SELF INTELLIGENCE
The capacity to truly know yourself
Self Intelligence is knowledge of yourself as a human system: your body, your brain and nervous system, and your psyche, together with a lifelong dialogue with yourself.
It works in two directions:
General: how human beings, as systems, operate.
Personal: how you operate, as a unique arrangement of that system, unlike anyone else.
“We are taught about almost everything except the system that operates us. We learn about the systems we communicate with, but not about the system that is doing the communicating. When I think about it, this is a huge failure of our civilization, because that system is the most sophisticated in the world, at least so far.”
Why Self Intelligence matters today.
20 years ago, I would have been compared with perhaps fifty people of my age.
Today, a young person compares herself with an entire generation, worldwide. The map she navigates by is almost unreadable: too much information, and no way of knowing what is true or relevant.
In that world, Self Intelligence is the compass, yet two things are missing:
Attention to ourselves.
Self-exploration is still a luxury for certain elites.
The means of exploring ourselves.
Most of us discover them only after something goes wrong.
In my view, Self Intelligence should be taught from kindergarten onwards.
Three dimensions of Self Intelligence
Understanding your system
The first thing to know is your brain and your body, and how they work together: the neurological, the anatomical, your immune system. It is not enough to know one subsystem. The question is what sort of system you are, in your entirety.
Exploring your psyche
This is no longer a physical phenomenon but a psychological one: your feelings and emotions, your mindset, your knowledge, your skills and your tools. Children express what they feel. As we grow up, what we lose is this self-touch.
Developing your inner dialogue
You can know a great deal about human systems, even about yourself, and still be out of dialogue with yourself. Inner dialogue begins with an honest question: not What do I think I should think? but What do I really think?
Signs that Self Intelligence is underdeveloped
Joy is scarce.
Not fun, not distraction: joy. If you cannot experience as much joy as you desire, something in your Self Intelligence needs attention.
Peace and calm are hard to reach.
Joy and calm sit at opposite ends of the same spectrum, and both are a litmus test.
There are blocks.
Parts of you have not been paid attention to, or not enough, and your alignment is skewed.
Discomfort has no name.
You do not know how to name the discomfort that comes to you, and your boundaries become blurred.
Your own desire was never consulted.
You never asked yourself whether you wanted the life you are living.
Many things change when you develop Self Intelligence.
You see yourself with your own eyes.
Society hands us glasses that distort how we see ourselves. Taking them off, and trusting your own eyesight, lets you see clearly.
Healing becomes possible.
You cannot heal a wound you have not looked at. Once you see it, healing comes logically.
Joy returns.
It is the first thing that comes when you know yourself.
You gain a sense of direction.
You may not know every step, but you know the direction is right, and you are not in a hurry. I call this the sense of rightness.
Self Intelligence is the foundation of all 8 intelligences. As soon as we cultivate it, we create the ground on which every other intelligence can stand.
How we work together:
The people who come to me are discontented with the way they are. They have a nagging feeling that there is some truth they should be finding, though they may not yet be able to pinpoint it. That suspicion is where we begin.