My owner’s brain weighs around 1350 grams, whereas mine comes in at just 18 grams. And my owner’s brain is meant to have some 100 billion neurons whereas I only have 3 billion in mine. (Mind you, I’d like to meet the chap that’s counted them all!)
So you’d think that humans would turn out to be a lot brainier than parrots. And that’s how they like to imagine themselves. But I’ve always thought differently, and the other day, I put my owner to the test. In fact, I asked him this very simple question…
“Which of my sides has the most feathers?”
Well, he scratched his head for a long while, gazing first at my left side, and then at my right. He got a piece of paper and jotted down some calculations, before finally, coming up with what he thought was his ‘eureka’ moment.
“Your left side,” he answered, “because you’ve got a new feather coming through on your left wing!”
Well he was, of course, totally wrong. The answer to my question was quite simply “my outside!”
And so I came to the conclusion that it’s not the quantity of cells or indeed the size of brain cells which determines intelligence. No, it’s all about what’s packed inside them. Take one of my small, feathered friends, -say one of our garden swallows. Every year, something inside its little brain tells it to migrate. And it doesn’t just migrate a few hundred yards down the road. It embarks on an heroic journey across the Sahara Desert, over the Mediterranean, across the Alps or the Pyrenees and then finally, across the English Channel, to return to the same wooden stable and country garden where it was hatched some years before. Yes, even a small bird can do this. And yet I know of human beings that have to use their sat. nav. to drive to the shops a few miles away!
And have you noticed how humans like to come up with scientific theories in an attempt to announce ‘their brilliance’ to the world around them. And so we have their theories of Quantum Physics, and their theories of Relativity and Atomic and Solid States. They have their Kinetic Molecular theories, and their theories of Quantum Mechanics. And perhaps, best of all, we have their “Big Bang” theory. (I reckon that someone came up with that brilliant notion after over-inflating a party balloon!) No, when humans use the word “theory,” it usually means a ‘human guess,’ a ‘stab in the dark’, or ‘an unproven idea.’ And I’m sure that if I conducted a study of my owner’s brain, instead of finding signs of any real intelligence, I’d discover vast quantities of receptors tuned into things like chocolate, football, Cornish pasties and rum!
Despite this, I do my best to love my owner, and I try to humour him, in much the same way as God and Jesus try to humour us all. Because they will always be the superior entities in our world, even if humans try to convince themselves otherwise. And their larger brains are not really any better than my smaller one. Because the real secret to intelligence is simply allowing the presence of God and Jesus inside your mind to change your whole perspective of everything. For when that happens, you take onboard a new wisdom and start to see things in a whole new way. You’ll suddenly understand why my friend, the swallow, decides to migrate each year. And why yours truly writes a weekly Christian blog. For when you have a little piece of God and Jesus inside you, you’ll discover much greater things than you ever thought possible!
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
(Marcel Proust: [1871-1922]: French novelist)
“We may ignore Him, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.” (C.S. Lewis: [1898-1963]: Northern Irish writer, literary scholar and Anglican lay theologian)
“Don’t shine so others can see you. Shine so that through you others can see Him.” (C. S. Lewis: see above)
“Guard, through the Holy Spirit who dwells in us, the treasure which has been entrusted to you.”
(2 Timothy: 1:14)
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”
