The Library
Intellect, reason, and intelligence are not convertible terms in this teaching. The first is the lowest faculty of the trio, the third is the highest, the second is the medial one. Intellect is logical thinking based on a partial and prejudiced collection of facts. Reason is logical thinking based on all available and impartially collected facts. Intelligence is the fruit of a union between reason and intuition.
5.7.1.14Listen He accepts all that mystical intuition can tell him about his own and the universal being. But he sees that it will not be weakened, it will only be supported checked and balanced if he listens also to what the rational intellect can tell him.
5.7.1.23Listen Intellect obstructs the light of the Overself.
5.7.1.34Listen Human thinking can only lead to, and produce, another thought, or series of thoughts. It cannot get beyond itself, cannot rise to any object that is not of the nature of a thought.
5.7.1.36Listen For the intellectual type, the essence of his need is to see that he is not his thoughts, that they are but projections thrown up out of consciousness. He is that consciousness, the very knowing principle itself.
5.7.1.73Listen Only when the intellect, after admiring its own massive historical achievement, will turn upon itself and perceive how puny is that by contrast with the still-awaited answer to the question, What am I?--only then will the possibility of higher forces coming to its aid be realizable.
5.7.1.82Listen The situation may be summed up thus: If the activity of thinking is directed towards external objects and inspired by the desire to attain or retain them, it binds a man to his spiritual ignorance. If however it is directed towards God or his divine soul and is inspired by the desire to attain it, then it leads him to spiritual intuitions.
5.7.1.124Listen First there must be intellectual understanding of the truth of his real being, then he can advance to the practices which lead to its realization.
5.7.1.129Listen The intellect’s finest function is to point the way to this actual living awareness of the Overself that is beyond itself …
5.7.1.133,Listen These studies do indeed open up the loftier faculties of human intelligence, faculties which bring us to the very borderland of insight.
5.7.1.136Listen Man’s self is not his thoughts but the consciousness which makes those thoughts possible. He stands in somewhat the same relation to them that they stand to the body: he uses them and partially expresses himself through them.
5.7.1.149Listen So long as these two faculties of human mind--reason and imagination--are surrendered to its animal side, so long will they prevent the real human being from being born.
5.7.1.162Listen The intellect is not competent to establish the existence of God, which only a higher faculty can know and consequently make any valid assertions about. But neither is it competent to disprove the existence of God since it can disprove only those finite matters which it can deal with: God, being infinite, is outside its reach in every way.
5.7.1.188Where intuitive feeling will guide him aright to his best decisions, calculating intellect will not infrequently step in with doubts or fears and rob him of them.
5.7.1.196Listen The danger of slipping into this overstress on intellectual activity and not retaining the healthy balance between it and intuitional activity, is large and real.
5.7.1.198Listen The intellect has so dominated the modern man that his approach to these questions is first made through it. Yet the intellect cannot provide the answers to them. They come, and can only come, through the intuition.
5.7.1.199Listen Logical thinking about a proposed course can never be equal to intuitive guidance about it. For the first is limited by the ego's capacity and experience whereas the second transcends them.
5.7.1.206Listen The intellect cannot know itself; it must have an object; but that which is behind it does know it. That Overself is the only entity which can know itself, which fuses subject and object into one.
5.7.1.207Listen … Truth dawns upon him either slowly or swiftly and then stays with him forever and cannot be broken by any form of materialism in thinking, of dualism in belief, or personality cult in practice…
5.7.1.213,Listen No single human faculty is alone adequate to the search for truth. All must be used, including intuition, and finally crowned by a new one—insight.
5.7.1.214Listen Men who have daily experience of a divine presence will not waste their time arguing whether or not a divine power exists.
5.7.1.215Listen ... Man began to think when he began to forget his Overself. However, the forces of evolution will so work that one day he will learn to remember his divinity and yet use his intellect at will without losing this remembrance.
5.7.1.219,Listen
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