Intellectual development (IQ) has been the focal point of educational institutions across the world for many centuries. As a result, extraordinary progress has been made in the sciences, math, literature, the social sciences, the arts and much more. A deeper understanding of atoms to outer galaxies has been gathered. Intellectual acuity has greatly enriched our planet’s many cultures and societies.

In contrast, emotional development has not been a focal point of educational institutions over these centuries, evidence is to be found most everywhere. Lagging far behind even physical development, the lack of emotional development/intelligence (EQ) has caused countless wars, massive stress, illness and disruption in what could have been and could be the smooth flow of societies, geopolitics and families everywhere, from the macro levels to the granular.

War in the advanced 21st Century, really??

Conducting war and having enemies in the 21st century among members of a species with three big brains, is it true? Thinking objectively for a moment, with how far we have come in so many ways, it is virtually unbelievable. Yet, it really is true.

But why? If we pride ourselves on our ability to reason, to be rational, what on Earth could possibly justify this barbaric, infantile behavior?

It is a brilliant example of society being dominated by the head-brain disconnected from the heart-and-physical brains. In Taoist and Traditional Chinese Energetic terms, this represents a serious imbalance. In Western psychological terms, it’s nothing short of a pathology.

Spiritual intelligence: all together now!

Spiritual intelligence is unifying the three brains together into a unified field. This may be the best definition of the fulfillment of human potential.

Clearly, our society puts primary focus on intellectual development beyond everything else. By and large, this has become the very definition of intelligence. The extolled status of the IQ test in academia and beyond illustrates this point. Relying on this single form of intelligence makes for a very lopsided development, hence society, like a stool with only a single leg.

Useful and desirable as intellectual intelligence is, no less valuable, and I argue even more so, is emotional intelligence which can pave the way to creating a culture of peace, something that all the great intellects of the world have not been able to achieve over millennia.

Indigenous people understand the intelligence of the heart

Traditional, indigenous wisdom the world over has always understood the superior “thinking” of the heart. Hence phrases such as “Do as the heart bids thee” and “Listen to and act from the wisdom of your heart”. For them, the points in this article are old news.

For the average Western European/American intellectual type, this is considered the stuff of myth and folklore, hardly giving it another thought. This may be exactly the problem—indigenous wisdom is looked down upon when in fact we should have always been looking up and honoring it.

Their understanding of Mother Earth for instance, is predicated on respect and holding her as sacred. Westerners look at Earth as a repository rich with oil and minerals to be extracted for material gain. It couldn’t be more different.

Intelligence types

Each type of intelligence, each important, has its own power and place. Intellectual intelligence yields a creativity that expresses itself in a myriad of ways, from breakthrough ideas and theories in the sciences and arts to innovations that can and have changed the world.

Kinesthetic intelligence has given rise to high levels of skill in dance, sports, agility, handicrafts, surgery, healing, music, sculpture, building, carpentry and on.

Emotional intelligence gives rise to any number of brilliant possibilities that can breed a society flourishing with good will, good cheer, forgiveness, patience, compassion and love. Through empathy and these other qualities, it becomes a palpable pathway to peace and well-being.

The work of psychologist Daniel Goleman and others has helped to advance the idea of EQ and its universal application and importance over the past many decades.

Understanding survival

It should be pretty obvious to everyone that the biology of all sentient beings contains a survival program at its core, the purpose of which is to preserve and protect life.

Without this, all bets are off. If any sentient creature senses a threat to life, it quickly adapts with fight, flight or freeze, whichever of these seems most appropriate to assure survival.

We have built arsenals & governments based on survival suspicion & low expectations

The developed nations have spent billions of dollars arming themselves against the enemy of being open, honest, truthful, peace-loving, emotionally intelligent and cooperative.

Yet it is exactly that state of mind/being that engages our adversaries to be same and sit down at the Peace Table to work things out. No head of government wants to be in a perpetual state of being “on guard” from attack—how crazy is that? Yet that is exactly how we as a collection of nation-states are postured and poised.

On a personal level, if the body is under constant threat, the immune system becomes exhausted and weak. If we can see this from this higher point of view, we’d all be much happier, at ease, feel safe, be more productive, creative and for we taxpayers, to save trillions. For us environmentalists, we’d be saving the planetary eco-system.

Moving beyond survival

Once any sentient creature doesn’t feel threatened but instead feels safe, an entirely different order of development is able to unfold. In the brain, we move from the reptilian/amygdala to the prefrontal cortex. This movement “forward”, toward the executive function of the brain allows for intellectual processing, critical thinking, discernment and reflection. This can immediately impact our emotional reactivity and allow for greater self-regulation, management and discipline.

While we have no certainty that these functions are uniquely human, they do help to distinguish us one from others at least within our own species.

Three brains: intellectual, emotional, kinesthetic

Despite technological development, intellectual acumen and the physical prowess of Olympians among a minute segment of the population, emotional development and intelligence has not been given a rightful place in our educational systems yet curiously, I suggest that it is the essence of creating human happiness and well-being. Why would it be so haphazardly handled? So sloppily?!

Of the three brains—I know, not usually thought of as such but they are—the emotional brain, in the heart, is the center of them all literally and figuratively.

Each of course is vital in its own respect, but if you leave out the center, there is serious trouble, as The Music Man said “right here in River City”.

To drive the point home, each of the brains has a vast number of neurons—the head brain, the heart and the gut. What we were taught about the human body, and what doctors are taught in medical school is but a thin sliver of both the larger and smaller pictures of the discoveries made over the past decades about the rich complexity of human physiology.

The discovery of neurons in these other body regions is but one of many deeper understandings that have accrued over time.

In addition to the biology of the human story is the one of body as metaphor. This is exemplified in the work of Louise Hay’s Heal Your Body and much deeper, the work of Dr. Hamer’s German New Medicine and Dr. Claude Sabbah’s Total Biology.

These are profound teachings which frame physical illness as a result of either trauma or an unmanageable, ongoing emotional stress that shows up in the body, expressed through illnesses specific to the kind of emotional stress.

Incoherent attention to intelligence that can lead to leadership & peace leads to enmity & war

As a result of the lopsided development of emotional intelligence our society is a bit haphazard, incoherent and contains multitudes of contradictions that are seriously challenging to understand. Violence abounds in film, TV, all media and in the streets.

Without EQ, our youth are not positioned to develop leadership skills our world profoundly needs in business, science, the arts and governance. Instead, too many college-age, young adults are still seeking coddling, teddy bears and safe zones, when a lot of adult life, life as a whole, is not particularly cuddly or safe but more thorny or like sandpaper.

Yet, a maturing emotional intelligence, resilient and able to deal with the “slings and arrows” of daily life is key to a successful life and society. It also includes the ideas of the development of healthy, humane values and development of character.

This includes empathy, standing in another’s shoes, experiencing other’s emotional pain and one’s own—this is all part of the growing process. This is how compassion is cultivated.

Developing EQ in other parts of the world like Tibet

Young Tibetan children, especially those being groomed to be monks, must spend time with the elderly and be with them when they die. This experience teaches the youth about the impermanence of life, a foundational Buddhist tenet.

At moments like these, there is no room for comfort, coddling or safety. As a result of this experience, compassion and connectedness to all life emerge as components of one’s character.

Emotional development should be an integrated, organic part of our education

This is not an aspect of growing up that should be haphazardly addressed or by happenstance but deserves the full attention of parents, teachers and one’s community.

Why is this area so neglected yet so vitally important? I’ll suggest that as challenging as developing one’s critical skills and intellect may be, developing one’s emotional life and intelligence is a lot more so.

Developing EQ is hard to do: the mammalian challenge

Developing emotional intelligence requires embodying society’s highest virtues that are also embraced and promoted by the world’s wisdom, religious and spiritual traditions.

These include understanding of self and others, compassion, kindness, generosity, acceptance, forgiveness, humility, empathy, embodying peace, love of life, respect for all sentient beings, mercy and patience.

Evolutionarily, as we moved from reptiles to mammals, from cold to warm-blooded and sometimes hot, inherently involves the experience of nurture and love. This is the basis of our human nature. We are programmed for these. But the head brain does not infrequently “get in the way” of the natural flow of energy.

Think for a moment of the challenges involved as you developed yourself along each of these lines and you get a glimpse of the challenge parents face in assisting their kids to do the same. Yet it is exactly the embodiment of these qualities, these virtues that we seek in our family, friends, colleagues and ourselves. The more of each virtue that is developed, the higher the regard we have for those who embody them.

I’m feeling very emotional!

Perhaps why developing EQ is so challenging is that humans are eminently emotional creatures. We feel everything! We experience life through the emotional lens. Everything is weighed and judged by our feelings which are often very intelligent.

Our ego is wholly weaved into the cloth of our feelings and emotional reactivity. Separating out, cultivating an objective meta-position as we say in NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming) toward ourselves has its challenges and is humbling.

An education which teaches virtue & the value of integrity

Imagine a world for a moment in which these virtues were developed as an intrinsic part of our educational curriculum. Imagine that parents made a point of consciously assisting their children developing along these lines and helping them understand the value of integrity. We’d have a different world, completely.

Difficult as it is to facilitate this kind of inner development in children and teens, there are ways to do so and even before more advanced technologies, there always have been during times and in cultures world-wide where this kind of development was taken very seriously, cultivated and honored.

This forward movement opens up an array of new possibilities for our human development. One of the key components is the further moving forward (and downward) to the heart with some 40,000 of its own neurons. Between the prefrontal cortex and the heart-brain or heart-mind (Shen in Chinese, or Home of Spirit), one’s emotional intelligence is getting stirred, like a chick cracking open the eggshell, the heart begins to open and the intelligence gets awakened.

The eggshell & the awakening

We all have an eggshell sheltering us from the outer world and protecting our inner world of womb-like bliss. At our own pace, we usually break out to “feel the world” and “tune in” to the people and environment in which we live. For some, this happens early in life, and for others, later.

Not infrequently, the opening happens through hardship or suffering, a shock, or a significant loss of a loved one. Hard as it is, this can often be the awakening of compassion, of deeper feelings of love and connectedness. This state of being heartbroken, is a state of authenticity in which real conversations can occur, where oxytocin can flow, where trust and brotherhood can emerge.

Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, referred to this heartbroken state as a version of enlightenment because it is so real, so raw and vulnerable.

Build trust, lessen ego, listen, be reasonable, cooperative and... voilà!: a pathway to peace

This state paves the path to peace. Not pens and paper, not discussion of borders, not even treaties though all of these may emerge. But the path to peace is made instead, among the heads of State who “lost their heads” and instead dwell in this state of high EQ, often a brainwave state between alpha and theta.

In this deeper state, these “heads” can discuss the sacredness of life and how important, at all costs, it is to preserve it. This is the core, this is the priority, out of which, once established on that level, the details for treaties can be cooperatively worked out.

It is true that Mahatma Gandhi said “There is no path to peace. Peace is the path”. I will daresay that curiously, both are true. If we are leading lives of peace, we are who we need to be for a peaceful world.

Peace from the head or peace from the heart?

I’ve made the case pretty clearly that peace is really “an emotional matter”, a matter of the heart, a deeper recognition of the higher values that unite us. The head can help to flesh the higher values out and what that looks like once mapped out.

The heart leads and the head follows.

Pollyanna is our friend

It only sounds Pollyanna-ish if the leaders of the most influential, leading nations aren’t willing to play. But of course, this is what real leadership is, the courage to step out from the flock, speak truth from the heart, with the knowledge that most deeply, we all want peace. It’s not banging on tables, raising one’s voice and sending in troops.

That’s the weak and lazy man’s way.

Seeing the silver lining in each situation is Pollyanna’s gift of wisdom to us all.

The strong man is the gentle man

The strong man is the gentleman, the vulnerable, honest, open, virtuous and funny one. His body may be buffed and muscular but his heart is gentle and soft as a lamb, malleable, adaptable and resilient.

This is the path to peace. Is anyone courageous enough among our leaders to walk this path, or more? We need a quorum. If so, please [sign up] (www.abetterworld.net)