No one teaches us self-awareness and self-understanding. Yet, if we do not understand our self, we cannot manage our self and, therefore, our relationships, roles and responsibilities. As a result, we learn to believe life happens to us and we live from ‘outside in’. We will often play victim. But when we realise who we really are and understand how life works, we come to know that life happens for us and we start to live from inside out. We restore our personal mastery.
Understanding exactly why this is so requires us to cultivate the four main levels of intelligence within our consciousness. We ‘think rationally’, which is a function of our rational intelligence (IQ). We can ‘feel intuitively’, which defines our intuitive intelligence (II). We can ‘know insightfully’, which is defined by our spiritual intelligence (SQ). Sabotaging all three are our ‘emotional reactions’, which can only be understood and lessened when we cultivate our emotional intelligence (EQ).
But first, what is meant by intelligence? The simplest definition—using what you know in the accurate way at the accurate moment. For example, you make a rational decision not to walk into cars as you cross the road because you know that will mean damage to your body and much physical pain (IQ). You intuit and know your friend is suffering, so you intuitively decide to listen more (II). You have had the insight that you are a spiritual being, so you knowingly decide to connect with the person who wants to insult your physical looks because you know you will remain unaffected and compassionate (SQ). They may insult your physical appearance, but you do not take it personally as you know you are a non-physical being. In each case you are creating a decision using a different level of your intelligence based on what you know.
However, when you become angry towards someone and project that anger at them, it is a demonstration of your absence of intelligence and, therefore, your ignorance. I do not mean ignorance in a derogatory sense. It just means you have not yet realised, so you do not yet know, that you are 100 per cent responsible for your emotions and emotional reactions.
This is why emotional intelligence is an oxymoron. When you are emotional, it is a sign of your lack of intelligence, simply because you are unknowingly projecting responsibility for the emotions that you create on to another. That means you have not realised you are responsible for all your emotions and you are, therefore, making your self suffer. Love, joy, happiness are not emotions. They are our natural states of being.
Emotional intelligence is knowing how to untangle our emotionally driven reactions from our consciously created responses. However, discerning the difference is only possible when we have cultivated our spiritual intelligence. In other words, SQ is when we know and are able to maintain the awareness of who I am as a spiritual being, when we know and maintain the awareness of how I function at the level of consciousness, and know why I am here in this world.
It is these three aspects of our self that no one was able to teach us formally or informally. Most of our teachers and our parents did not know. They only passed on their ignorance out of innocence.
Mike George is an author of 16 books on self-awareness, spiritual intelligence and personal undevelopment. To subscribe to Clear Thinking, go to www.relax7.com.