The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

The Nature of Intelligence / 35
that these larger wholes are parts of even larger wholes. Every part is
connected with every other part by including it or being included along
with it in a larger whole. Intelligence lies in the ability of every whole
part to receive feedback from and make connections with all the other
systems that are related to it, and to thereby unfold its inherent potential
to serve the larger wholes.
In an orchestra, as in a community, intelligence allows individuals to
make their unique contribution while receiving feedback from the larger
wholes and serving them in a meaningful, fully connected way. Joy blossoms
through this experience of intelligent interconnectedness—and joy
may actually be the ultimate purpose of the boundless, ever-blooming
and transforming dance of becoming that arises through the universal
interplay of countless nested systems, each and every one including and
included within countless others. We can see that no being is ultimately
separate; all are interconnected and all arise within larger systems of
intelligence that are, to the parts, transcendent and life-bestowing.
The largest whole that includes every atom, every cell, every creature,
community, planet, star, galaxy, and universe is, to the part, say an individual
human, inconceivable, and is intuited as divine, infinite, eternal,
omniscient, and beyond all dualisms. There is literally nothing outside
this largest whole, nothing that “it” is not. Our language completely fails
to describe “it,” since by its very nature language makes objects and
things, and the ultimate wholeness within which all appearances reside
as nested wholes is not a thing in any sense—it is separate from nothing.
The intelligence of this universal wholeness embraces all apparent parts
down to the tiniest, and lives within all the parts as their intelligence. Our
dualistic thinking cannot grasp this directly, for it is beyond existence or
experience as we know them. This universal intelligence can only be
sensed non-dualistically, through intuitive receptivity in inner silence that
is not clouded by concepts and conditioned thinking.
Intelligence, Telos, and Chickens
All of the nested wholes—systems, planets, communities, people, animals,
plants, cells, and so forth—are possible because they partake of
the universal intelligence operating through and within them. This intel-