Usually we think of intelligence as something useful, something handy, something that helps. While that is true, it is also true that intelligence is the exquisiteness of Being and its beauty. It is the exquisiteness of our Being that makes us intelligent. When you perceive how Being manifests in its various dimensions, you realize that intelligence is always part of its manifestation. The exquisiteness of its appearance points to the majesty of intelligence, a complete and awesome presence. – Brilliancy: The Essence of Intelligence, Ch. 1
The intelligence of Being does not function in a mechanical way like a computer does—by stringing together perceptions and memories. It is not like artificial intelligence, which is why artificial intelligence will never become real intelligence. There is an innate creativity in the functioning of Brilliancy. Intelligent inquiry possesses an organic, intuitive magic in how it arrives at insights. As a result, there is always a newness in the experience, and always an efficiency in our way of understanding. The inquiry embodies a lucidity, a fluidity, and a radiance that illuminate experience and make it possible for us to see more directly. Consciousness becomes so luminous that it cannot help but see more intrinsically, more to the core of the matter, always in a very smooth, easy, and lucid way, without effort or method. – Spacecruiser Inquiry: True Guidance for the Inner Journey, Ch. 27
One of the functions of the discriminating intelligence of true nature is that it operates as an inner teacher. I don’t mean that there is something sitting inside of us teaching us something all the time. It’s more that this penetrating intelligence gives us the capacity to research our experience, to investigate it and inquire into it in a way that allows the experience to unfold and become an expression of the freedom of true nature. It is as if we had at our fingertips all the discerning capacities—the telescopes and microscopes and MRIs—of true nature with which to investigate our experience and the situation at hand. And the more input, the more data and experience there is, the more comprehensive is the insight and understanding, which then guides and transforms the situation. The bigger the field of perceptions, the greater the scope and the power of the synthesis.
This kind of penetrating intelligence is not abstract, by which I mean that it is not isolated from any situation we find ourselves in. Guidance arises as a living and intelligent response to the situation. When we are recognizing the truth of our experience, when we are investigating and researching what is happening, it is not only to fulfill our curiosity and answer our questions. The intelligence of reality is engaged as a direct response to an actual need that is arising in the situation. It is not motivated by the need to discover something new or be creative in some way. It only responds to loving the truth for its own sake, and its responsiveness is attuned and sensitive to what the situation actually is. It is in this sense that this intelligence functions as a research tool—fueled by the love of the truth and finely calibrated to the situation at hand. – The Alchemy of Freedom: The Philosophers’ Stone and the Secrets of Existence, Ch. 9