I compare our consciousness and awareness to a light. Some people have lights of a very small radius. Of course, with a small radius they can only be concerned about themselves or survival for instance. Some have lights with large radiuses. They can see much more at a time with such a large light. They see the connection between things.
An analogy I like to use is that if you walked into a pitch black room that you knew had a large, detailed tapestry of a vibrant city covering an entire wall, the size of the light you walk in with would affect your ability to understand and take in the image of the entire tapestry. If you only had a tiny penlight you’d have to go slowly, centimetre by centimetre, and it would take time to understand even one small area or city block in the great tapestry. But if you walk in with a flood light and turn it on you’ll understand entire chunks, whole neighbourhoods, at once.
I don’t think how much we understand is a function of intelligence the way we think of it but rather a function of our awareness. How much of the big picture can we see at once? How much information can our consciousness hold at once?
Going back to the tapestry analogy, with our penlight and having to move slowly across the tapestry by the time we got a quarter of the way through would we still remember the details from the first section?
If someone asked us to plan a route through the city from a particular home to the marketplace, imagine how long that would take with our tiny light. We would need quite a bit of time to even find where the two locations are to begin with before even starting to figure out directions.
And with a tiny light we would not so easily see that two different buildings that seem to be far apart on the map are actually connected via a road or river.
I think of intelligence quite differently now. I see it almost as a byproduct or side effect of our awareness, our consciousness.
And as our consciousness expands our light expands, and we go from being only able to see and be concerned with ourselves and our own survival to being able to see our family, our village, our country, our world, and beyond. All at once.