An Approach to the Creative Origins of Human Life

Security lies in the Exercise of our Collective, Free, Creative and Loving Intelligence

Human intelligence is the creator of the culture and the worldview in which we live. It embraces every aspect of the way people think, what they value and how they act without them even realizing it. Hence the primordial importance of intelligence and its health for our wellbeing. As we will see, intelligence cannot be defined but only characterised through its creative powers and three dimensions. From the very beginning of our species, domination power has been present one way or another. Firstly, to face the enormous contingency of our lives, we sought protection and security through submitting to supernatural domination powers such as spirits and gods, which represented the unknowable but liveable mystery of reality. Later this domination power extended to the political domain with kings and nation states, all of them turning human intelligence a programmed one, which could submit to their command. A loss of true freedom making most people, especially from modernity onwards, just interested in their own skin, allowing the perpetuation of the domination power. Initially this domination was Essay exerted by means of mythological narratives and belief- systems, then later through ideologies, stablished knowledge and normative societal rules. Now this power to dominate is stronger, more effective and subtler than ever in its ability to control us all, and thus disabling the most specific power of human intelligence: creative freedom and its unconditional love.

Opposed to this apparently universal human tendency is the discovery that real security lies in the joyful exercise of our collective, free, creative, loving and ever learning intelligence. This is what constitutes a truly human way of life. Millennial wisdom traditions already taught different versions of it, but they did not change the human domination- submission tendency in search for security. Hence, creative freedom never fully flourished in humanity. Now it is necessary for human survival. For example, in the face of the destruction of jobs caused by automation, the response of the domination power impulse is simply to change the rules of the labour market. It does not consider helping people, through education, to become the free, creative intelligences that machines can never be. It should be clear that the main role of education is helping to develop our innate creative intelligence and tits main creative powers (interest in reality, communication, subsidiary symbiosis, inquiry and freedom) rather than reducing education to just the knowledge and skills acquisition, needed for productivity and so competing with machines.

While there is currently a great deal of noise about so- called artificial intelligence, very little attention has been given to the real potential of human intelligence. People the world over are enthralled by the progress of robotics or machine learning, while at the same time completely disregarding the true constitution of their own intelligence and its threatened impoverishment. Artificial intelligence taking over the world and controlling human activity can only happen because humans have not developed the full potential of their innate creative intelligence. We now need to change our priorities and plunge into the vast potential offered by a fully developed human intelligence. This is our very own creative power, our innate capacity to properly understand our world, to act flexibly and effectively within it, and to make it our happy home. In summary, this is the central focus and overall purpose of my work.

Moreover, a creative intelligence is not only important to get results satisfying our needs and interests but also, like what happens with a cared body exercise, intelligence when healthy and not submitted to productivity pressure, then its simple creative exercise is a source of well-being. I offer a look at the creative origin of this life, at the origin of all human action, and links it to what I call the creative freedom of reality and its agency, universal intelligence, the body of which is the entire universe. Notice that these creative origins do not refer to time, a history of human evolution, but they refer to the source from which human life is continuously created. That creative freedom is the foundation and the main power of the human species, is not considered in most of the accounts on the humanity’s origin.

Interest in the Foundations of Human Life

Such an intention may sound speculative in the extreme, perhaps idealistic, even a fantasy. At least it seems an elusive a topic, but central, with far-ranging implications. However, I want to insist that the foundations for such an approach are there, underlying everything, simple, concrete and accessible to everybody, the commons of humanity. We touch the foundations when we approach things without goals, without self-interest, without relating them to a ‘me’, without a separate ‘me’ conditioning action, in pure contemplation of beauty and selfless action. For example, the spontaneous impulse we feel to help an old disabled person to cross the street and many other acts of selfless love sustaining human life even risking the own good. Realizing this freedom and its unconditional love together (not to be confused with a mere moral good action) is the birth of a new life of clarity, peace and happiness love, with the ground beneath our feet, the quality of what grows from these foundations will depend on the care we are prepared to give them. It is nothing less than the growth of humanity that is here the focus of our attention.

This interest in understanding things by examining their origins or foundations has been with me all my life. When I was eight years old, full of enthusiasm after reading a brief biography of Thomas Edison, I was on my way to school in the rain. I decided to invent something that would keep me dry. After long pondering, it dawned on me that the best possible invention already existed: the very umbrella I was carrying – both simple and effective. I may not have actually invented anything, but I began to experience the joy of looking at everything as a creation of intelligence.

From that point on, first subconsciously and later actively, I became more interested in questions than in answers. I wanted to understand the creative powers of intelligence itself more than its creations - knowledge and its applications. I started to discover that my primary interest was not in knowledge or explanatory theories but in their foundation and origin, the intelligence itself. I began to think of myself not as Homo sapiens, the one who knows, but as Homo quaerens, the one who is aware he does not know - and so inquires. In our present situation, far from being part of an idealistic dream, this attempt to get to the origins or foundations is now the vitally necessary approach to human life. It is there where the power lies continuously recreating the world. Without it, the temptation to despair in the face of the world’s complexity and current problems threatens to be overwhelming. In a word, only the intelligence of creative freedom, humanity’s actual power, can overcome the current perverse power of domination conducing us to total destruction.