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Two Kinds of Intelligence

There are two kinds of intelligence:
one acquired,
as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts
from books and from what the teacher says,
collecting information from the traditional sciences
as well as from the new sciences.

With such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others
in regard to your competence in retaining information.
You stroll with this intelligence
in and out of fields of knowledge,
getting always more marks on your preserving tablets.

There is another kind of tablet,
one already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox.
A freshness in the center of the chest.

This other intelligence
does not turn yellow or stagnate it's fluid,
and it doesn't move from outside to inside
through conduits of plumbing-learning.

This second knowing is a fountainhead
from within you, moving out.

From Essential Rumi
By Coleman Barks

Maria’s commentary:
This poem strengthens me to act from my heart. It seems to me that my ‘struggles’ in my life appear when I’m debating between following the one or the other intelligence. I know I have access to that fountainhead and at the same time I see myself trying to live up to expectations of society and my upbringing.
This poem gives me also comfort when I’m frustrated with, what I label, my slow reading skills. It makes me realize that I did enough ‘plumbing-learning’ in this lifetime!

"Love is the energizing elixir of the universe, the cause and effect of all harmonies.” - Rumi

Maria, I feel the two intelligences in the poem you contributed are united by the energizing elixir of love. I feel this love in your music, the harmonies showing your second intelligence in expression!
Thank you, Cheryl, for sharing this Rumi quote today from HeartMath.

Rumi Poems

Your love lifts my soul from the body to the sky
And you lift me up out of the two worlds.
I want your sun to reach my raindrops,
So your heat can raise my soul upward like a cloud.

From Thief of Sleep
Translation by Shahram Shiva

Julie's Commentary:
In meditation outdoors in nature, flower-gazing in my garden at the vibrant colors of the Beloved's rainbow garden, my body begins to float in a spiral ecstasy of love, well above this octave, easily transported to the third heaven by the simple virtue of exquisite color, like ribbons of light ascending, like the flowers with their heads toward Heaven, drinking the sunbeams...

"Love is the Cure" by Rumi

"Love is the cure,
for your pain will keep giving birth to more pain
until your eyes constantly exhale love
as effortlessly as your body yields its scent.”

I can see and feel how love is the cure for pain. I recently asked to be able to emit more love and concurrently a painful karmic situation came to my attention. Intuitively, I know that love is the cure for this situation. This poem helps me to understand that pain will keep revolving until love is a constant flow.

In proportion as the Sufi loves God, he sees God in all His creatures, and goes forth to
them in acts of charity. Pious works are naught without love.

"Cheer one sad heart: thy loving deed will be
More than a thousand temples raised by thee.
One freeman whom thy kindness hath enslaved
Outweighs by far a thousand slaves set free."

from The Mysteries of Islam, p.48
by Raynold A. Nicholson
Rutledge, Kegan Paul, London (1914)