The Precise Time

Second Rung

The second rung, intellect, gives you something which is higher than biology, chemistry, and animal nature. Intellect is also inborn, just as intuition is, just as instinct is. There is no way to increase your intelligence; all that can be done is to make your whole potential actual, which will look as if your intelligence has grown.

The reality is that the most intelligent person uses only fifteen percent of his potential; the normal, ordinary, common person uses only six to seven percent. Eighty-five percent of intelligence remains unused even in Albert Einstein or Bertrand Russell. That eighty-five percent can be made available and it will be a tremendous growth. You will think that certainly you have grown in intelligence, but you have simply recovered, reclaimed what was already yours.

We have found ways to teach intellect and to increase your power of memory. All the schools, colleges and universities – the whole system of education around the world is only doing one thing: sharpening your intellect. But there has arisen a problem which was not foreseen by the educationists: when your intelligence becomes a little powerful it starts interfering with your instinct. A competition, a struggle for power starts.

The intellect tries to dominate, and because it has logic on its side – reason, argument, a thousand and one proofs – it can manage, as far as your conscious mind is concerned, to convince you that the instinct is something evil. That’s why all the religions have been condemning instinct.

They are just intellectual games. Instinct is part of your unconscious mind and intellect is part of your conscious mind, but the problem is that the conscious mind is only one-tenth of the unconscious mind. It is just like an iceberg: only one-tenth shows above water, nine times more is hidden underneath. Your conscious mind is only a tenth part, but it shows; you know about it. You don’t know anything about your unconscious mind.

The conscious mind is being taught in the schools, in the colleges, in the universities, in the churches, in the synagogues – everywhere. And they fill your conscious mind – against instinct. This is a very ugly phenomenon; they are making you anti-nature, anti-yourself.

But the unconscious mind is always silent; it is deep in darkness. It is not worried about your conscious mind at all. Whatever you decide with your conscious mind can simply be thrown away by the unconscious any moment, because it is nine times more powerful. It does not bother about your logic, your reason, or anything.

Once your unconscious is completely free of repression, your instinct has a different quality to it.

It is joined with intelligence. When your unconscious is no more repressed, when there is no Berlin wall between your conscious and your unconscious – the wall can be withdrawn because there is no repression so there is no need to keep the unconscious hidden – then you can move in and out of your unconscious as easily as you move from one room to another room in your house.

This is your house. Gurdjieff used to use this simile of the house, that man is a three-storied house. The first story is the unconscious, the second story is the conscious, the third story is the superconscious. Once your intelligence and instinct have no conflict, you become man for the first time; you are no longer part of the animal kingdom. And to me this is what is absolutely needed for anybody who wants to know truth, life, existence; for one who wants to know who he is.