What is the difference between intellect and intelligence?
Answer Podcast
Transcript
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question thank you any other questions oh uh is there any difference between intelligence and intellect see there are terms and there are concepts so if there is a suitcase no the suitcase has a handle so that so the handle is what enables us to say carry the suitcase or pull the suitcase so terms are like handles the concept is like a suitcase now one time my suitcase got broken and then just before i realized it was broken just before i started off from one place to another so then the devotees got a new suitcase for me and then i had forgotten what that new suitcase looked like all that i remembered was a handle so when the carousel came out this is my suitcase but i pulled it out you know i opened it without my suitcase so i had to go through six seven suitcases before i found out this is my suitcase so what happens is the handle the handle is meant to be attached to a particular suitcase so we shouldn’t get too caught in terms to understand the underlying concepts sometimes the same term may refer to a different concept like i gave a class and then one young boy says you killed it i said what what did i kill now in today’s world you killed it in the way of appreciating you did a very good job you killed it so the term is the same but the concept is very different killing is not about murder killing is about doing something very successful so so basically the terms and concepts can be very different so now broadly speaking intelligence refers to the capacity to choose right action that this is good this is bad this is short term this is wrong term this is spiritual this is material this capacity to discern that is what we mean by intelligence now intellect basically refers to information processing ability information processing means some people can remember a lot of things some people can you know they can just do calculations in their head some people can just you know they see a person they remember that person’s name some different people have different intellectual capacities some people they see you know enter a room they see the structure of the visual picture gets imprinted in their mind so we all have different intellectual capacities in different ways so now these can be helpful in decision making but a person can have i can have phenomenal intellectual capacity and still have poor intelligence because they are able to remember a lot they have a lot of information processing but information processing and decision making are not necessarily the same so intellect refers to in information processing capacity intelligence refers to decision making capacity so now all of us by our past karma have been given a certain kind of body a certain kind of mind so we all have certain intellectual capacity now we can expand a little bit but we may not be able to develop phenomenal intellectual capacities if we don’t have them but we all can develop our intelligence so intelligence is something which if the more we reason carefully the more we study scripture the more you become purified the sounder decisions we can keep making steady so we all can develop our intelligence