Light is the intelligence of understanding. In response to interest and focus it will give insight into how to make a painting beautiful as readily as how to make a gun, for even at the level of the sensory mind or intellect it leaves you free to ask what you like. That is because people must learn to value and develop their intellect before they can learn to use it rightly. But to the real mind or intelligence, that is, to the deeper intuition or understanding, the Light shows the cataracts of preference and prejudice on the sense mind's eye.

The sense mind should be the focus faculty for the real mind – a neutral, unfeeling hand that holds steady whatever the mind wants to look upon, and it is that which translates understanding into action. But most often it is the cause of the mind's fall. It is unfeeling and only perceives the surfaces of things. It works with forms and with abstractions from form, with what the senses show, and with words– but not with underlying principles or ideas, unless they concern form. If made to do so despite its incapacity – and it is made to do so all the time – it carnalizes meanings and strips them of their living essence so that it can grasp them. It works with them mechanically as if they were sense objects. It is analytical, taking things apart to work with them, or, it treats things as dead to “understand” them. Its action is to isolate and separate, as if everything and every problem it considered were a form it could fit together or take apart. It cannot wonder, nor synthesize its understandings through essences. Like a computer it really largely only tabulates and measures. It compares surface aspects or appearances through association (this is like that) – for it perceives neither essences nor life.

When it tries to work with ideas it cannot. It substitutes mechanical logic, linguistics, and authorities to imitate, for real thinking or direct knowing with the Light. The carnal mind as the Bible speaks of it is an identification. It arises when the soul identifies with the body, with the point of view of the sense mind of the body, and with the conscious personality that arises from these. Then a person acts for the body as if the body were identity; it acts to have feelings and get desires, and not for intelligence and love. Objects and how they feel become strangely important and substantial, as feeling fills them out, and desire hungers after them; while what causes them or what they are in themselves recedes.

The real mind is what focuses meaning and comprehends. When brought together in the pursuit of knowledge the real mind and the sense mind (or intellect), called the shining mind and the chattering mind in Taoism, produce conceptual intuition. More often though, the ego or earthly man will use the carnal intellect as its prop and ally, not for knowledge but to deal with things unfeelingly. The intellect or sense mind has this virtue – it can view desire and emotion unmoved. This allows the real mind breathing space to see and consider; but this virtue is often used to suppress, not to acknowledge or feel feelings, or to work with, or think about desires. Using the sense intellect to work with issues and matters beyond itself is how evil arises, especially if it is acting at the whim of the ego or of unbalanced emotion. It then cuts off feeling, empathy, and the sense of relation. In that case, its aim and focus sharpen in an intense and now unconscious drive which seeks connection even while negating it. The intellect deals with things as if they were mechanical and unfeeling like itself, and is able to slice through bodies or issues as if they were so much butcher's meat. Nevertheless, it has no motive of its own, being unaware as a self. The soul of feeling and desire is what chooses through its loves and fears. It identifies with either mind, or channel for the Light, depending on what it wants. The soul may identify with the sense mind through the carnal ego, or with the mind of the Spirit. The Pharisees are the Bible's imagery for what the carnal mind regularly does with and how it sees the things of the Spirit.

The Light shows what Love is, and what it is not. It gives intuitions of your real relations with things. It can also bring to the surface the emotion behind a habit, and show how to release that contraction of life. Your heart's knowledge must include the warmth and depth of love to understand the greater dimension of what is Good. The Light that the sense-intellect accesses allows for any and all discovery, based simply on right asking, and not yet on right being. Honesty will solve much, and through the development of the morality that honesty and truthfulness are, will reconnect the intellect to the real mind – but without Love the mind plows a barren field. Put differently, despite the fact that the sun is brightest in winter, the earth is cold when its axis is turned away from the sun's warmth. Nothing can grow or live then, and everything returns to the root. Come spring, though, the hemisphere leans back into relation; light and warmth combine, and everything comes to life and grows. The light of the intellect needs the love of the heart to grow into the actual Light of Life.

It is really Love that allows Light access to all things and gives entry to whatever the mind considers or tries to understand. Knowledge is union spiritually with the subject or object known, by means of the Light. On the other hand love without intelligence, or a knowledge of what is true, is blind, selfish, sentimental, and foolish; a psychic whirlpool of feelings and desires. It is not then the One who is Good (Lk 18:19). It takes love and light for life to take root in the Real, and reach upward.