Intelligence is both a human and non-human capacity, as it is acknowledged to exist in animals and – as some claim – machines as well. Although there are very different concepts and ideas that are usually subsumed under the Latin term “intelligentia” (the Greek νοημοσυνη being a very intriguing case per se), and “intelligence” is defined in various ways, there is a broader understanding it as the ability to act upon the environment, others, and oneself to achieve the best outcome. Precisely for this reason, in L’évolution créatrice, Henri Bergson defines it as “the practical, utilitarian capacity for manipulating inert matter, analyzing the static, and solving spatial problems. The flexible, conscious knowledge of relations and means. It can solve any problem but works on matter from the outside. It is “the science of matter”.” According to the philosopher, in humans, it is the mind’s brilliant but inherently limited tool for analyzing, manipulating, and controlling the material world. It is an evolutionary survival mechanism superb for technology and science, but fundamentally inadequate for grasping the living, flowing, creative core of reality. Therefore, he conceives it in opposition to instinct and intuition.
In turn, Richard Buckminster-Fuller considers it as the operational mode through which two fundamental activities are processed: information gathering and problem solving. Hence, he says: “I define intelligence as an organized system of information.” But the American inventor postulates for it a scope that far exceeds the human dimension. Indeed, according to Fuller, in Critical Path, it is a property of the universe: “Intelligence is the Universe’s capacity to organize itself. It is an anti-entropic principle—a force that works against chaos and decay by creating, integrating, and sustaining patterns of order manifesting in all effective, sustainable, life-supporting design. A tree, a galaxy, a well-designed geodesic dome, and a humane social system are all expressions of this universal intelligence.”
In the wake of the Informational Revolution, the advent of the so-called Artificial Intelligence has resuscitated the discourse about the meanings of intelligence, giving rise, in addition to AI itself, to Ambient Intelligence and Ancestral Intelligence. The latter seeks to establish and implement, from a Darwinian evolutionary perspective, both the accumulated knowledge of nature and culture and the extremely accelerated knowledge of the digital. It is therefore a matter of thinking about ancestry not for its intrinsic value, but of returning to the past to instrumentalize it with the aim of programming the future. Thus, looking in the rearview mirror, the cybernetic episteme summons all knowledge produced by humanity to reconfigure it according to its own instrumental objectives.
My intention here is to question not what we gain, but rather what we lose by insisting on limiting our gaze to a retro-perspective vision, to use a term coined by curator Catherine David. And to make this loss palpable—a loss we moderns are no longer even capable of knowing and recognizing—I propose that Ancestral Intelligence be considered from another optics.
In Crowds and Power, and also in The Human Province, the writer Elias Canetti expresses his admiration for a faculty lost to us moderns, still active in the 19th century among the Bushmen, or San people, of the Kalahari, Africa. According to him, this ethnic group based their lives on listening to what the body says—an astonishing capacity, entirely unknown to us. What does this hearing consist of? Canetti writes: “They feel in their body the imminence of certain events. A kind of palpitation of their flesh speaks to them and informs them. As they say, the letters of their alphabet are in their body. These letters speak and move and determine their own movements. (…) The premonition tells the truth.”
In my understanding, this Canetti’s “hearing the body” is a perfect example of Ancestral Intelligence: it’s collectively developed over millennia of hunter-gatherer life; it’s embodied — knowledge stored in the senses and reflexes, not just in symbols; it’s adaptive — crucial for survival in a specific ecological niche; it’s holistic — integrating sound, intuition, empathy, and environment into a single act of understanding. It would therefore not be an exaggeration to say that we perceive there, in action, another type of intelligence. Furthermore: of Ancestral Intelligence. Not only because it radically realizes intelligence in the service of intuition, according to the Bergsonian key. But, also, because it reveals another mode of being in relation to the world, to others, and to oneself—no longer based on a utilitarian logic, but rather affirming a logic that privileges empathy, communion, relation, metamorphosis. That is to say: the logic of a leap toward mystery.
For years I was in contact with the Yanomami, a very ancient ethnic group from the Amazon. With them, I learned many things, above all the estrangement of finding myself outside the modern world, completely outside a society governed by the value of money, the famous “commodity fetish” of Marx, which is our religion. There I witnessed several shamanic sessions, learned the sequence of moments in the rituals, inhaled the yakoana, the hallucinogenic powder that leads them to encounter the spirits. And I discovered something that, for me, was the most precious in that coexistence and that I will never forget: the fact that the shamans have a very sophisticated technology for accessing the unknown, from where all the ancestral knowledge they bring to the community comes. But in this process, what matters most to them is not so much the revealed knowledge—this is a kind of “side effect” of an operation in which what truly counts is going ever further, ever deeper into the mystery. Not because they would be seeking a novel “experience,” but because they know that truth resides in fusion with the cosmos, in its infinite movement.
I mentioned earlier that Yanomami shamanism is a very sophisticated technology, unknown to us moderns, who have always underestimated ancestral knowledge. One of the most impressive factors of this technology is the modus operandi through which the shaman apprentice undergoes a process of de-subjectivation. Indeed, as soon as the initiation begins, the apprentice takes the hallucinogen and lies on the ground, under the impact of the yakoana. He then plunges into chaos. But beside him, squatting, the shaman who is initiating him begins to call his attention to the figuration taking shape in this chaos. Speaking in his ear what, through experience, his own body also intensely traversed, the shaman begins the deconstruction of ordinary reality and the reconfiguration of emotions and sensations. And when he feels the apprentice is ready, he operates the symbolic dismemberment of his body, swapping organs and limbs, placing the nose where the hand was, the foot where the ear was, etc. In short: deregulating all the senses and reconstructing the body according to a new configuration that ensures, through experience, the apprentice will never be the same again.
Now, it is necessary to understand that this activation of Ancestral Intelligence does not go unnoticed by great poets and artists. Let us remember what Rimbaud wrote at age 16, in a letter to his teacher Izambard, in 1871: “I wish to be a poet, and I am working to make myself into a seer: you will not understand at all, and I would not nearly know how to explain it to you. It’s a question of coming to the unknown through the disordering of all the senses. The suffering is enormous, but one must be strong, be born a poet, and I have come to terms with my destiny as a poet. It’s not at all my fault. It’s wrong to say “I think”; one ought to say “I am being thought”- forgive the play on words – I am other.”
Let us also remember the discovery of Antonin Artaud, of the “body without organs,” after taking peyote with the Tarahumara shamans in Mexico in the 30s. The French poet introduced the concept in his famous radio play “To have done with the judgement of God”: “(…) man is sick because he is badly constructed. we must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape off that animalcule that itches him mortally, god. and with god his organs. for you can tie me up if you wish. but there is nothing more useless than an organ. when you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom. then you will teach him again to dance wrong side out as in the frenzy of dance halls and this wrong side out will be his real place.”
Rimbaud and Artaud perceived the need to abandon ordinary reality with its corollary of stereotyped feelings and emotions, of a mind occupied by egoic manifestations, of exacerbated instrumental reason, of ready-to-wear subjectivity. But if they knew how to diagnose the problem and operate the disordering of all the senses, they lacked, however, a method that would allow them to positively access the cosmic dimension, they lacked exercising the Ancestral Intelligence that would make them avoid falling into the black hole.
This is what we intend to explore in the sequel.
Modern man lacks a method, or rather, a practice that allows him to exercise Ancestral Intelligence. For this very reason, he behaves as if it did not exist. And when he admits its existence, he can only conceive it within the parameters of what he knows. But such adequacy proves incompatible. Thus, the primacy of Artificial Intelligence over Ancestral Intelligence is always a misunderstanding, for they are of a radically different nature. It would therefore be necessary to take this difference into account so that some understanding of the question could become possible. After all, while Artificial Intelligence is based on language, Ancestral Intelligence is founded on the unsayable; while the former is always referred to the known and to pattern recognition, the latter affirms the unknown and the unique character of each manifestation; while the former can only exist from what has already been thought, the latter deals with the unthinkable; while the former belongs to the field of reason, the latter is inscribed in the primacy of mystery.
Take, for example, the case of Yaqui shamanism, an indigenous people from the state of Sonora, in Mexico, narrated in the books of the anthropologist Carlos Castañeda. Don Juan, the shaman responsible for his initiation, explains that man, a “luminous being,” is composed of two halves, from his birth: the tonal and the nagual. The tonal is the social person, the organizer of the world, a guardian that protects our own being. The problem is that the guardian becomes a guard: “A guardian is broad-minded and understanding. A guard, on the other hand, is a vigilante, narrow-minded and most of the time despotic.” The tonal is everything we know, everything that appears to sight; it begins with birth and ends with death. Its function is to judge, evaluate and witness. There is a personal tonal for each one of us, and there is a collective one for all of us at a given moment, which we may call the tonal of the times. “The nagual, says Dom Juan, is the part of us which we do not deal with at all, the part of us for which there is no description – no words, no names, no feelings, no knowledge”. “The nagual is there”, he said. “There, surrounding the island. The nagual is there, where power hovers.” It is not mind, it is not soul, it is not the thoughts of men, it is not grace or pure intellect, or psyche, or energy, or vital force, or immortality, or the life principle… The nagual can be seen, but cannot be mentioned. Therefore, despite the increasingly despotic control of the tonal throughout life, the nagual comes to the surface, always emerges inadvertently.
Therefore, it is necessary to see the nagual. But how to make the modern Western man see something he does not even know exists? Seeing is direct knowledge. And because the nagual cannot be explained, it can only be witnessed, seeing requires an apprenticeship that passes, first, through the division of man: “There comes a certain moment when the nagual has to whisper in the apprentice’s ear to split him.” – says Dom Juan. The nagual whispers, opening the fissure, the division of the apprentice, which will alter his perception, make it “to open its wings”. It is a long, slow and dangerous process, for in it the apprentice may lose himself, go mad… until he can develop his personal power, that is, fulfill this impossible task of being himself without being himself. Hence the importance of the shaman’s accompaniment, of his dedication.
From then on, Dom Juan begins to address the mutation of perception conducted by the shaman, which operates through the will of the apprentice. It is not appropriate here to develop this topic. It is enough to recall that it is necessary to turn off the internal dialogue, sharpen attention, erase personal history, assume responsibility and use death as an adviser. All this entails a reduction of reason, of the tonal, and an opening of the will, which leads to the nagual.
The mutation of perception leads man to access the totality of being, the secret of luminous beings, which is the fact that we are perceivers of a reality that is at once ordinary and extraordinary. Carlos Castañeda writes about “jumping into the abyss: “(…) I had witnessed the unknown that no one can talk about. They said they were going to hurl me into it again, and that I should let the wings of my perception open and touch the tonal and the nagual at once without being aware of going from one to the other.” To access the totality of being is, in short, to enter the sphere of power.
It is interesting to note how Yaqui shamanism finds strong resonances with something as distant as Daoism. There, as here, the teaching is structured in a rigorous ethics, in a practice marked out as a way, and in the paradoxical understanding of a dimension that is unintelligible by habitual standards and yet perceptible. Indeed, the first verses of Dao De Jing, written by Laozi in the 5th century B.C., states:
The Way that can be told of is not an Unvarying Way;
The names that can be named are not unvarying names.
It was from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth sprang;
The named is but the mother that rears the ten thousand creatures, each after its kind.
Scholars usually interpret these verses in two ways: “’Non being’ names this beginning of Heaven and Earth; ‘Being’ names the mother of the myriad things.” One can see, therefore, that the Dao that is named is not the true Dao, for it is from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth emerged; and it was these that, namely, generated the ten thousand creatures. Therefore, from the very beginning, Laozi affirms the impossibility of thinking the Dao, for words are lacking to do so. And if it lies beyond the reach of thought, it is necessary to realize that we are before the Mystery. Thus, man, who is situated between Heaven and Earth, or rather who is one of the consequences of the relation between both, needs to perceive that the use of reason and intelligence is not enough to access the primordial reality founded in Non-Existence, in the Existence of the Non-Existent and in Existence, from which Heaven, Earth and all beings originated.
A question is then posed: If the Dao cannot be thought, if it belongs to the Mystery, how can it be not understood, but apprehended by man? This is what the Dao De Jing will deal with. And for this purpose, the book was conceived as the tracing of three interwoven lines: the Doctrine, which consists fundamentally in pointing to what can be glimpsed of the inconceivable nature of the Dao; the Method, a practice through which man can free himself from all the physical and mental conditionings that transformed him into an ordinary being; and Ethics, which establishes how Virtue needs to be lived so that the Doctrine and the Method may open for the Daoist the doors of the Mystery.
A Mystery which, moreover, does not dissipate, but, quite the contrary, thickens, as man penetrates it and, at the same time, is penetrated by it. What, then, in this context, is the role of intelligence? If reason and knowledge no longer have primacy, what is now valued? Calculation, interest, instrumental action, in short, the centrality of the “I think,” are gradually emptied along the course of a way toward the natural and disinterested spontaneity of a child, toward a kind of radical Return to the origins… to the Dao. In this process, intuition is no longer at the service of intelligence – intelligence is at the service of intuition. And to exercise this emptying, men of value practice “actionless activity”, carry on wordless teaching. In chapter 3 of the Dao De Jing, Laozi writes:
(…)
By emptying their hearts
And filling their bellies,
Weakening their intelligence
And toughening their sinews (…)
Would this deliberate weakening of intelligence then be the exercise of an Ancestral Intelligence that recognizes its own limits within the scope of a much greater process, of which it itself is part and on which it depends? We may raise such a hypothesis in view of the way intelligence appears and how Laozi relates it to the Dao. Indeed, in chapter 18 of the Dao De Jing, one reads:
It was When the Great Way declined
That human kindness and morality arose;
It was When intelligence and knowledge appeared
That the Great Artifice began.
It was when the six near ones were no longer at peace (father, son, elder brother, younger brother, husband and wife)
That there was talk of “dutiful sons”;
Not till fatherland was dark with strife
Did we hear of “loyal slaves”. (as Ministers called themselves)
Return to the state of infancy, return to the Limitless, return to the state of the Uncarved Block – this is Laozi’s recommendation to the Daoists. In this sense, it is then a matter of returning to what lies before intelligence. How could we do this through Artificial Intelligence? It is clear that we could not. Which, evidently, does not mean that we should deny it and discard it a priori, but rather understand what it can and cannot do, understand its limits in the face of the Limitless. And one of the ways of understanding may perhaps be by evoking the role of Ancestral Intelligence in the process of return, on the way.
To finish, I would like to mention one last point, raised by Krishnamurti. The Indian sage of the 20th century has a radical vision in which the discoveries of these ancient peoples evoked in this text seem to resonate, peoples that existed on all continents, and that trace invisible lines of a network of relations unknown to modern man.
In a conversation with the British scientist David Bohm, in 1983, he raises the question:
J.K. I am talking: is there an activity which is not touched by thought? We are saying there is. And that activity is the highest form of intelligence. Either the action is born of memory, and therefore memory is limited, therefore thought is limited, and it has its own activity which then brings about conflict.
D.B. Yes, I think this is connected with what people are saying about computer. Every computer must eventually depend on some kind of memory, which is put in or else programmed and that must be limited.
J.K. Of course.
D.B. Therefore, when we operate from memory, we are not very different from a computer; the other way round, perhaps the computer is not very different from us.
J.K. A Hindu has been programmed for the last 5000 years to be a Hindu, or in this country you are being programmed as British. So, we are all programmed up to a certain extent.
D.B. Then we could say there you are bringing in the notion of an intelligence which is free of program, which is creative perhaps.
J.K. Yes, that is right. That intelligence has nothing to do with memory and knowledge.
D.B. Yes, it may act in memory and knowledge, but it has nothing to do with it in its origin.
J.K. It may act through memory, etc…