Question: With what special significance do you use the word intelligence? Is it graded and therefore capable of constant evolution and variation?

KRISHNAMURTI: I am using the word intelligence to convey the vital completeness of thought-action. Intelligence is not the outcome of intellectual effort nor of emotional fervor. It is not the product of theories, beliefs, and information. It is the completeness of action arising from the undivided comprehension of thought-emotion. In rare moments of deep love we know completeness.

Creative intelligence cannot be invited or measured, but the mind seeks definition, description, and is ever caught in the illusion of words. Awareness without choice reveals, in the very moment of action, the concealed distortions of thought and emotion and their hidden significance.

“Is it graded, and therefore capable of constant evolution and variation?” What is discerned completely cannot be variable, cannot evolve, grow. The comprehension of the process of the ‘I’ , with its many centers of self-protection, the discernment of the significance of anchorages, cannot be changeable, cannot be modified through growth. Ignorance can vary, develop, change, grow. The various self-protective centers of the mind are capable of growth, change, and modification. The process of substitution is not intelligence, it is but a movement within the circle of ignorance.

The flame of intelligence, love, can be awakened only when the mind is vitally aware of its own conditioned thought, with its fears, values, wants.

December 13, 1936

The Collected Works of
J. Krishnamurti
Volume III 1936-1944
The Mirror of Relationship
Jiddu Krishnamurti