Layer 22 Emotional Intelligence

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This computer’s spell check has just made me realise that the words ‘meditating’ and ‘editing’ have great similarities in both structure and meaning. In states of meditation we allow our unconscious and our conscious awarenesses to connect, communicate, and transform. The work of the editor is to review a whole body of thought or expression, to spot errors and inconsistencies, to highlight misconceptions and flaws, to delete whatever is inappropriate and false, to recognise the need for greater clarity and perspicacity, to come up with ideas for more accurate and more truthful modes of representation and understanding. To be a meditator is to be an editor.

To be a philosopher is to be a meditator and an editor. I take philosophy to be concerned with ways of understanding the world and self. Everyone engages with philosophy at some time, at some level.

I spent the weekend experiencing alternating states of enlightenment and confusion, which, you might rightly say, is the normal human condition. The difference with this weekend was that the ‘enlightenment’ felt quite extreme, and the confusion was extremely perplexing.

Driving south on Saturday I found myself slipping in and out of meditating on IQ and SQ.

In my philosophy the axis of IQ runs from intellectual to instinctual.
Intellectual intelligence can be characterised as “reflective/contemplative”.

Instinctual intelligence can be described as “reactive”. Much of it is pre-programmed into the primitive core of the brain, well away from the frontal lobes where conscious thought is processed. We breathe, we eat, we cry, we laugh, we move instinctually. Through early experiences, when the brain is still forming, we learn to react without conscious thought to various stimuli. Hence flight and fight and freeze reactions. The physical act of sex is clearly instinctual. Though making love involves all of our intelligences.

The axis of SQ (spiritual intelligence) runs from physical to metaphysical (spiritual).
Physical intelligence can be called “sensory”. The senses don’t provide us with ‘facts’, but they do supply us with crucial and clear impressions of our surroundings.

Metaphysical intelligence is essentially “intuitive”. It has nothing to do with facts, or logic, or sensory impressions. Most ‘creative’ ‘thinking’ derives from intuition - sudden revelations or ideas that come into our consciousness seemingly from nowhere. Intuitive thoughts may be triggered by existing ideas and sensory impressions, but they don’t rely on them.

I’ve spent quite a lot of time thinking about where intuition fits into the larger scheme of things - where it stems from, and which intelligence it works through. Metaphysical intelligence works through direct KNOWING. It doesn’t need facts or logic or sensory input to make sense of the world. It just KNOWS. Intuition is simply KNOWING.

Prior to the development of ‘scientific’ ways of understanding the world, prior to the ‘Enlightenment’, our KNOWING was essentially through direct experience (use of the senses - physical intelligence) and through intuition. Ever since the Enlightenment these earlier forms of discovery and knowing have been downgraded and seen as somehow belonging to the realm of the ‘feminine’, and therefore inferior or even invalid.

The worship of the intellect and all that can be quantified and categorised has continued apace. Ours is the scientific age. We believe we’re living in the Age of Enlightenment, and yet it seems to me the worship of science and IQ is in itself extremely ignorant, especially when it tries to downgrade and belittle the other types of intelligence. Though to be fair, the more enlightened scientists recognise the value of imagination and intuition.

Driving south I was also meditating on the third axis of intelligence, which connects emotional intelligence with social intelligence, what been referred to as EQ. Daniel Goleman’s book, Emotional Intelligence, inspired me in so many ways, and I’ve thought for some time that I understand what emotional intelligence is, and how it operates.

Suddenly I found myself realising that I’ve been missing something. Something very important to do with emotions. Specifically: what they are, how they operate and how they can be a positive form of intelligence. That’s a very big something to be missing for someone who feels he knows something about emotional intelligence.

Social intelligence is less problematic. Goleman didn’t make this entirely clear, I felt, but I now believe that social intelligence works through empathy. It is in fact empathetic. Without the quality of empathy we cannot relate positively and creatively to others.

Goleman has recently published a book called Social Intelligence, which I’m part way though reading. He clearly thought that social intelligence needed a whole book to itself in order to do justice to it. Empathy seems to me fairly easy to understand, as a concept, though much harder to accomplish in practice, for some people at least.

But emotions? If they are in some senses the antithesis of logic, reason and intuition, and the opposite of empathy, how on earth can they really be seen as an ‘intelligence’? What positive life-force do they possess? What was their evolutionary benefit or necessity? What word encapsulates their positive functioning, if any?

I felt challenged and frustrated by these questions, and spent much of the weekend trying to grapple with them and figure out some answers.

I ask the question about which word encapsulates the positive functioning of emotions, and I say ‘if any’ because I recently finished reading Goleman’s book ‘Destructive Emotions - And How We Can Overcome Them - A Dialogue with the Dalai Lama’. The whole tenor of the book is that emotions are extremely problematic, and as with his ‘Emotional Intelligence’, the need is for us to develop the habit of engaging the intellect, the frontal cortex, and using it to put a brake on the workings of destructive emotions, the key emotions being hatred, greed and jealousy.

Since the outcomes of the unrestrained expression of these emotions are usually so dire, in terms of violence, exploitation, abuse, etc, it’s obvious why we need to apply those brakes. So we need to stop, and think, and remind ourselves of those probable consequences of passionate actions if they are unrestrained, whenever we feel ourselves in the grip of powerful, destructive emotions.

I reckon the emotions are what Freud described as the Id - the dark energy within each of us. Freud (I nearly wrote Fraud) also saw the emotions as something problematic, troubling and potentially destructive, and therefore in need of control by what he called the Superego - the surrounding culture’s commandments and strictures, and its threat of punishment for behaviour that was is any way licentious, anarchic, unorthodox, libidinous, chaotic, nihilistic, etc.

But surely emotions can also be positive? Is love an emotion? Love is impossible to define, but it’s surely possible to experience love - for example a love of life, or for some people a love of God - without emotional engagement. Love can be entirely spiritual, and therefore the emotional realm cannot lay claim to love as belonging to it exclusively. Maybe we can have an intellectual love of mathematics and philosophy. We can love nature, and love art and other works of creation without emotional engagement.

However, it seems fair to say that love is more powerful when the emotions are engaged. So I think what the emotions are really about, their unique factor, their exclusive mode of operation, is PASSION. Here we have a powerful and evocative word and a concept which is also neutral, in that we can be passionate in both a positive as well as a negative way.

We know about crimes of passion. But we also know about loving passionately in a positive way. We can live life passionately. Passion is a driving force, a fire within us. We can use it positively or negatively. Passion provides the energy for our bodies, our minds, our spirits, our relationships, and our ambitions. Passion fuels our creativity. It’s the fuel for the engine, the oven, the furnace, and the boiler. It’s the heat in the sun that makes life possible and worthwhile. It’s the rays that nurture the crops in the fields, the trees in the forests and the life in the seas.

But passion can also cause wars and other sorts of destruction. Passion is potentially very dangerous - like fire, like nuclear power, like ultra-violet rays. It can be toxic and radioactive, carcinogenic and all-consuming. When it’s truly out of control then it can neutralise and eliminate intellect and spirit, and destroy us physically.

It does what it does, and we need to work hard at ensuring its energy is properly harnessed and directed, and consumed in moderation. We cannot binge on it and seek to use it as a stimulant, an opiate, a hallucinogenic or an anti-depressant.

Perhaps for these reasons we need to stop seeing hatred, anger and jealousy as emanating from or residing within the realms of the emotions. Maybe we should see these afflictions as being as much to do with negative ‘thoughts’ and negative ‘feelings’ as merely negative ‘emotions’. Maybe they’re much more complex than mere emotions.

Why not consider the emotional realm as being just a field of energy that has both its light and its dark aspects - containing the potential for both light and dark ‘passion’? Maybe we don’t do this because we find it so difficult to think of emotion (or passion) in the abstract, without attaching it to some other concept. But difficulty shouldn’t prevent us from making the effort and the attempt.

These past few weeks I’ve been enjoying listening to and reading about the various theories, philosophies and ideas circulating in the ether and in the airwaves and in cyberspace concerning our confusion about the nature of reality, consciousness and human perception. Last week’s ‘In Our Time’ on Radio 4 on Materialism was a good example. We’re still arguing about whether the philosophy of materialism makes sense!

Clearly we still have a long way to go in our shared understanding of consciousness, perception and the workings of our brains, our spirits and our souls. We are still trying to figure out whether spirits and souls really exist, let alone whether they’re located in our brains, or elsewhere.

It’s obvious that many scientists are of the view that even if there seems to be a spirit and a soul and they’re situated in and operate within our brain (which seems to be indicated by real-time brain scanners) then they’re really just a physiological and a material phenomenon and therefore they don’t really exist because they’re just a part of the material that’s our brain, and the way it operates, insofar as they believe that the physical brain, the intellect and the spirit are part of our corporeal reality and are therefore synonymous with 'body'. Therefore there is only the material, only the body, and spirit and soul don't actually exist. It’s all nonsense really.

We have this difficulty because of the dominance of science, logic and the intellect in Western philosophy and usually feel the need to investigate phenomena primarily from the basis of ‘scientific’ and data-based research and exploration. Intuitive and metaphysical thinking seems to have little or no validity, and is therefore dismissed as “New Age” or hippy nonsense.

But for now I’m happy to stick with my new thought - that emotions are the energy that causes passion, and what we’ve traditionally called emotions are in fact the by-product of some dark form of the energy we may call passion, and also consist of feelings and ideas that have become negatively warped and twisted.

Therefore anger is just anger, and has components of negative ideas, negative emotions (passion), and negative feelings.

Similarly jealousy is just jealousy. Hatred is just hatred. Resentment is just resentment. Perhaps these can be considered ego-states. They're not emotions as such, or at least they're not emotions pure and simple. Certainly they're the opposite of whatever connects us with others.

Love, on the other hand, is just love, and usually has components of passion, knowledge, input from the senses and feelings.