The Intelligence That Truly Matters

*Based on the inaugural class of the Samba Śiva group, with Jonas Masetti*

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There is a provocation Jonas makes in the inaugural class of the Samba Śiva group that hit me hard: a person can make 100 million in a single day on the stock market, but needs medication to sleep. Can they be called intelligent?

The short answer is: no. At least not in the way that matters.

Three types of intelligence

Jonas describes three types of intelligence, each deeper than the last.

Logical intelligence is the one we most value in the world. It builds rockets, operates computers, does complex calculations. But someone can build an atomic bomb and not be able to sit at the dinner table with their family and be happy. Who is more intelligent -- that person or someone who cannot operate a computer but lives well?

If you are not using your intelligence to live well, that is not intelligence. It is stupidity with a diploma.

Then comes emotional intelligence -- the ability to walk into a room and perceive what people are going through. To understand that the world is not black and white, that people carry pain they cannot express. This intelligence is superior to logic, because without it, you cannot engage with the complexity of being human.

And there is a third, which Jonas says is the highest of all: metacognition. It is the mind's ability to see that what it is thinking is wrong. To rewrite itself.

The sleepwalker and the cheese

To illustrate, he tells a story that is absurd and brilliant at the same time. A guy gets a piece of cheese, puts it in the fridge of his shared house. Next day, the cheese is half gone. He gets furious. Fights with everyone, complains, sets up a hidden camera above the fridge. Guess what? He was sleepwalking. He himself was eating his own cheese.

The metaphor is perfect: when is a sleepwalker going to catch himself eating cheese? Never. In the same way, when we are "asleep" -- on autopilot, without self-awareness -- we cannot see that we are the cause of our own problems.

Metacognition is the camera on the fridge. Without it, we stay trapped in cycles we cannot solve.

The glitch of the mind

Jonas gives another example that gave me chills. A person wants to feel loved. To feel loved, they need someone to *choose* to be with them. For someone to choose, there must be freedom. But the person fears loss, so they take away the other's freedom. And without freedom, the other cannot truly *choose* to be there. And the feeling of love disappears.

It is a circular paradox -- what Jonas calls a glitch. A bug in the mind's programming that does not resolve itself. And the person thinks the problem is the other: "I knew I should not have let them talk to so-and-so." But the problem is the internal loop.

Why you cannot do it alone

The conclusion is direct: this reflexive capacity does not develop on its own. You need a method. You need someone from outside who functions as a mirror.

The teacher is not there to say "you are wrong here, wrong there." They are there to create a frequency, a context, where the mind can see itself. Vedānta is not another spiritual group, nor another belief. It is a journey of clarity based on three pillars: logic (if it is not logical, it does not work), personal experience (I need to verify it in my own life), and personal understanding (it does not matter who said it -- what matters is whether it is true *for me*).

And this journey -- painful, funny, transformative -- begins when we admit: the worst slavery that exists is the slavery of our own mind. It is waking up every day, looking in the mirror, and not finding yourself good enough.

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*When was the last time you asked yourself: could the problem be me?*