This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit mindstrengthbalance.substack.com Practical, Consensus, and Inspired Intelligence The interesting thing about artificial intelligence is the question of what is intelligence in the first place. I answer that by giving intelligence three levels: practical, consensus, and inspired. Practical intelligence is what is necessary. Like walking or making a to-do list, and it isn’t considered particularly intelligent. Bees can walk, maybe they make to-do lists, and it’s just been discovered they make tools. There’s more to practical intelligence than we think, but it’s practical. Consensus intelligence is what we think of as common wisdom. It’s not widely recognized, but it’s widely available. It’s things like biblical wisdom or what’s dolled out by popular authors. Things like “don’t covet anything that’s your neighbor’s,” or “the benefit of vulnerability is having the courage to show up,” or “love is all there is.” Religion is a font of consensus intelligence and its truth is questionable. Inspired intelligence comes from two things. First, you combine your honest opinion with what’s practical and generally accepted. That yields such important insights as “that’s b******t,” “the truth is reasonable nonsense,” or “I can accomplish what I’m committed to.” Second, building on the first, is a bolt of insight. An idea that seems critically important but, on further examination, may be obvious from a more experienced point of view. Inspired ideas are true and explainable, but often socially uncomfortable or unwelcome. Practical intelligence provides instruction. Consensus intelligence provides maximal cover both for many people and circumstances. Inspired intelligence is what you recognize about yourself. Our Higher, Middle, and Lower Selves The higher self gives you purpose, the middle self gets you by, and the lower self is short-sighted and selfish. They’re all available but most people don’t recognize them as different and as aspects they can control. Instead, they are governed by whatever triggers them. We spend most of our time listening to our middle selves, excusing our lower selves, and having little dialog with our higher selves. We all have these levels within us and are guided by them to varying degrees. Because we tend to be mono focused, one or another of these three attitudes underlies the decisions we make. It is curious that our lower selves seem to speak the loudest, our middle selves like to keep things normal and quiet, and our higher selves are often out of the picture. Such is the case for those of us focused on accumulating power, security, and control. That is to say, the needy ones. That is to say, most of us. We might be in a desperate, practical, or altruistic frame of mind, but one usually predominates. Most people seem to be dominated by their practical or needy sides. The deeper truth is that they all play important roles. On the one hand, these are learned roles. On the other hand they echo aspects of heaven and hell. We are not communing with demons and angles—these aspects are more down to earth than that—but they lean in those directions. People who search for insight will drive themselves into higher states in order to find the truth. Sages, prophets, and creatives will have visions, but these connections are not as available to us as are our higher, middle, and lower selves. We should be able to move between our states, but it takes practice. The Middle State A person who repeatedly undervalues themself will find themselves in a habitually powerless state. This is a state that attracts exploitation from those looking for self-advantage. When low self-esteem becomes a rewarded habit it grows roots into your middle self. It becomes your comfortable self-ideal. This could be because you have a traumatic memory of times when you tried to defend yourself, which often happens to us as children. Alternatively, it could be because of your being habitually rewarded for being weak, deferential, and obsequious. This would lead you to adopt these behaviors as normal and self-defining. This typifies the body dimorphism broadly accepted by women in Western society in terms of dress, behavior, and reputation. A study of 700,000 people, done in 2000 using the HEXACO personality measure (Lee 2009; Patel 2025), found that middle children were the most cooperative. Similar studies found these children grew up to be more socially successful (McGeehan 2024). HEXACO stands for honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and open to experience. You can take this test to rate yourself. The test is free at https://hexaco.org/ Where We Learn The Higher Realms The Trouble of Doing Better The Lower Realms
