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jnani and the intellect Having defined jnani as an orientation to the transcendent based on the mind, it becomes important to understand the relationship between jnani and the intellect. Krishnamurti entitled one of his larger book compilations 'The Awakening of Intelligence', where the intelligence he was referring to was the jnani quality of the mind (though he never used that word). Krishnamurti was one of the great jnanis of all time, but did not posses an academic kind of intelligence, and as a young man failed the Cambridge entrance exams repeatedly, despite the best in private tuition. How then are we to understand the difference between what is conventionally called intelligence in the West, and the kind of intelligence that jnani calls for? To do this we need to retrace the intellectual history of the West, right back to Plato. This will be done is some detail in the section 'jnani and the West', but for now it is not hard to recognise that a rather analytical kind of intelligence has for centuries been elevated by Western culture over and above intuition and insight. This form of intelligence is masculine, brittle, erudite and confident, and is responsible for both the triumphs and tragedies of the West.
At the same time the dominant
religion of the West, Christianity, is a bhakti-oriented religion,
demanding faith and obedience. This meant that the intellectuals of the
West did not have a natural spiritual mode of expression (other than through
more underground spiritual traditions like neo-Platonism). This is especially
true after the Scholasticism of the medieval period petered out, leaving
the jnani-oriented individual little religious scope. Once science
became established in the 17th century the intellectual development of
the West took its tone from that endeavour, and hence a certain kind of
intelligence became valued, one that could penetrate and analyse the objective
world, not the subjective world.
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