Smart/Stupid/Happy/Sad

[Coelho]

However, I still feel left in the dark as to the nature of the smart/stupid. The dictionary defines "intelligence" as "capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc." and gives no insight as to the reason for the difference in this capacity among individuals. In contrast to bhouncy's belief, I feel that this "capacity" is integral to the level of happiness and the very meaning of what happiness is to a person.

Hmmm... now i understand better what you meant... and i agree with you... intelligent people can see deeper into the things, so its harder to them to be happy because of the things that make stupider people happy... like... some not-so-bright people can be happy because their team won a game, or because some couple of their favourite soap opera got together, or any shit like this... yet for intelligent people, this things does not bring any happiness, cause they know the shallowness, the meaningless of it...

I don't get how you can back up what you're saying here. How can you know that newborn babies don't experience emotions or thoughts? The pleasure of eating is both a physical sensation and an emotion that you attach to that sensation.

Well... i must admit that i really cant back up what ive said. I think nobody will ever know how to be a baby feels like... of course we all were babies one day, but for some reason we just cant remember...
Anyway, while i dont know if they experience thoughts and emotions, surely they does not experience them like us adults, and thats what i meant. They may feel the emotions and think the thoughts, but i doubt that they recognize them as us do.
I meant that the babies are driven mainly by physical sensations, simply cause physical sensations are the stonger stimuli we humans feel... emotions are not so strong, and thoughts are weaker still... then, with the growing, they learn to give more attention to the emotions, and after it to the thoughts. Or in other words... they learn to "function", to be driven, to be "guided" by emotions, and then by thoughts...

The very act of recognizing one's own role as a perceiving ego (...) is the most basic foundation of all the other modes of perception.

I dont know if i understood rightly what you wished to say... anyway... there is a difference between percieving and being aware that youre a person percieving something... we dont need to know that we are percieving beings to percieve them... its possible to just percieve the world, without interpret it, without being constantly aware that "im a being and im percieving it, and that, and that else"... so i dont agree that the notion of being an percieving ego is needed to percieve anything.
BUT, this is my response to what i understood from your post... if i misunderstood you, please excuse me.

Perhaps not everyone realizes the strangeness and significance of the fact that inside this weird lumpy tall hairy organic system there is a seemingly magical thing that perceives (and orders and thinks about and essentially creates) all these things that surround and affect the wet, soft, strangely shaped things that are our physical bodies.

Indeed... from all the uncomprehensible things that surrond us, surely the most mysterious is the fact that we percieve... and yet most people just take the fact we percieve as granted, and live their lifes without ever thinking about the marvel that it is...