Deva: Our Relationship with the Subtle World

By Jacquelyn E. Lane

An in-depth introduction to the Deva Kingdom and our relationship with Deva

• Explores how we partner with Deva in our everyday lives to evolve both our kingdom and theirs

• Explains the hierarchy of the Deva kingdom, from elementals and nature spirits to higher angelic Deva and every level in between

• Offers suggestions on how to communicate with the Deva of trees and plants as well as the angelic kingdom

• Shares the author’s personal experiences with Deva around the world

Nature spirits, faeries, gnomes, and their higher angelic counterparts who overlight landscapes, mountains, rivers, and plants have held a fascination for people worldwide for countless generations. The Deva kingdom is essentially the world’s form builders, the symphony at the heart of Creation, yet Deva is so much more than the joyful beings that animate what we call Nature. We each have a very personal and direct relationship with Deva via our physical, astral, emotional, and mental elementals, but this connection has been forgotten or, at the very least, overlooked. When we partner with Deva in our everyday lives, we can help evolve both our kingdom and aspects of theirs.

Exploring the realm of Deva and our relationship with them, Jacquelyn E. Lane introduces us to the hierarchy of the Deva kingdom, from elementals and nature spirits to higher Deva and the levels in between. She examines the metaphysics that underlie their existence and how the energy of Deva is intrinsic to all that we experience. Deva is a Sanskrit word meaning “Being of Light,” an appropriate name as Deva sing light out of the primordial darkness to create forms for Being. Sharing her personal experiences with Deva in many lands over four decades, the author investigates our relationship with Deva, in particular via the elementals of our human constitution, and how we can communicate with the Deva of trees and plants as well as the angelic kingdom. Through scientific discoveries and cultural traditions, we discover the impact we have on Deva and how we use and even “create” new forms of Deva via our inventions and collective activity. Jacquelyn also looks at the orchestrating function of higher Deva and the wider implications of our understanding of Deva, including the role of Deva in Pan consciousness--our increasing realization of the intricate matrix of life within and between all the kingdoms on Earth.

Offering not only an in-depth introduction to the world of Deva but also a glimpse of their wisdom, humor, and joy, this book reveals how we can begin to hear their complex song, find our own song, and work with the appropriate subtle layers of the Deva kingdom to grow and evolve.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
• Release date: Jun 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781644110751

Jacquelyn E. Lane

A widely traveled New Zealander, Jacquelyn E. Lane is an artist and educator who has been involved in a broad range of metaphysical studies for nearly 50 years. She is the author and illustrator of The Children of Gaia and scribe of This World of Echoes.

Book preview

Introduction

The Song

Life is a great song. From the rocks that seem to be still to the bubbling water of the stream that flows over them. From the uncurling leaves of small plants to giant trees. From quiet hamlets to teeming cities. It’s all singing—notes within tunes, tunes within themes, themes within symphonies. We usually think of sound as something that happens in our ears but that’s just one way of recognizing the phenomenon we call sound.

From soil to stars everything vibrates, everything has its own resonance because inside every atom there is energy. In fact, quantum physics tells us an atom is nothing but energy. So, at its very heart physical matter is only energy; vibrating fiery light that emits or sounds different notes.

How does the fiery energy inside the atoms and molecules that make up a leaf know how to be, how to respond to the elements of air, water, heat and light that surround it, bombard it, caress it and pass through it? How does that matter know how to be a leaf and not something else, a caterpillar for instance?

We can reduce everything to chemical analysis or explain the universe in mechanical terms but these are not the only avenues open to us. We’ve already been there, done that, when Descartes and Newton, enamoured by the new inventions of their time, found it convenient to see our entire universe as a giant machine. How we choose to see or think about things fundamentally decides how we treat them. The consequences of treating this living, breathing, growing, dynamic planet as a machine has had disastrous consequences. It has also led us to ignore countless thousands of years of observation, knowledge and wisdom of entirely different sorts. We will discover that seen from a different perspective, knowing how to be a leaf (or a caterpillar, a rock or a stream) is both the task and the joy of deva.

Are There Faeries at the Bottom of Your Garden?

Faeries at the bottom of the garden is an English saying that was in vogue amongst the grown-ups when I was a child. It was usually accompanied by a tolerant smile. Perhaps for me, it was a seed thought. The word deva however, was not in use until the Eastern philosophies began to disseminate in the West in the 1960s and 70s.

You may have heard that deva are nature spirits, faeries and elves for example but the deva kingdom is about all matter in, on and surrounding our planet. Furthermore, deva is not just in what we normally consider to be physical matter. You may, however, have picked up this book because you thought it would be about faeries, so we won’t leave them out.

So, are there faeries at the bottom of your garden? What, you don’t have a garden? No matter, I’ll show you they don’t just live in gardens so if your back yard is a concrete jungle you may still find them. (Though I confess, I find it easier in a garden.) From the faeries at the bottom of the garden or in the concrete jungle, to the mighty deva of landscapes, deva are known for their joy and humour, so they’ve asked me not to get too serious. That goes counter to my natural inclinations but for their sake and yours, I’ll try. To stay as true to them as I can, this book is full of deva encounters and wherever possible I have let them speak for themselves.

While this is not a textbook, we need a framework to help us better understand this kingdom that is both so vital and vitalizing to our world and ourselves. Woven with our journey into the deva realms will be attempts to answer some of the what, how and why questions about deva. Let’s start with a few short questions, and some short answers . . .

What Are Deva?

Deva is an ancient Sanskrit word from India meaning Being of Light. I am told it is pronounced day-vah. Because it is not an English word, we can use deva as a collective noun, just as in English we use the word sheep to mean a single animal or a flock.

Deva are not to be confused with diva—those female celebrities of opera—though deva are singers. They sing ideas into form. It is deva that cause us to exclaim, Wow, this is a special place. It feels so alive! At the lowliest level, they are within each atom. Deva are the faeries in the grass. They are the vast energy of sea, wind and mountains and as we will see, the deva kingdom is not confined to what we call nature.

In this book, I am using the term deva to refer to the entire range of beings that come under the domain of the deva kingdom. Just as the term animal kingdom includes millions of different life forms at varying stages of evolution—bacteria, insects, birds, animals, fish etc.—the deva kingdom includes a huge variety of beings. They range from the tiny elemental lives associated with the elements right up through faerie or nature spirits to the great angelic beings that are most appropriately called deva—beings of Light. Hence, in Western countries, deva is often referred to as the angelic kingdom and its higher ranks are included in the major religions. In other traditions, they are referred to as the gods.

To really get deva (in the sense of understanding what they are really about), we need to realize that deva is the kingdom of substance and form—the world of matter both solid and subtle.

What Do Deva Do?

Deva infuse all matter in our solar system with intelligence and respond to us from the spaces inside everything we see, feel and think.

Intelligent matter? Now don’t drop the book in horror, thinking you have entered that controversy between religion and science over a designer God. Knowledge of deva has been around for many thousands of years in various guises. Many other writers have shared their experiences, as have uncountable sane, sensible human beings who may or may not belong to a particular religion.

We could go through the rest of this book without talking of God again. To some people even mentioning the word can be intensely annoying. To others it is a word of power that expresses the Oneness of Being and brings meaning into our small lives. North American Indians use the term the Great Spirit. Islam says there are ninety-nine names for God. Judaism likewise has its own names. There are thousands of paths and perceptions around what we think of (or are at pains to deny) as divinity.

If you are so inclined, you can see the deva kingdom I describe as an expression of divinity. It may just expand your definition of God far beyond the one you are used to. The major world religions claim that God is omnipresent, and that means He/She/It is everywhere, in everything, even in what may not seem very God-like to us. So, putting prejudice aside, here’s what deva do. Wherever there is purpose, deva gather to carry it out. We think we are the Masters in this world but we can do and experience nothing without them.

Deva are in all substance regardless of how dense or subtle it is, so everything is alive with their intelligence. Some of this intelligence is so infinitesimally small it is way below our level of awareness and some of it is so enormously large we can barely begin to comprehend it. We can also describe deva as Creation’s engineers and mechanics because they are the beings that get things done on Earth. They produce all the phenomena we see and experience so our relationship with deva is one of interdependence. Without them we might still Be but we would have no experience of our Being. If you are new to such concepts, they can be hard to get your head around. Don’t let that put you off; it will become clearer as we journey together.

Above all, deva have revealed to so many of us, a universe of joy, love and respect for a Being-ness way beyond what we can physically see with our eyes or deduce with our machines and instruments.

The Sea of Deva

Both inside and outside, we live in a sea of deva that surrounds us as water surrounds a fish. We are so in it that most of us are not aware of it. The deva kingdom infuses all substance and because of our lack of awareness, we do not realize that such substance surrounds us in multiple levels of density. Here, subtle and subtler means it’s less dense than solid and that for us, it is accessed as different levels of consciousness.

A heaving body of ocean, a liquid, flowing river, moving, changeable clouds, they’re all expressions of an elemental life we call water. The same element sloshes, flows and gurgles within our physical body. Its higher counterparts form the subtle waters of our astral/emotional body. In Chapter Seven, we acknowledge how water affects us emotionally. When the water elementals interact with the rocks of a streambed or fall as rain, their song stimulates our own watery astral elementals, delighting us with its musical tumbling and soothing us with the gentle patter of rain or, as a raging sea or a flooding river, instilling us with fear. Water is also traditionally used as a symbol and metaphor for our emotions, for obvious reasons.

Like our emotions, water is a changeable fluid. When it is cold enough, water freezes into crystalline forms of snowflakes and ice. When our emotions freeze, we become emotionally cold, uncaring and unresponsive to the needs of others. Toxins can be created by emotional turbulence that triggers the release of chemicals that flood our physical body. Whether in sadness or joy, when we experience strong emotions, we can cry spontaneous, watery tears that help to remove those toxins from our bodies. As well as being a receptacle of emotions then, water is also a natural cleanser. Water can have a quality of clarity and stillness just as our emotions do when we are calm or meditating deeply but physical water can also become stagnant. Tears can wash our emotions clean, getting them out of the body whereas harbouring them can lead to an unhealthy negative accumulation or to a stagnant emotional life.

The Nature of Reality

If there is intelligent deva life in every atom of physical matter, what of the more subtle layers that make up the vehicle you, as a human personality inhabit? What of your emotions? Does your emotional body have matter or substance? Of course! You may not normally see it with your physical eyes but yes; it is composed of substance that is finer than solid, liquid, gas or etheric (look ahead to Fig 8 for those layers). So, the substance of your emotional body (sometimes called a sheath) is above the etheric plane. You’ll find it in Fig 9 where it is called by its usual name, the astral body. It may be less dense but it’s no less real than the physical matter you can see with your eyes.

To the trained eye, the emotional body is visible, changing colour and form in a heartbeat. It spreads outward or contracts, flares, sparks, floats, soothes, expressing pain or pleasure. While not all of us can see it, we can usually feel it or sense it via our own or other people’s emotions. Yes, our emotional body is matter, emotional/astral matter and what is infused into every piece of matter at every level of density? Deva—a kingdom of responsive intelligence that at each level of being has its own quality. The qualities of fluidity, changeability, seeping into things, flooding, thirsting, crystallizing, becoming solid or evaporating into thin air, these are all characteristics of both water elementals and the astral elementals that constitute our subtle emotional body. Unruly little devils at times aren’t they, causing problems whether we’re two or eighty-two. Now there’s an evolutionary challenge; how do we get those emotional/astral elementals under control?

Shakespeare’s Hamlet was right, There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. The esoteric philosophy in this book aims to open us up to those things not dreamt of or just plain avoided, in orthodox Western philosophy.

The nature of reality is not just a subject for investigation by the physical sciences but the field of metaphysics, the study of what is behind, beyond normal human sight in the physical world. Metaphysics can include religious, philosophical and spiritual teachings and is often given other labels like esotericism and occultism. Occult is a word that has been hijacked by misuse and confined in recent times to the realm of superstition, witchcraft and devilry. Its real meaning is used in astronomy to describe a celestial body (e.g., a planet or moon) that is hidden or unseen behind one that can be seen. So, it’s a very apt word to describe the subject matter of this book.

Metaphysics seeks to explain what is hidden behind or beyond the physics of the real world and to explain what causes the physics of this real world. To the esotericist or metaphysician, the discovery that atoms are just energy is hardly surprising since one of the fundamental ideas of metaphysics is that the manifested world (the world and universe of physical form) is in fact, nothing but energy of different densities and qualities.

The solidity of our world only holds together in a narrow band of perception. Its apparent solidity is merely the result of our human physiology—our eyes, ears, touch etc.—and of course, the way our brain functions. Outside of this band, our world is just patterns and qualities of energy. The solidity we humans perceive is the illusion that holds us prisoner but also enables us to make sense of the buzzing, sparking shifting energy that is our universe—the creation in which we live and move and have our being. We’ll come back again and again in different ways to this tricky business of the nature of reality and between the stories of deva we’ll gradually build a framework that helps us to understand it. The anecdotes will give you a sense of how we can consciously experience the deva realm.

On Landing

When I returned to a mortal human life again, this time in a personality to be named by my parents Jacquelyn, I already knew this planet was very beautiful. That didn’t stop me being afraid as I stood upon the departure disk for I knew there were many challenges to face in this world. The bright colours of spirit dimmed to a dull grey as an opaque, swirling fog surrounded my little island. I felt as if I were in a tiny field of long grass that swooshed and swayed with the force of a violent wind. Only later did I realize it was the swishing sound of amniotic fluid that added a note of terror before the descent into denser matter.

It wasn’t as if I hadn’t been here before. I had, quite a few times in fact and I knew there were compensations. The abundant plant life of the vegetable kingdom clothes our planetary Being in a love blanket of rich greens—beautiful, nurturing and constantly giving. This greening began in the oceans before spreading to the rocky land where water, pressure, shifting and grinding had created small particles. Amongst these particles new plant forms could take root and over time create a rich soil through their decomposition. Soil gave the plant kingdom more opportunities to grow and change, setting the cycles of growth, decay and rebirth. What was originally barren land, gave rise to countless new forms of life. After millions of orbits around the sun, building and building, the great deva of nature grew huge forests to cover the lands with their splendour—nurseries of life of a scope and complexity beyond our human imagination.

I love forests but I love the deserts too, even where there is seldom green of any hue. The desert deva are large and powerful. Their processes are subtle and their effects majestic. Their vast space gives quietude to the mind if one has the chance to be alone with them. It mirrors a little the glorious stillness of the space between the stars.

Earth is evolving, necessitating constant change. We say that water symbolizes emotions. Does that mean when the planet has mastered its own planetary equivalent of emotions, that the seas will dry and the colour of Earth will shift from watery blue when seen from space to the colour of mind? What is the colour of mind? Perhaps it’s like polluted air; dim and filled with particles of illusion until it too has evolved to resolution and clarity to become a clear bright diamond, folded by the pressures of its own mastery into a thing of sharp beauty.

Mineral, vegetable, animal—how large must the thoughts of a planet be to create such magnificent lives as these! And how high and tuned to love those thoughts must be to make such beauty as the forests and the seas. But how do these thoughts of a planetary Being get turned into the things I see, that we all see, touch or feel when we stand and gaze upon this Earth?

Learning to Drive Our Vehicle

It takes a while, in an unfamiliar body, to master its sensory equipment. It doesn’t help that those who are teaching us to take care of this new body don’t have knowledge of all the sensors our human bodies contain. It’s like buying a computer that no-one shows us how to use so we try different things, lose a few files now and then, pick up tips here and there, eventually becoming familiar enough with its capability to do some essential stuff. Yet it’s only a small fraction of what the computer is capable of but we don’t have the time or the patience or let’s be truthful, the inclination, to discover the rest.

So, like an underutilized computer, only a few of our body’s sensors get used—eyes, ears, nose, taste buds, muscles, skin—the usual ones that are obvious to everybody. But what if someone taught us, when we were very young, that we have so many more sensors than these? What if we knew that our ears have a subtler counterpart, as do our eyes; that there is a field of subtle stimuli around us that is picked up by a subtle body, of which our physical body is just an out-picturing?

That’s the challenge when landing on this planet Earth—how to get the most from this physical instrument. Not to get it to run faster or jump higher but go ahead and do those things if that’s your want. I’m talking about using our own subtle body to sense the subtle field of all that makes life on this planet special, beautiful and rare, so rare. Have the great big telescopes trained upon the stars found another planet in the galaxy such as this? No (not yet), so the Earth is rare and if you want to know how it gets to be this way, stick around.

Growing Up with the Inner Eye Open

I had a friend called Carron. She had long brown hair and eyes so large and round that when they moved, lots of white showed below the iris. Her hands were neatly formed as if they’d come from a Renaissance painting. Always expressive, she waved those beautiful hands through the air as she talked.

Carron grew up in a family that knew about faerie. Nobody said, Don’t be silly, faeries aren’t real. They knew the nature spirits were there where nature is able to flourish and faeries are nature spirits.

When I began writing my eco novel, The Children of Gaia, it was Carron who offered to help. Am I imagining things? I asked myself. She took me for walks around the lagoon. We watched the water and she asked me what I saw. When I discovered a soil gnome beneath a big flax bush, feeding energy to the roots and emitting its heat through the earth, she nodded and smiled her bright red lipstick smile and grew my own confidence in what I could sense and see.

A woman called Dora Van Gelda grew up in Indonesia in the earlier part of the 20th Century. Her parents were part of a group of esotericists that included the famous theosophist, C. W. Leadbeater. Born with clairvoyant abilities, it was many years before Dora discovered (to her surprise) that not everybody saw the nature spirits. It is significant that Dora’s abilities were accepted and reinforced by her parents and their peers. There are many who begin life being clairvoyant but who lose their abilities when those gifts are not acknowledged or encouraged, or are openly denied or derided. How often, we may wonder, is a child’s clairvoyant experience dismissed as imagination?

It was my heart that drew me to the idea of faeries when I was very young. It is the trees that have always beckoned my heart to come and play. When I spied Paul Hawken’s book, The Magic of Findhorn, I knew I had to read it. At first, I thought it was a novel but it was actually the true story of a community in Scotland that still exists. The three founders took their instructions from deva and created a garden that defied soil science in the quality and size of its produce.

These were just some of the tugs on my heart and finer senses that have led me to write this book. Over the years, I have met many people who have communication with the nature spirits or faerie as they are often known. These humans come from many walks of life but they have in common a deep appreciation and love of nature, two attributes that help us pass through the gateways to the deva kingdom.

The Scope of This Book

I intend to go beyond nature to include the dance between deva and ourselves, a dance that gifts us the experience of being human here on Earth. We’ll look at the challenges deva present us with, along with how our intentions and inventions actually create new kinds of deva. Above everything else, the world of deva gifts us the indescribable sensation of being connected to everything through the medium of substance, everything from our favourite tree to that star twinkling in our night sky.

Where appropriate I shall let deva speak for themselves. I have set these passages from deva apart, indented from the main text, so you will know deva are the authors of that information and I, for better or worse, am simply the scribe.

How can we claim deva speak to us? And in our own language? Of course they are not using the words of our languages be it English, Japanese or Swahili. They communicate via a transmission or exchange of energy that our brains, mental and emotional bodies translate into words or feelings. One of my university lecturers quoted research claiming that even human to human, our communication is around eighty-five per cent non-verbal. We don’t just pick up visual clues from each other but emotional and other subtle signals. Rightly interpreted or not, we feel attitudes, judgements and emotions emanating from another person. Behind smiles and politeness, we can sense disdain or irritation.

These emotional and mental states flow out of us as surely as words do but they flow from finer layers or bodies than our flesh and bone physical body. These finer layers are made of substance too but substance of less density and different qualities of energy than our physical body. It’s these less dense bodies or layers that enable us to connect to similar layers in the world around us. Our less dense or subtle bodies are connected with each other and with our physical body via spiralling vortices traditionally called chakras. In their book, Superlearning, Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder tell how blind people have even been taught to use the chakra between the eyebrows to see the placement of furniture in a room. It is via our subtle, less dense bodies and their chakras that we communicate with deva. How deva-human communication works should become clearer as we journey together and put this whole subject into a wider context.

This book is certainly not intended as a complete text on deva, even if it were possible to write such a book at this time in our evolution. Many great writers go before me who can tell you just what this faerie, nature spirit, landscape angel or greater deva look like and what their hierarchies are. You’ll find reference to some of these works throughout the book and listed at the back.

My aim is to present a framework that will help us to understand the bigger picture of deva and how this kingdom is so intertwined with our lives at all levels, not just in nature. In no way is this framework intended to be a religion, a cult or a fixed, unbendable perception. Rather it is intended as a helpful philosophical perspective designed to integrate and expand our understanding of deva rather than see it as an isolated folklore tradition that does not fit with our current worldview. I see science and spirituality as being necessary partners in our understanding of both the natural world and us. I do not see how we can solve our multitude of problems without such integration.

Above all, this is a personal journey. It may or may not resonate with your own encounters with the deva kingdom. Either way, I hope that in my sharing, you will be both entertained and to whatever degree, informed. When we’re done, you can go find the faeries at the bottom of your garden, your asphalt or your concrete. If it’s the latter, maybe encourage your fellow citizens by writing your own story My encounters with apartment deva or Life with the city gnomes. No, I’m not being facetious, I’m perfectly serious, it’s my nature, you see.

Talking of which, the nature spirits are drumming on the desk now, waiting for me to leave these ponderous word elementals and join them. I’ll see you again in Chapter One.

Part One

Elemental Tunes

Chapter One

Density

Sensing Faerie

Many children, especially girls, love the thought of faeries. Perhaps that’s because they are depicted wearing very pretty but distinctly human dresses, fluttering, gossamer wings, have long hair and slender bodies. Often children will go looking for faeries, enchanted by the idea of them as if a distant knowing has tapped upon their minds and said, Remember us? They may look for them, as I did, in the grass but saw only flickers of light instead of gossamer-soft dresses and wings. Our human brain wants to make sense of what it sees and so it will turn the flickering, fast light of faerie into a tiny humanoid figure with a pretty dress and wings. After all, how could a faerie creature move so fast if it didn’t have wings?

Science tells us that matter is not actually solid at all. The parts of an atom are no more solid than the flicker of light in a distant electrical storm. Matter, they say, is just energy, a fizzing spark of light. Sounds a lot like that slithery light of a faerie to me . . .

Faeries, the wise tell us, are part of an order of being called deva. The deva kingdom is everywhere, say the ancients—an Intelligence infused into matter at every level of density.

What Does Level of Density Mean?

Isn’t liquid less dense than rock and gas less dense than liquid? What of light and the wavelengths of light that we cannot see or the sounds that only certain animals or specially designed machines can hear? Some lights and sounds can be registered by our normal senses and some can only be inferred from collective experience or understood through reaction of instruments or machines. Such things are even less dense than gas.

Metaphysicians say we have many senses and that some are subtler than our physical ears and eyes. There is life, movement and consciousness beyond the three dimensions of our space-time model of the world. This way of understanding the world says there are many levels of density.

It’s deep into this less dense world we are going, deep into the heart of matter and no, faeries do not wear human dresses nor butterfly wings though the flowing light of their movement may seem like flight and suggest these things. But what we call faeries do exist and I’ll show you they are only a tiny part of a kingdom so vast, so joyful and so close you use it with every step you take and every thought you have. It infuses the air you breathe and the body you inhabit all day and take to bed each night. It’s called deva and it’s a kingdom of natural joy and light.

From Simplicity to Complexity

No scientist has actually seen an atom with their eyes (because atoms are way too small) but they believe they have proved these tiny sparks of energy exist, so let’s begin right there. Deva is intelligence, so the devic life within an atom is a very tiny intelligence indeed. We could fill this entire chapter with a discussion on what intelligence is, probably a whole book. No doubt, someone has already done that. Instead, we will let intelligence define itself, not by limitation, for a definition by its very nature must limit the concept under scrutiny to one thing and exclude it from being another. We will liberate intelligence from the constraints of old thinking and look instead at its dynamic, moving nature that is directly related to that topic so central to today’s thinking—energy. For now, we’ll just say that intelligence knows stuff—what and how. The atom knows how to be an atom of whatever kind it is.

An atom is so small, what use is that? we may protest but if an atom joins up with other atoms, it makes a molecule and collectively a molecule knows how to do much more than a single atom alone. Now here’s a mystery; if two atoms of hydrogen (a gas), team up with just one atom of oxygen (another gas), it becomes water, which is not a gas at all!

A team of three can do wondrous things and water is a most magical team of three. It can freeze into a solid crystal of ice, melt into a liquid drop to quench a thirsty plant or make an ocean. Or it can become so light it floats upon the air to obscure the sun or sail across the sky as part of a fluffy cloud on a bright blue day. These three invisible atoms, when they get together can do these wondrous things, increasing the complexity of the intelligence they