Intelligence not Knowledge is Primordial

Intelligence is in the Origin and is the Guide of Life

Human cultural creative evolution is best understood when we consider the intra-active dynamism of human intelligence to be primordial, rather than acquired knowledge based on past experience. Intelligence, as the origin and guide of life in its continuous flux and newness, deserves our attention over knowledge or any other gains. Intelligence involves a free, flexible, continuously fresh approach to people and things. Freedom is necessary to act in the right way and to appreciate everything in its newness. If, instead, we project our past knowledge, feelings and images onto everything, we close ourselves in the prison of the past and remain unaware of the continuous creativity of life, of its new opportunities for a good life. We should not forget that only a mature, free and creative intelligence can synthesize when needed to open the space for divergent ideas, traditions, cultures, approaches, and wisdom. It is vital in our diverse multicultural, multi-ethnical, global world to prevent the great suffering caused by racism. One can observe that intelligent, ethnically diverse people tend to be more empathic than those from narrow-minded, homogenous societies.

Humanity has fallen into the trap of prioritizing knowledge over intelligence so that human interest has been centred on results and the dominant power they uphold. We have been dazzled by the results themselves as objects of possession and consumption. The focus is on possessing the result rather than the action and experience of producing it. A basic error leads to greed perverting thus the intelligence, which becomes a mere tool. What is more, while the knowledge created more specifically by techno-sciences can be so beneficial for human wellbeing, it can also be used to dominate, to make increasingly destructive deadly weapons. Ideas and thoughts have become far more important to us than developing creative intelligence, which is the agent of a true and good life, practical, and contemplative, of what matters. What good is it to develop theories of conflict resolution if we’re too immersed in our models to be able to see the essence of humanity and unable to reach out with feeling and empathy?

By paying more attention to results than to the inquiring process of obtaining them, we have become careless about the creative powers of intelligence and their healthy and lifelong development through non-accumulative or non-memorising learning. While results or knowledge accumulate and become increasingly complex, intelligence always remains simple, free and creative when it is carefully developed. In other words, the attempts to model or know an intelligent living (i.e. a bacterium, a brain, an ecosystem) result in complex knowledge. However, the living intelligence itself is simple, in no need of the complex knowledge about the brain to work well and healthy. Moreover, our current collective intelligence is ill (i.e. tolerant to war) despite the huge knowledge accumulated. As seen later, only an awakened liberating intelligence can heal our ill intelligence.

For example, it is easy to become lost in the complexities of techno-scientific knowledge but an understanding of techno-sciences from a cultural perspective is accessible to everyone if it is explained through functional intelligence (where its interest lies, how communication and cooperation is exercised, the method of research and the use of freedom to make abstraction). Taking this approach, we understand that techno-sciences (should) expand people’s opportunities to achieve their creative freedom.

Moreover, in the current accelerated social change, knowledge and theories about society become quickly outdated. Knowledge comes from our past experience and is very useful in dealing with the regularities in the world. However, knowledge, in particular knowledge about social phenomena, cannot deal with the unpredictable novelty, the unknown. What really matters is the flexible, free and creative intelligence to face the unknown and the challenges of constant newness. Intelligence is the only agent we share in pursuit of a good life together and for all.

Our misunderstanding of human intelligence is shown by the fact that we put it at the service of knowledge, rather than the other way around. There is a well-known joke about precise but useless knowledge. A group of people in a hot air balloon are feeling lost. They descend to approach a man walking in a field with his nose in a book. After yelling at him several times, he reacts and asks what they want. “Please can you tell us where we are?” they reply. After thinking about it, he answers, “In a hot air balloon.” They reply, “You are a mathematician, right?” “How did you know?” he asks, surprised. They respond, “You have thought about it a lot, the answer is very exact, and it is of no use to us.”

Knowledge as an Instrument of Domination

Mature, healthy intelligence does not stop with creating knowledge but rather ends in loving action. The focus on knowledge responds to the original error of considering that the world is pre-given and made of separated entities, subjects, possessors of knowledge and objects, and self- interested individuals unaware they depend on the common good and mutual care. As explained in these pages, individualism has penetrated and corrupted all domains of human life, especially in the West. Christianity proclaims the salvation or damnation of individuals, to end up in either heaven or hell for eternity, depending on God’s judgement at the moment of death, thus enforcing individualism. Even meditation and contemplation are seen as paths to knowledge, to some gain (i.e., non-ordinary experiences and ‘spiritual states’) rather than what they are: the action of liberating intelligence, ending ego’s domination and cleansing the mind of the burden of accumulated past experiences to recover the original emptiness of creative freedom.

Individualism has moulded knowledge into a possession that individuals frequently use as an instrument of domination (i.e., in colonialism) and a primary good aimed at solving problems (i.e., current advanced societies of domination are called Knowledge Societies, when in fact the unknown is bigger than the known). Academic research, following modern tradition, aims to promote human welfare by improving the knowledge of various aspects of the world. It does this in the hope that this new knowledge will be used to help resolve social problems in a humane and just fashion. This approach is severely limited because knowledge is solely a means of the intelligence of need. Instead, to help us uncover new, appropriate ways for developing better solutions for the current appalling human problems, we need to develop a healthy intelligence. Only intelligence can fully embrace cultural human life in its five constitutive creative powers or CCP and its three dimensions. Only the healthy development and special care of these powers (interest, communication, subsidiary symbiosis, inquiry and freedom, the five fingers of everybody’s creative hand) can ensure a good life. The quality of results, such as created knowledge, depends on the quality of creative intelligence, the core of the quality of our actions and consequently the resulting happiness. However, when knowledge is viewed as primordial, the rising dominant power is a source of division, conflict, violence and suffering. How much does humanity and the Earth have to suffer to instigate an end to the destructive domination of power? Its persistence generation after generation has made us used to it, taking it for natural and so forgoing our actual power to create a happy culture.

An attachment to results and their possession has put creative freedom into second place. By focusing on productivity and efficiency, we forget that the source of humanity’s happiness lies in the social flourishing of human intelligence. For example, social justice is now understood as an entitlement to an equal share of society’s distribution of goods. If, on the other hand, it involved ensuring the full development of a healthy and creative human intelligence, a fair distribution of goods would be one of the many natural beneficial outcomes.

The fact that creative freedom is the origin of intelligence must be recognised and embraced in everyday life and lifelong education to achieve liberated intelligence. If we are unaware of this pure, clear source, we search for and attach intelligence to the static, temporal models of reality that it creates. Finally, the models stagnate and intelligence loses the freedom to flow thus becoming a programmed intelligence., tending to take on beliefs, behaviours, styles and attitudes solely because that’s what the people around them are doing. This leads to division, allowing domination by the minority and submission by the majority, and it becomes susceptible to corrupting itself. In the absence of an integral lifelong education, most people follow this path. This unconscious attitude of submission is so entrenched in us after tens of thousands of years of its practice (submission to sacred ancestors, spirits, gods, kings and their ministers, patriarchs, current nation-states, etc.) that it still allows the society of domination and exploitation to thrive.

Here I aim to invert the situation. I focus attention on process and intra-activity, on creative intelligence and its healthy development, on the agent of human life, on people’s true power and on the foundation of creative democracies.

Casual Creativity in Static Preindustrial Societies

Since the beginning of our species, characterised by the development of the creative powers of intelligence we have been inquirers: Homo quaerens. Bearing on the new freedom that semiotic communication allows, humans had for the first time in the evolution of life the power to create meaning and so create the culture in which to survive. Although we tried to understand our lives by asking questions, nature did not reveal all her answers to us. The most threatening phenomena lightning, thunder, hurricanes, and above all death were inexplicable. The need to face what was at the time the inexplicable and so feel secure moved humans to find solutions through representations of what they sensed to be the ultimate reality, the mystery or unknowable core of reality. In general, this reality was represented as supernatural dominant powers in which to find protection and help. They did this within the paradigm of their environment and livelihoods. Hunters represented ultimate reality with the world of spirits (i.e. the spirits of the ancestors) where life comes from death, herders represented it as the fight between Good and Evil. Neolithic horticulture was a pacific society, worshiping goddesses and, for farmers in the past, the ultimate reality was an almighty entity, a divinity at the top of their authoritarian hierarchical way of living where submission to dominant power became the higher virtue or value.

Preindustrial societies used root metaphors of the universe, which defines people’s relationship to each other and to nature, ultimately leading to a fixed system of values that directs each culture. As we will see this pattern of organisation cannot work in the present very dynamic societies where only a creative intelligence can face new needs and challenges. In the book ‘From programmed to creative intelligence I devote a chapter to these preindustrial myths.

Preindustrial humans sought protection, meaning and direction of their lives in an invisible world of sacred ancestors, spirits and gods with great powers. They believed in and submitted to them as a refuge in the face of human contingency. These supernatural dominating powers were considered to be creators of the world and omnipotent judges of human behaviour during life but especially after death. During life, they rewarded good deeds and punished bad ones, already creating a binary dividing system of good in conflict with bad. After death, they judged and granted eternal happiness in heaven to the just or condemned the unjust to eternal suffering in hell. While these supernatural beings were seen as maximum exponents of love, they never renounced their capacity to administer punishment. As written in a psalm of the Bible: “But you, 0 Lord, are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” To put it briefly, these beliefs were a powerful and very effective instrument of domination. The fear of punishment and especially that of hell was very cogent. For example, in preindustrial societies, a priest was more effective in keeping order than a garrison of police officers. It must be stressed that these beliefs were a functional product of the intelligence of need, of thought at the service of survival in preindustrial conditions of life, where order, security (submission to dominant powers from fear punishment) and static stability were paramount values.

As well as being products of fear (the main enemy of creative freedom and so of human intelligence), these beliefs were also divisive (collectives with different beliefs), contrasting greatly with the unique wordless and unconditional insight into reality’s freedom, truth, beauty and love, proper to liberating intelligence. Each religion proclaimed its beliefs as describing reality, as truth itself with the obligation to impose itself, thus generating conflicts and violence. For example, in the bible’s book of Deuteronomy Yahweh ordered Israelites to destroy completely those nations unfortunate enough to exist in the territories Yahweh decided to give the Israelites as an inheritance. Jericho’s complete destruction is a case in point. Christianity also practiced a new form of monotheistic intolerance. For example, the slaughter of twenty thousand Cathars, a heterodox Christian sect of thirteen century. In 1600, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake because of his pantheistic beliefs. Islam (this word means submission) extended creating an empire by conquest. Moreover, programmed intelligence’s belief in the dominant powers (divine and political) as the origin and foundation of human symbiosis and security was and still is the main obstacle to founding human life on the creative freedom of reality, which is our deep human identity.

Such submissive beliefs are at odds, though have coexisted, with liberating intelligence. The liberating approach never submits. It calls us towards creative freedom rather than worship. To use religious language, it would be to live and act as one with God where God is a symbol of creative freedom and unconditional love as inseparable from freedom. It has been practiced most often by enlightened minorities and I believe it embodies the deeper message of millennial wisdom traditions. This contrasts with the more widespread abovementioned (mainly Western) religious view of merely believing in a transcendent, omnipotent God who asks for submission to “him” and “his” ministers.

Mythologies created by thought have played a fundamental role in the development of the submissive approach, contributing to the programming of human intelligence. Mythical narratives, rather than being taken as the models or representations that they are (models or representations pointing to the unknowable) were taken as accurate descriptions of reality itself, theology trying to explain them rationally and enlarge their reach. Language, instead of being more humbly perceived as a communicative power to share meaning and ask questions, was seen as a tool to univocally describe reality. In this view, language can embrace and exhaust reality through a narrative taken as the only truth. It can easily be misused by those controlling the narrative, as a dominating or commanding power. The conflict between the different mythologies was therefore unavoidable and resulted in much violence. Moreover, using language predominantly as a tool to describe reality undermines our creative power of communication’s potential. Language, the main human power to avoid conflicts by creating new shared meanings adapted to the changing contexts, circumstances and interests, was and still is underused.

Basic values were understood as a list of unquestionable divine commandments rather than what they are: adaptable human creations for human survival and wellbeing. Submissive religion was therefore used by political domination powers as a very effective means of social control. Mythological narratives allowed for an implicit, if not explicit, alliance between religion and political domination powers. However, mythologies also served to keep the sense of reality not relative to our needs alive— a key to the awakening of liberating intelligence.

The unquestionable role of mythical narratives in determining societal structure was followed by preindustrial societies’ preoccupation with security in possessions. In particular, the land is the material basis of one of the first origins of confrontation, and conflict followed by violence. Surplus products initially appeared in agriculture and became the origin of urbanization, class division, and state formation. Possessiveness evolved as a basic human trait bringing domination and greed. Brigandage and piracy became frequent practices. Warriors and armies were required. The conquest of weaker neighbours to get wealth was a spread practice. As property accounting and record keeping emerged, rights and titles could be sustained by reasoned argument. Legal codes and law enforcement practices became necessary. However, even reasoning and dialectics were pervaded by the conquest or domination attitude. The divisive plutocracy greatly strengthened the human original error of feeling separated entities. Plutocracy is the perversion of the economy into an instrument of domination.

Possessions of goods such as land, shelter and cattle, of arms, beliefs and later of knowledge programming human intelligence and so bringing the end to the Homo quaerens, the inquirer, always open to the unknown. Most of the population was reduced to non-creative or programmed intelligence, first by mythical beliefs and later by knowledge for production purposes. In this ill culture, people lost most of their inquisitive power, which together with semiotic communication, subsidiary symbiosis and freedom are the necessary and great human intelligence powers that need to be developed for a good creative life, as explained hereafter. Only a minority of artists maintained their creativity from the very beginning of the human species (i.e., cave paintings). However, they were marginal in a society that tried to avoid important structural changes. Hence, the social impact of unavoidable human creativity was felt casually and slowly in other activities.

The humble and altruistic Homo quaerens, the inquirer, became the arrogant, dominant and greedy Homo sapiens, the ruler. The armed dominant power of the Homo sapiens programmed by beliefs and knowledge came to substitute the creative power of the Homo quaerens’ inquisitive intelligence. I argue that the imperative reversal of this situation can be achieved through living from creative freedom, the foundation of human life. In the book ‘From programmed to creative intelligence. Humanity’s radical mutation’ I respond to three fundamental questions from T.S. Eliot’s Choruses from ‘The Rock’ (1934): Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? I understand these lines as Eliot’s lament for the lost unity of human life and its intelligence. Mindful of this great loss, we must now become aware of the urgent need for - no longer the minority - but the majority of human beings to be living life to the full, through flexible, creative intelligences.

The need for Socially Embodied Creative Intelligence

During the European Renaissance, there was a shift from the preindustrial focus on repeating the past towards a new interest in creating the future. This change of interest marks the beginning of humanity’s great mutation, which opens up the possibility of living from creative freedom, whose agent is intelligence. Systematic creative research began to grow resulting in the Scientific Revolution of the XVII century, the Enlightenment Revolution of the XVIII century, the first Industrial Revolution of the XIX century and the present Fourth Industrial Revolution. All of it shows the great power of the interest or energy of intelligence in creating a better future. However, creative intelligence was considered to be an elite activity pertaining exclusively to specialists, mainly techno-scientists and engineers. It was divided into disciplines to create new knowledge, new understanding, and new products and services by particularly gifted and educated experts. The majority of the population was dedicated to productivity and so denied an opportunity to develop their innate creative intelligence by cutting their creative wings in the first years of life. Children are usually reacting to others, giving in or resisting, but in neither case acting independently, autonomously, pursuing their interests and needs. For example, to develop their innate CCP, in particular the power of inquiry, children need freedom, support, and respect. Thus, almost unconsciously, we have enslaved the children, creating programmed intelligence, a world of programmed intelligence generation after generation. Children have immense intelligence (not knowledge) but down the ages, they have not been allowed to develop intelligence’s three dimensions in harmony. Hence, the mutation of cultural species from a programmed into a creative one, which we desperately need to put an end to domination power, could not take place. Making it happen is our major challenge.

Intelligence, especially the silent liberating intelligence, is shared by all humanity as a common ground where we can meet and organize life together. The powers of intelligence are sharing powers such as communication to share meaning and symbiosis to share life. In other words, only intelligence can create the much-needed unity between humans and the Earth in the pluralism of life. Human intelligence is symbiotic, in that it develops through human relations and mutual care. An important theme along these pages is that intelligence unites us through the exercise of the creative powers (interest, communication, symbiosis, inquiry and freedom) constituting the creative hand. Conversely, acting from personal knowledge and thought, seeking to impose ourselves on others, divides us and often deteriorates into conflict, violence, war and suffering. From the beginning of human history, some six thousand years ago, humanity has lived in this predicament. Modernity even enforced it despite the material wellbeing it brought to advanced societies. The evaluation of individuals by knowledge possession in schools settles this division early on. And this division, exacerbated in our labour markets, social relations and economic organization, leads to a society of domination and exploitation we are immersed in.

Cultural intelligence understood as the creator of cultures represents the place for different cultures and societies to meet, understand each other by communication, share interests and so cooperate and live in peace.

Divisive thought is an aspect of intelligence that cannot fulfill the task of peacekeeper although thought does have its own function in the intelligence of need such as in the domain of technoscience. Problems arise when thought dominates human life, creating the individual and collective ego, keeping us separated or divided and so in potential conflict. This egoistic separation between individuals, groups and nations is the root of human suffering.

I focus on full creative intelligence and present it from this cultural, collective or symbiotic perspective and as complementary to the naturalistic one centred on its individuation. The role of culture in biology is recognised in the so-called interpersonal biology.

Not only is our intelligence mainly cultural but culture is also the most general and easiest way to influence intelligence’s healthy and full development (something we are still far away from). This can be safely achieved through lifelong education rather than transhumanism and post-humanism projects focused on physically manipulating the body and brain to create cyborgs. Under these proposals, the quality of your intelligence will depend on the quality of your bank account. They ignore the full power of human intelligence. Rather than seeking to fully understand who we are, they ask who we want to become. More often than not this is a misleading question bringing only conflict and frustration. Education is much more than simply programming the intelligence of individuals with beliefs, knowledge and skills as is so frequently done. True education means stimulating and guiding the emergence, awareness and healthy development of a free and creative intelligence, rather than just cultivating the memory as is so frequently done. Accumulated knowledge in memory is not a sign of intelligence but frequently indicates a lack of it, unintelligent computers would do better. The situation is continuously changing and the answers in your memory don’t change. Intelligence rather than knowledge is founded the human flourishing. Intelligence is not an individual private property to be nurtured for and by oneself, an error in the origin of egoistic individualism leading to inequality and plutocracy. Rather, it develops through the interactions between humans and nature and these intra-active, mainly cultural or collective qualities should be reflected in education. That is why comparing human intelligence with artificial intelligence machines makes no sense. Liberating intelligence, the foundation and warrant of a healthy intelligence, deserves but has never received special attention and so, the illness of the current advanced cultures (such as domination epitomized by war) leads us further towards the precipice.

We need a truly integral education of intelligence with its three dimensions in harmony, as I will explain in the book ‘The social flourishing of creative intelligence’. This requires creating the appropriate conditions in our educative community. Our educative community should have a warm, very sensitive and secure ambience where everybody acts as they are, an educator and a learner. Obstacles to integral education, such as individualistic selfish behaviours, dominant attitudes and insensitivity, should be removed. The students are co-inquirers in dialogue with the teacher. Their response to the question evokes new questions, followed by new understandings. Thus, gradually the students become really concerned with their process of learning. Moreover, teachers deserve maximum attention and respect from all of society, especially parents. They should be provided with suitable means to accomplish their key role in lifelong intelligence development such as periodic pedagogical advice. Quality education is vital to prevent collective intelligence’s illnesses such as domination and maintain a healthy, free and peaceful human culture.

In our global ever-changing societies, where the uncertain and unexpected so frequently arise, the application of knowledge alone, which always belongs to the past, is insufficient. The ability to adapt is highly valued in advanced societies where people change jobs on average seven times during their professional careers. We need fresh, flexible and creative intelligence to face new situations. Discovery, awareness and observation of the great creative power of our cultural intelligence and its simplicity is the first requirement for understanding and living joyfully in a very complex world undergoing constant change. It is the great inheritance of all humans and, while inherent in human nature, requires our careful attention in developing its main constitutive creative powers or CCP seen hereafter (interest, communication, cooperation, inquiry and above all freedom). We need to observe and so become aware of their ways of working in each of us, their allies, adversaries, obstacles and possible corruptions induced by self-interest. This is the best way to understand ourselves, and the world and so create our life freely. It offers a natural, innate alternative to living a second- hand life dictated by dominant powers who submit us to their propaganda through their control over the media and information technologies. Only alert intelligence can avoid this trap.

Our common ground is intelligence rather than memorised knowledge, which serves as the necessary means of intelligence, but frequently separates us and is used to dominate. For example, increased knowledge of the properties of the earth’s minerals is used by dominant powers to exploit nature through extensive mining, leading to terrible consequences such as climate change (i.e. average global temperatures during 2023 were higher than at any time in the last 100,000 years) and a polluted earth. Nature’s submission to human free will only culminate in suffering for nature and humans. The current immense accumulation of information and its manipulation by the technologies of information can serve as a powerful tool for intelligence if we learn how to navigate it. However, like the sea, its immensity has the danger of drowning out intelligence as demonstrated by the misuse of the ChatGPT.

Nowadays, it is the stealthy but powerful digital dictatorship, made possible by information technologies which pose one of the greatest threats to the healthy evolution of creative intelligence. We may be unaware of the extent to which they control our lives and our preferences. We watch how Chinese communist policies centre on gaining control over the nation but are often blind to how these ideals are exported to the rest of the world under the pretext of efficiency.

A friend of mine was very pleased that Google was always suggesting to him the music he liked. I told him this went against the discovery of unknown new possibilities by research. This attachment to the known is nowadays a common impediment to the development of intelligence. For instance, when we feel unwell or unhappy, rather than observing and inquiring how our CCP works, we look exclusively for information, for external readymade superficial solutions — often googling symptoms and treatments on the internet. Dictatorship, the lack of actual freedom is the end of the social development of creative intelligence (freedom must not be confused with mere free will, permitted but controlled by the surreptitious digital dictatorship.) We are already heading towards this dictatorship and will not change direction unless people become aware of, observe and understand this trend with full clarity.

Not an account of Reality

Usually, there is a great interest in giving accounts of reality, in particular about human reality. These are accounts of what we did, our evolution, our interest in knowing our future, and what we can do in the future. Surprisingly, much less attention has been paid to the agent of all human actions: our intelligence, which is frequently misunderstood as an individual attribute linked to problem solving. While endeavours like flying to the moon receive high praise as examples of human power, we forget about the most marvellous of human creations: semiotic communication, which is central to human intelligence.

In general, our focus of attention should be on intelligence as it operates in each reality. No matter how good and ambitious an agenda or plan of action may be, such as that of the UN ‘Agenda 2030’ or the Earth Charter, if the intelligence of the agents or people implementing it is flawed so will be the result. Why we do not give priority to collective intelligence, ensuring its healthy development in the majority of the population? The quality of our collective intelligence (whose development and health depend on us) determines the quality of human life. Our ill culture is the result of a lack of attention to the healthy development of intelligence through lifelong learning opportunities for all. in particular, interest, and so research, and resources, are going to Artificial intelligence rather than to human intelligence development, on which the health, wellbeing and maturity of humanity depend directly. This lack of attention to human intelligence is one of the causes of our ill culture. In other words, to have a sane culture start healing our perverted selfish collective intelligence.

In this essay, I do not and cannot try to give an account of reality, a new worldview, a proposed solution to challenges and threats, or tell you how to see reality, what to know or what to do. Moreover, we should distrust the mainstream world views controlled by domination power, plutocracy and imperialism, two main enemies of democracy, which pour vast fortunes into manipulating the political and media landscape in ways that serve their interests. Rather, I insist on the need to be fully aware of the nature and potential of human intelligence: the actual agent of human life, its foundation and actual power, which is at the hands of everybody to transform our toxic cultures into creative democracies. If the core diagnostic of human cultural illness is not accurate it cannot be the healing. This new perspective on human life goes directly to the heart or origin of our many crises, and points to the way forward for their solution: the social flourishing of the creative intelligence harmonious in its three dimensions functional, axiological and liberating. This is the actual human power to secure the needs and wellbeing of all. Ensuring the social flourishing of this creative power, something never seriously proposed and so never done, is to eradicate all cultural illnesses such as poverty, fear and violence, and ensure a free, peaceful, healthy and happy humanity on a cared planet Earth.

Every story about reality, telling us the meaning of life and our role in it, programming thus our intelligence, the religious ones (so effective in static societies of the past to keep human symbiosis) as well the industrial ideologies, have become obsolete. And necessarily so: they accepted division and violence as a means to solve conflicts; and with the current power of destruction, violence is a great menace to human survival. Moreover, no new story can tell us the meaning of neither the current ever-changing world nor who we are. Instead, we need to continuously co-create human life together, the task of creative intelligence. Otherwise, we live a second-hand life controlled by domination power and obsolete narratives.

There are many analyses and proposals to face the current serious threats to human survival: the obsession for economic growth, social inequality, climate change, nuclear war, disruptive techno-sciences, pandemics, the cold war between the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China, a worldwide digital dictatorship, etc. For example, the terrible and wide-ranging effects of climate change are creating turmoil in humanity’s common home. They are putting unprecedented economic demands on governments and so political turmoil, by increasing inequality, and pushing desperate people across borders, etc. However, these threats are so complex and entrenched that all proposals, narratives and declarations to solve them, offering a future to believe in, although necessary, are insufficient; to be effective they require an active healthy creative intelligence in the majority of the human population. This may seem impossible, but it remains a dire need. The role of a shared healthy mature intelligence as developed through its creative powers is to offer a happy life in common, without divisions, violence or auto-inflicted suffering.

Nor will I try to theorize about what we know and even less about intelligence, which is the free agent embracing all human life in body and mind. This is an unsatisfying task due to intelligence’s unpredictable creative freedom, in constant change and newness. Instead, we must become aware of and awaken this important agent of human life, its plurality of forms and its powers instilled in us from birth, just waiting to be fully developed. Moreover, theories are creations, which cannot capture the free creative agent creating them: intelligence surprises us with unpredictable newness.

Intelligence is developed by exercising its creative intra-active powers. This approach contrasts with the individualistic view of intelligence, which tries to measure and compare different individuals’ intelligence, but only fosters division and conflicts between humans. This misleading approach to intelligence ignores its collective character and the healthy multiplicity of its intra-acting embodiments and developments. The use of IQ tests (an individualistic functional approach to intelligence) is clear proof of the current misunderstanding of intelligence and of where its power lies. What really matters is the creative intelligence of strong teams which is so necessary to face the current challenges and threats that are impossible to deal with by individuals no matter how supposedly intelligent they are. The impossibility and inadequacy of measuring a child’s potential contribution to society through high school exams has culminated in only allowing a narrow percentage access to further education. Talking during an exam is condemned as cheating rather than praised as working together to find the best solution. How can we create good research teams in this competitive individualistic school environment?

The key question and corresponding research is about the development of intelligence through the exercise of its main creative powers while avoiding its obstacles and adversaries. This is accessible to everybody, unlike most areas of increasingly specialised knowledge. It is the most powerful way to face the current world without being lost and discouraged by the complexities of its problems, existing knowledge and theories. There is an urgent need to go to the foundations from which everything continuously arises: creative intelligence, the agent of creative freedom to renew our decrepit world.

The development of intelligence relies on language as a means of communication, of sharing or creating meaning, of mutual understanding rather than as a means for univocally describing the world. Used in this way, language can pave the way for living together in peace. Stories about the world have entertained us for years from Noah’s Arc in the Bible to more recent narratives on the history of humankind. They provide an enjoyable pastime. However, only those narratives that go further than entertaining, which invoke reflection and prompt further questions, can activate our intelligence and desire to investigate. These narratives can help to awaken and develop intelligence as the agent of human life and contribute to actual progress.

The affirmations in this essay are intended to raise questions and incite research rather than to contribute to knowledge acquisition. Knowledge is too frequently consumed rather than providing a stimulus to vital research. We are more used to conferences for knowledge acquisition than to participatory-led dialogues providing the opportunity to exercise the above-mentioned creative powers of intelligence. Requisite knowledge is useful as a tool for the creative hand rather than as the master. I do not propose theories or models as no one can give us the recipe for a good life in the current ever-changing global world; only a healthy, harmonious and mature intelligence can continuously create it.

This essay aims to pay attention to, care for and develop the powers of intelligence. Consider for a moment their powers: of interest as the mover of action, of human relations (communication and cooperation) in your life, of inquiry to face the uncertain and the unknown, and of the necessary freedom to not fall prisoner to dominant power, is it the ego or plutocracy and imperialism. Nowadays, the powers of intelligence are in danger as many people unconsciously move from being liberated to programmed intelligence through excessive exposure to social media. During this process, the dominant powers control the people more easily through sophisticated information technologies. Finally, the dominant powers know the people better than the people themselves do and freedom is lost. I will pay special attention to freedom and its liberating intelligence, the source of creativity, mainly understood as the continuous creation of human daily life. The creation and caring of a beautiful, welcoming and comfortable home provide one such example.

The level of caring for the quality of intelligence creative powers, the CCP, is then reflected in the care for the quality of human life. In particular, it ensures the quality of the different forms of knowledge we create together. Knowledge can then be channelled towards satisfying our needs and interests in the changing situations of the world among other creations, especially that of social justice and wellbeing. Only when each of us recreates the existing knowledge through the creative powers of our intelligence or creates new knowledge, can we actually know and be aware of the immensity of the unknown lurking in the known. Then the world is open and in need of our creativity.

The development of the Creative Intelligence is an Intrinsic and Central Human Right

Consequently, the lifelong healthy development of the creative intelligence of all citizens is an intrinsic and central human right. It should be the primary aim of society as it is the only power we all share and can trust to ensure social justice and wellbeing and thus avoid the self-destruction we are facing. For example, education in the warmth of a family should receive more attention and support from society, given its incalculable consequences for good or bad. A child’s experiences in the womb and during the early years of life greatly affect how their brains develop and hence their beliefs, feelings, and actions throughout their lives. Neuroscience shows that quality of care and education affects the vital neural structures of the brain. Furthermore, evidence of the enormous financial benefits of investing in parenting, early childhood education and assistance can be seen in countries such as Canada.

Why not give priority to research on cultural intelligence and its education over neuroscience rather than the other way around as currently happens result of the hegemony of functional intelligence? Then we have high-quality scientists easily manipulated by domination powers. Rescuing them from this domination by making them aware of the liberating intelligence implicit in their research, would be a decisive advance towards creative democracies. Body and mind, brain and intelligence are intra-dependent but it is our direct awareness of cultural intelligence’s working that allows us to care directly for it and so indirectly the brain.

In our concern for a different future for human intelligence, we need to recognise and embrace the fact that we are lifelong learners and educators. Accepting that we are born in a pre-given world, taking it as we found it, could be an unbearable weight for us to take on and so we should recognise that we are the creators of our society and so responsible for its working.

Still Immersed in the crisis of a Deep Mutation

As mentioned before, the European Renaissance began the deepest cultural mutation of humanity, the transition from the authoritarian, patriarchal and hierarchical agricultural paradigm of life towards a new one based on creative freedom. We are still immersed in this transition and the possibility of living from the enjoyment of many forms of creativity by the majority of the population. The door to fulfilment and happiness for humanity is open and waiting.

The deep mutation from preindustrial societies to new creative democracies has begun but not yet been accomplished. In particular, we need to put the axiological aspect of intelligence to work, creating the new collective values required to take the techno-sciences out of the hands of plutocracy and imperialism and guide them towards the wellbeing of all humanity.

Hence, the deep axiological crisis we are faced with. Our very survival in the current techno-sphere is at stake. Nuclear war is a possibility, among other scenarios of total destruction. In general, rather than sensing war as the most repulsive illness of intelligence, there is an incredible tolerance toward it as a future of humanity (i.e., in our entertainment as projected through commercial films and video games based on war). Either we eradicate violence from our brains, as an outdated inheritance from our lives as hunters, or it will kill us all.

The old world is nearly gone, and the new world is just coming, full of hindrances and crises, not yet secure in its arrival. This is characteristic of all cultural mutations. Remember the biblical narrative where the farmer Cain kills the herder Abel, showing the violence of the transitions, in this case from herders to farmers. The present crisis is whether humanity will survive this current deep mutation, presided by the hubris (i.e., systemic extreme pride, supremacy, arrogance and greediness) of modem Homo sapiens (this name seems like a mockery). Their individualistic rationalism remains mainly at the service of domination rather than mutual care in subsidiary symbiosis.

We live in no man’s land. We have come from societies with static stability, living in direct contact with nature (hunting, herding and farming), with well-established traditions founded on now outdated mythologies and an imposed system of values. From there, we have transited into ever-changing societies, living from the continuous creation of new products and services by nearly hegemonic functional or techno-scientific intelligence under the control of plutocracy and imperialism. Functional or techno- scientific intelligence is very useful but abstract intelligence is incapable of creating the necessary meaning and values to guide techno-sciences towards the common good and it is here that axiological intelligence comes into its own light. An intelligence programmed first by religious values created for preindustrial societies and then, by modem ideologies, which have made important improvements to social justice. However, in our current society, these values and ideologies have reached their limit for developing axiological intelligence. On one hand, the values of the preindustrial past expressed mythically, are impotent to guide the continuous technological innovations, as their control by plutocracy self-interest proves. On the other, the modem ideologies and other narratives, fixed and imposed systems of values programming human intelligence, are too inflexible to guide permanent change. Due to their rigidity, they lack the creative freedom necessary to fulfil the role of creative axiological intelligence. They are incapable of guiding the techno- sciences and taking them out of the hands of plutocracy and imperialism, a corruption of axiological intelligence by self- interest and domination power.

In the absence of fully developed axiological values, techno-sciences are guided mainly by short-term economic profit, ignoring their impact on society and nature. For example, the short-term profit model that we have created for transportation is not only unsustainable and polluting the air but also causes more deaths on the road each year than all contemporary wars together. Great corporations are increasingly deciding the direction of techno scientific research, guided by their economic self-interest and conveniently disguising it when necessary. So the corporation privatises the gain, and socialise the losses. Most corporations are programmed to maximise financial return for their investors above all else. Moreover, how can we feel proud about the conquest of the planet Mars given our terrible mistreatment of our own beautiful Mother Earth? I rejected an invitation to collaborate on a research project to improve the meat industry on seeing the lack of respect for animals.

In general, the creation of new narratives for the axiological programming of human intelligence is too rigid and so not adequate to guide ever-changing societies. We cannot pre-establish a given way of living but have to create it continuously. To guide us through life, we need dialogue and cooperation to create new meanings, thus enabling us to live harmoniously and embrace our diversity. Both are dynamic powers of intelligence, mainly axiological intelligence. Without a holistic approach to learning aimed at maintaining a permanent and powerful public flexible dialogue founded on exercising the other CCP, especially freedom or detachment from our ideas, we will fall into a digital dictatorship.

Need for a Harmonious Intelligence

Any culture’s survival ultimately depends on harmony between the three dimensions of intelligence; the cultivation of functional intelligence, the development and care for a new creative axiological intelligence and the awakening of the liberating intelligence. The axiological guides the functional and both will reach their potential for humankind if their foundations are rooted in the liberating, allowing selflessness and creativity to flow through all three. We need to put the natural, strong and harmonious intra-dependence of the three autonomous dimensions of intelligence into action.

I would like to encourage readers to create together a new very dynamic way of living cooperatively through collective, intra-active and harmonious intelligence. I call this way of living Creative Democracy and first write about it in the book ‘From Programmed to Creative Intelligence’.

From programmed to creative intelligence

In Creative Democracy, we live with creative freedom. Life is experienced as a whole, without divisions, conflicts, violence, fears, and the suffering that they all cause. This means breaking away from plutocracy and imperialism, as well as their instruments of domination, such as exploitation, lying, and war. These three are extreme forms of violence. It means putting an end to a society of domination and exploitation (of humans and nature) and its degradation of collective intelligence. We are destined for either a healthy collective life within creative democracies or complete annihilation.

The current imbalance among the dimensions of intelligence strongly favours the functional. It is the root of many of the world’s problems, taking us further towards the tipping point of destruction. Humanity’s self-inflicted violence, suffering and sorrow have constituted humanity’s enduring problem throughout the rise and fall of all civilizations. This problem has never been solved, to the point that it is accepted as part of human nature. However, this acceptance is no longer permissible as it is threatening human survival on Earth.

Human life has been dominated by though, the instrument of the functional intelligence of need. History shows that divisive thought is intricately linked with domination and exploitation and cannot bring about the vital experience of life-as-unity in the pluralism of its individuations. Divisive thought has too often been used to create models of reality, leading to suffering and leaving little space for the enjoyment of liberating intelligence. These models cannot replace the immediate sense of reality in the present moment, its truth, joy, and beauty. Models of reality should be at the service of our needs and interests and therefore under constant axiological and liberating revision rather than be made absolute and imposed on us by a dominant power controlling them.

A strongly creative axiological intelligence needs to be developed. It is the only fully dynamic power we have that is centred on interest, communication or dialogue and cooperation to continuously create the meaning and values capable of guiding functional intelligence and adapting to the circumstances of our current ever-changing societies. Neglecting the development of creative axiological intelligence and paying only sparse attention to the liberating is modernity’s great mistake, still waiting to be corrected.

Liberating intelligence offers freedom from divisive thought and the imposition of models. We have to recognise that the self-inflicted violence deeply rooted in our brains and the consequent suffering and sorrow is a deep illness or perversion of humanity’s intelligence bringing distorted perceptions of reality itself. This illness can only be healed by the social flourishing of our greatest but dormant power, the liberating intelligence, the foundation of a healthy intelligence where interest is love and communication and symbiosis exists as the communion and mutual service in love, as seen hereafter. Only liberating intelligence can transform our violent brains into peaceful ones and offer an alternative to the current path to self-destruction.

Learning from Wisdom Traditions

Although past belief systems are inadequate for today’s challenges, they should not be disregarded. There is much to learn from millennial religions and wisdom traditions, once their insights on ultimate reality are translated, (thanks to our freedom) into terms that are understandable and of help today. For example, it is remarkable the brief period (500- 300 BCE) known as the ‘Axial Age’ during which most of the main religious and wisdom traditions emerged in Eurasia. Most of them shared the wisdom of what has become known as the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have done to yourself. When read with the perspective of the present human needs, the wisdom traditions around the world can serve as the inspiration for the new paradigm of life: living from creativity. However, they first need to align with the new paradigm of life. For example, their texts and tenets should not be read literally but as symbolic language seeking to communicate wisdom. Their role is now to point us towards the unknowable, ineffable truth, rather than to describe it as some interpretations have claimed throughout history. The imposition of their ‘truth’ has generated conflict, violence and so much suffering, demonstrating the grave consequences of the error of trying to capture reality. The message of wisdom is not to capture freedom, truth, beauty and love in a model by using the categories of the intelligence of need. It is to live in reality. Rather than the blind or even reasoned acceptance of a set of formulated beliefs, true religious faith is the deep level of the intelligence constituting humanity, which I have called liberating intelligence. Hence, there is no need to express this faith through beliefs produced by thought. The healthy functioning of intelligence is tested by the harmony between the intelligence of necessity and the liberating one. Let me insist. While knowledge and thinking are important for creating models of reality, they neglect the foundational dimension of human intelligence: liberating intelligence. This is the immediate (without the intermediation of words or thoughts) intelligence of reality’s creative freedom, of truth, unconditional love and beauty, a subtle intelligence often dormant, only awakened in occasional acts of selfless love and the contemplation of beauty. Wisdom is the fulfilment of intelligence, the right action in front of the unknown, rather than great knowledge or deep thinking. As with all foundational things, wisdom cannot be defined but can be characterized as the harmony between the intelligence of need and the liberating, which implies the harmony between the three dimensions of intelligence, functional, axiological and liberating. Helping each other kipping liberating intelligence awake and paying sustained attention to the intra-action between the intelligence of need and the liberating is the way to cultivate together wisdom. Then the ineffable wisdom manifests itself in myriads of actions and forms of true love.

Wisdom is not the real domain of knowledge and thought, divisive in itself, and thus fragmented. Religion, philosophy and theology demonstrate how thought, the instrument of the intelligence of need, is unsuitable in their quest for capturing the ineffable truth of ultimate reality. To begin with, ultimate reality embodies freedom and so cannot be captured. Religions have used thought to attempt to capture reality in their descriptive texts. However, reality can only be authentically communicated through living, not thought. Furthermore, they have limited thought by constraining the intelligence of need through the application of categories such as punishment and reward (e.g., the promise of an afterlife: heaven or hell). Any attempt to limit thought is characteristic of dominant power. In turn, philosophy and theology have relied on divisive conceptual thinking in their quest for ultimate reality, confusing rather than insight into the core of reality. Truth, freedom, unconditional love, beauty and happiness are whole and once separated, they cease to be. Divisive conceptual thinking therefore moves away from ultimate reality. Thinking only becomes fully clear and helpful on the path to ineffable truth when founded on and at the service of liberating intelligence. To sum up, wisdom is the domain of freedom; nothing can be imposed, captured or categorised in the name of ineffable truth.

Thought’s questions and explanations can be more distracting than helpful when they dominate the psyche and pull us away from the experience of feeling the truth through living it, but the wisdom traditions can offer an alternative. Some religions can guide us towards the experience of truth, for example, concerning death. The Gospel expresses death to self - so necessary to a full life - loud and clear. The teachings of Buddhism and Taoism are presented in ways that are easily understandable to us. Buddhism uses concepts, while Taoism uses metaphors. However, both religions ultimately point towards the origin and intelligence as the agent of creative freedom. As individuals, we are merely temporary embodiments of this intelligence. Therefore, it is important to be aware of and live through this intelligence, which is a continuous process of creation. In the following pages, we will explore this concept further.

The transmission of this wisdom for societies that have to live from creativity cannot be done through traditional religious language, used under the conditions of hierarchical and authoritarian preindustrial societies where a minority rules and the rest submits. Firstly, traditional religious language does not speak to the new generations of techno- scientific societies: it was created for the old agricultural paradigm of life and so it is inadequate for the new paradigm of life based on creative freedom. For example, the terms such as lord, almighty or celestial king (suggesting both a supreme individual and a domination power) to refer to the ultimate reality does not work in a society in need of liberation and creative practices in teams. On the contrary, domination and submission kill creativity. Moreover, language itself is limiting. The main role of language is communication, not for describing a revealed reality. Hence, the impotency of old religious descriptive language to communicate the sense of the indescribable ultimate reality is now evident in the current techno-scientific societies.

Awareness of ultimate reality has to be communicated in terms of new symbols akin to the new way of living such as creative freedom. This is how I envisage the unknowable, the mystery, the ultimate reality. The true teachers of wisdom are those who embody creative freedom and serve human society’s unity, rather than seeking individualistic power under the guise of master or guru.

In this book, I aim to convey an understanding of the ultimate reality from the viewpoint of human intelligence and the five creative powers, CCP, mentioned earlier. I start at the very beginning, the origin of everything: the creative freedom of reality, which is governed by universal intelligence present in the universal web of intra-actions that make up the entire universe.

From this perspective, all aspects of human life from the basic needs to techno-scientific creations, from systems of values to the highest selfless acts of love appear naturally to be closely interconnected. They are more easily understood this way than from the perspective of the very complex accumulation of fragmented knowledge and thoughts surrounding it.

The wisdom traditions use the qualities of detachment, goodness, love, community, celebration and wisdom to transmit their main message; the need to break away from the dominion and separateness created by the ego, the individual and the collective. They are the main obstacles to living in immediate contact with reality, to living in reality, in its creative freedom, rather than in its models and they constitute an impediment to unconditional love and the origin of so much suffering. Deep freedom implies unconditional love, which is the interest in reality and the inexhaustible energy of human intelligence bringing the fulfilment of a happy human life. Thought tells us this is an impossible utopia. However, although the thought is good at attending to needs, it cannot tell us who we are, and what a good life is, frequently confusing it with pleasure. It is only liberating intelligence that can reveal to us what a full life is.

However, we do not listen to this deep message of wisdom. Some are still attached to beliefs (such as the promise of an afterlife of happiness), and others are immersed amid the louder screams of desire. This loss of contact with reality, its freedom and unity, truth and beauty has led to divisions among humanity, and consequently to the conflict, violence and suffering threatening human survival. We have neglected the intelligence of reality, the silent intelligence that is not centred on us, on our desires, fears and expectations. It is the mystery of unknowable reality, the reality of liberating intelligence, and the source of all happiness, found not in the future but in the non-temporal here and now.

Living spontaneously in the always new present, dropping the past and its memories, free of thoughts exploring the past and the future, is the pure and active awareness proper to liberating intelligence, the one dispelling the ego and so never judging. This awareness of our acts avoids the full automatization of the intelligence of need, making it creative. We can detach from the burden of memory creating thus our lives ever new in every moment. This is the proper working of intelligence acting always in the present. To face our uncertain future we need to put all attention in the present, from the clarity emerges the right creative and loving action here and now. By creating together a good present we secure the future. Frequently enough thinking about the future we are distracted from creating it in the present.

Awakening humanity to liberating intelligence has been a pending necessity since the beginning of human evolution. We have now reached a point of planetary destruction where we cannot wait any longer. In this respect, we have a lot to learn from millennial religions about their strategies for arriving at the hearts of the people. These include strong communities and the institution of the all-important celebrations marking the calendar of human life.

I will now briefly explain the more fundamental insights and reflections on intelligence as an agent of the creative freedom of reality.