Nonduality is intelligence. It’s the intelligence that animates you and me. I’m not talking about knowledge, and I’m not talking about IQ.
Think of it this way: imagine you’re a waitress—a really good waitress. You have knowledge and experience in how to do all sorts of things. You know the whole menu of your restaurant, how best to interact with your customers, how to add up the bill. You know a lot of things, and it took you a while to learn those things. So the more and more you do it, the better and better a waitress you are.
Now imagine the exact same person instead became an artist. The same exact person doesn’t know anything about being a waitress but knows how to take the paint and put it in the exact right spot on the canvas and how to build a picture together until it’s something that’s expressing what they want to express. Two different kinds of knowledge—exact same person.
So what is the spark of intelligence that could go either way, could learn either thing, could learn both things? You can certainly have a waitress that’s also an artist, can’t you?
Knowledge and this intelligence I’m talking about are different things. This intelligence is what animates us. We don’t need the ability to retain huge amounts of knowledge to have this intelligence, to be imbued with this intelligence.
One good nondual practice is to simply relax and let your intelligence bloom. It makes it easier to meditate if you’re kind of focusing on something, so focus on that.
What’s blooming? What is it that knows what’s going on? What’s this intelligence? What’s your very earliest memory? There’s an intelligence there experiencing it, right?
We can feel this intelligence any time we focus, and we can let it blossom within us. When we let the mind relax, the intelligence comes forth, and when we reach that place where we understand who we are under the mind, then the intelligence can bloom naturally.