader perspective to learning how to learn than the rote memorization of facts (and agreeing with the teacher) that dominates our modern school systems).

Imagination Intuition Emotional Intelligence Neuroscience Education Yin Yang Philosophy

Meet your Teacher

In Memory of Trevor Lewis

Asheville, NC, United States

Meet your Teacher

In Memory of Trevor Lewis

Asheville, NC, United States

Transcript

Hi, I'm Trevor Lewis and I'm here with Chris Largent and this talk is about the four levels and the six intelligences. Chris, Over to you. Thanks very much Trevor. This is a fun one. This is practically everywhere in the ancient world but sort of disappeared in the age of enlightenment as it was called, Slightly ironic phrase, Because what happens here is there's this idea that everything is contained within this reality and that's kind of the highest level and level is kind of artificial here because these are all interrelated. But the whole itself, People call it the one being, God, The Tao, Whatever it is, Or looking at a whole discipline like physics here as an example, Within the whole it's too big to understand. So how do you kind of break it down? Well, Within the whole you have these complementary principles that are working. Like in physics it might be motion and rest or bright matter and dark matter, Whatever they are. Most famously for us it's yin and yang from China, These two weaving together. And Walter Russell, The artist scientist, Said these basic movements are really important for understanding physics. And Tesla agreed with him. They actually knew each other. And that at that level you're just dealing with these unifying principles. To get down to be more specific, You have to have the level where these principles start giving rise to patterns. For instance, In physics, If you had something like principles of motion at rest, By the time you get to the third level, And again, It's kind of artificial, The level business, There would be laws. And the laws are these patterns that help us understand and organize reality in our lives. So that then the everyday level, And this infinitely diverse universe, Which is William James' famous phrase, If we didn't have the patterns and principles to understand it, It would just appear to be a bloom and buzz and confusion. But instead, The patterns help us understand that. So for instance, Someone without any understanding of this could say, Well, I was having this nice, Warm, Sunny time, And I was lying out on the beach and enjoying things. And all of a sudden, It started to get cold. And then the leaves started falling from the trees. Some horrible thing is happening. Oh my God. And then white stuff fell out of the sky by part of them up north. What is this terrible disaster? Well, If you understand the pattern of the seasons, And you're in the right, Far enough up in the hemisphere, You know exactly what's happening. Summer is turning to autumn, Turning to winter, And then you'll get spring and summer again. Those patterns help us understand what's going on. That's where you kind of get the free will debate that comes in. And it's always part of when I taught philosophy in universities. The free will debate can get a little silly if you don't have the levels. Because people have to figure out what's determined and what's not. Well, Just look at the levels. The whole is not changing. The principles interacting yin and yang, They're not changing either. The patterns, Like the laws matching the law of gravity, It's not changing either. When you get down to everyday experiences, An infinitely diverse universe, Anything can happen, Will happen. So all kinds of things happen. So in the use of seasons as a pattern, I don't have free will to change summer going into fall. I can't have it jump to spring or anything like that. However, I will experience that season on an everyday level in infinitely diverse ways all the time. That's where my free will comes in. I'm making choices all the time there. As one famous philosopher says, I'm choosing probability curves. And the patterns help me understand that. And one of the things that we tried to do in the last couple of years to have a sense of how we relate to those. And this is, Again, Slightly oversimplified, But most tools are like that. It's something that's going to be useful. So if you're looking at the intelligence as the whole itself, Well, It's just kind of like that joke in the cartoon that that intelligence is the whole intelligence. It's got all the intelligence. So don't get in a game show against God you're going to lose every time. It's just the universal intelligence. That's it. Whereas if you move down to the level of yin and yang, Our intelligence is it can grasp holes in motion are going to be our imagination and our intuition. Imagination will help us notice a beautiful sunrise, A beautiful sunset, A beautiful piece of music, Falling in love. It experiences the whole experience and our intuition gives us patterns within those holes. We're just starting to study that now in Western sciences in the second half of the last century. Whereas if you get down to the level of patterns, This is where the intellect kicks in. The analytic one that divides things into bits or filters out what we don't need and the synthesizing one that makes sense of it for us. So if the analytic mind says there's a rounded thing with green on top of it, The synthesizing is on a hill. So the intellect gets in there and with the patterns it starts saying, Okay, We can understand these things and organize our lives a little better. Then in the everyday, It's the physical and emotional intelligences that get us around. So my favorite example with anybody's favorite example is probably going to be if I'm driving my car. If I get in, I make an emotional commitment to not play bumper cars with my friends or run over innocent creatures, My physical intelligence drives the car and I didn't have to think about the thing. It just takes over and does it. These can be very impressive at dealing with the infinite diversity and challenges of everyday life. The only thing we notice is that the emotional and physical intelligences give us a direct experience. The imaginal intuitive have direct experiences that are holes. The intellect is always reflective on those other two. So it can be educated, But it can also be programmed. It can be programmed to believe all kinds of silly things because it's indirect. We think of examples through history where people say for a long time, People thought the earth was flat and some people still do. You'd say, Now, Yeah, People could think that, But no, Our experience is not quite that and so on. So the intelligences give us a sense of what we have to work with. And that's the other thing. We only, Classical academies want to train the imaginal and intuitive and would like the physical and emotional to be more and more involved. They don't train the intellect as if it's alone. They train it as if it's directing the other four. Whereas schools just try to train the intellect. In fact, If I can add one of the disasters of neuroscience right now is that neuroscientists are only studying the intellect and calling it awareness. And the general studies that are coming out, Those as a range saying, Well, We only tend to spend 30 to 40% of our time in awareness. So we need to try to expand that. No, You don't. You want the other four intelligences to be taking up their time too, Where the imaginal and intuitive are doing things that the intellect can't understand, The physical and emotional are doing things it can't understand. We don't want to force the intellect to be a bigger thing than it is. In fact, We had a talk here on neuroscience and saying the unconscious elements, Imaginal and intuitive, Physical and emotional, Taking millions of bits of information when the intellect is only taking in a couple hundred. So neuroscience needs to get away from that sense of awareness, I think, If they want to move in directions that can be more useful. And I think they will in the future. People are starting to get have trainings in intuition and valuing the imagination. We have a universe of CGI with a bunch of kids doing amazing things in films and art and so on. Imagination is going to make a comeback here. Thank you, Chris. Thank you everyone for joining us today. If you'd like to hear more talks, Please join us in the group Ancient World Wisdom. And if you have any questions, Comments, Please feel free to post them in that group. Again, Ancient World Wisdom. You can do a search for that group. Thank you.