Where is my intelligence?

For last couple of days, I’ve been thinking a bit about intelligence, its source and how it is playing out in my mind/body.

I know that I go to office, I solve design problems, I write code, I attend meetings to have meaningful discussions and I do many other things that require me to apply certain amount of intelligence in my day to day life.

At the same time, there are various intelligence things that happen within me & through me which are completely involuntarily. My heart beats; I don’t beat it. My stomach digests food and absorbs its essentials; I don’t do it out of my own will or I don’t apply explicit intelligence to this matter. If I get hurt, healing happens of its own accord. I don’t remember any time when I explicitly instructed my blood to form a clot on a cut that I got from the kitchen knife.

And then there are things which are at the cross of voluntary and involuntary intelligence. Driving is one such thing. There are times when I drive. I am alert, I am processing inputs from all my senses and taking all the driving related decisions. On the other hand, there are times when the car just keeps moving along with the flow and I just reach where I wanted to reach. I am all the time aware of the car moving and the act of driving. There’ve also been times when I was thoroughly drunk and I was not even aware of the car moving or me driving. But I still ended up reaching (safe & sound) wherever I wanted to reach.

So, looking at the plethora of activities that I do during a day, and the ones that just happen through me, and also the ones that are in-between these two extremes, I am forced to enquire about “how things really happen”.

It’s clear that I don’t evaluate-decide-do everything. There is also an invisible-intelligence that works through me and everything else around me which makes things happen. In fact, the other day, I was making a list of things that I really evaluate-decide-do in a day and it was very short. I found that majority of the things just happen.

This brings me to an interesting question: can I tune out myself from the evaluate-decide-do sequence? Can I delegate the task of “taking me to office” to the same intelligence that beats my heart. And if one day, I don’t end up in office, can I remain neutral about it?

Can I let things happen to me, and through me, and not act as the source of intelligence that made those things happen. Even if things are as routine as sipping coffee and watching rain?