Consciousness vs. Intelligence

So much of the news has been filled with opposing opinions regarding our leader’s state of mental health, neurobiological fitness, or source of his own boasts of superior intelligence. For those of us who see human beings as spiritual soulful beings before we’re secondarily conditioned by our cultures and societies to see ourselves as essentially willful, mental, or physical beings, it’s an opportune time to challenge our ideas of mental health and intelligence altogether and relate instead to the deeper realities of personal states of ‘emotive health’ and ‘consciousness.’ In those terms, one possible calibration of the degree of what we call ‘consciousness’ involves four main elements. One could be said to be more ‘conscious’ relative to:
- The depth of the ability to see ourselves from an objective distance and from that viewpoint dispassionately and critically evaluate our inner world of thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and attitudes, and how they directly source our outer expressive worlds of choices, actions, reactions, and behaviors;
- The depth of a personal porosity of being that allows us to feel our impact on others and so not cocooned inside of our own narcissistically sealed-off state of being;
- The degree of possession of an innate moral code with which we measure the mature or immature nature of our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, actions, reactions, choices, and behaviors and their ramifications and impacts upon ourselves and others;
- The lack of the degree of our attraction to having power over others in ways that consciously or unconsciously elevates us above others in some way.
As such, given the contextual framework of a spiritual, not religious paradigm of life that guides our value systems and evaluation algorithms, the degree of the presence of these four factors can be said to endow a person with a more advanced or higher consciousness, and contrariwise, the degree of their absence can be said to indicate a less advanced or lower state of personal consciousness. And how a state of narcissistic self-absorption that compensates for one’s denial of a deep inner powerlessness creating the need to have power over others and not feel our negative impact on them only deepens the morass of consciousness fixated at that immature state. The same effect is true for boasting, always a compensation for an inner lack of self-worth.
These elements are a very different and far more sophisticated evaluation algorithm than one’s score on a Stanford-Binet test measuring some version of Intelligence Quotient, something even the experts agree can be culturally biased in the direction of societal norms, prejudices, and educational opportunities. And because high IQ  and MCA cognition score so often co-exist with both low consciousness factors and low emotive maturity indices, intelligence or cognitive alacrity are exceedingly poor and outdated measures of our personal state of insight acuity, integrity, self-responsibiliity, and empathic reponsivity to our effect on others.
In that sense, relative to consciousness quotient (CQ), using ‘intelligence quotient (IQ) as an evaluative measure of our educational history, societal status, and supposed mental acuity is like believing a photo of a mountain replaces the actual experience of climbing one.
Why do we as a species so often cling to such a narrow positive or negative measure of personal being, and what can we do to move past intelligence as a measure of value and replace it with one that captures more of our complexity as spiritual beings having human experience? To that end, it is offered it is time to move away from high IQ and mental health as measures of human value and worth and more toward high CQ, which additionally involves emotive health.
As such, our habituated conditioning to measure a human being by intelligence and mental health is all part of how deeply and invisibly we still labor under an almost four-hundred year old paradigm of the human condition of ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Descarte’s position thus supports the idea that the better or more efficiently we think, one main measure of which is IQ, the more in alignment we are with what makes us essentially human. 
But high intelligence easily co-exists with rabid low consciousness and emotive immaturity states in  criminals, leaders, parents, authorities, and both the more and less educated. Why are so few of us curious about how our predominant evaluation of ourselves is based in a mental-based ‘I think, therefore I am’ or its neurobiological cousin ‘I have a physical brain, therefore I am’ worldview? Such worldviews completely omit any objectifiable measure of dynamisms like integrity, morality, self-awareness, kindness, impact on others, and all the aspects of our humanity that align with emotive and spiritual maturity, none of which have anything directly to do with intelligence, orientations that have outlived their usefulness in the modern age.
The last twenty years have seen a remarkable increase in interest in both the nature and effects of emotions in our life. No matter where we look, from mass consciousness self-help books and gurus to more serious inquiries and research of emotions in psychology, philosophy, and many psychospiritual orientations, talk about the role of emotion in our lives is currently taking up a huge amount of space in our collective experience. As one of the very few, and at one point the only person specifically exhorting such an inquiry in the mid-1980’s into how deeply emotionality makes us who we are, this new interest is both gratifying and frustrating. Gratifying in the sense as a tribe we are finally talking about human emotivity, and frustrated that virtually all such interest still relegates our emotive nature as a subset of mind and body, smothering it under the aegis of Descarte’s outworn picture of human beingness and its inbred neurobiological-based cousin.
This includes all modern modalities that support emotional development or awareness but never see emotivity itself as upstream of our mental and physical being, and so only scratch the surface of our deeper aspects of consciousness. In that sense, emotivity is our innate capacity to have emotional states in the first place, where what we call an emotion is sourced by either upstream emotive congestion or health only secondarily expressing as that specific emotional state. Without that distinction, all attempts to create emotional health still languish within Descarte’s outworn picture.
So what first needs to be corrected is to shift the way we see ourselves as primarily comprised of mind and/or body and all the limiting processing and measuring aspects of such a worldview. And to legitimate that our level of CQ is not only measurable by an index of emotive maturity, a common benchmark inexcusably absent in virtually all mass consciousness, philosophical, psychological, and psychospiritual orientations, but also that soul-based consciousness itself is actually made of emotivity before it secondarily expresses as mind or body. And further, that a high index of such a benchmark of emotive maturity based in our emotive primacy being automatically imparts the presence and depth of those four CQ factors from the bottom-up, including the presence of an inner moral code, without needing any top-down grafting from any religious or spiritual teaching or conditioning, east or west, traditional or modern. EQ must now be recalibrated as an Emotive Quotient of consciousness that cannot be attained unless our personal being undergoes a healing dharma based in our emotive primacy of being.
Such a re-orientation to our essential emotivity has the power to radically change our conditioned worlds just as much as ‘I think, therefore I am’ lifted us out of the religious and mystical ‘I sin, therefore I am’ in western orientations, and nondual-based ‘I am an illusion, therefore I am not’ of buddhism or hindu-based ‘I am impersonal, therefore I am’ of taoistic or oneness-based eastern paradigms. And further, what if human emotivity is the missing link that finally connects our innate emotivity to our actual soulful being that abides to a much deeper degree with Love, an emotive dynamic, not a mental or physical one?
If the answer to these questions is a possible yes, then we are in the verge of discovering a critical aspect of the missing linkage between psychological and spiritual states of consciousness, a heretofore unmanifestable state of being that could not arise until we realized that our emotivity, our innate capacity to process reality through feeling and emotion first before secondarily abstracting experience with the mind, is that which defines us most deeply as sentient beings.
And that our emotive essence is also the key to unfolding spiritual tiers of consciousness with no eastern transcendence, no repudiation of the dualistic basis for personal life or teachings of impersonality, no need for any scripture or apology of our natural dualisms of being, and no immortality project of any afterlife, however real such may be, that we consciously or unconsciously employ as an escape from human life, all of which exhort us to disinhabit our humanity in greater or lesser degree.  
So it is time to recognize that it’s the measure of Consciousness Quotient that is relevant to this domain, not some arbitrary standard of mental stability, cognitive competence, intelligence quotient, or even current standards of emotional quotient, all of which are rooted in an outworn ‘I think, therefore I am’ or ‘I have a brain, therefore I am’ paradigmatic focus. Mental stability, cognitive fitness, intelligence quotient, and current emotional quotient standards all easily co-exist with states of narcissism, racism, bombasticism, and low CQ, and so do cannot track the most important aspects of what constitutes human character, caring, and competence in the way we intergrously deal with our impact on others and our own inner states of maturity.
It is time now to facilitate the means for upcoming generations to create both emotively and spiritually mature states of consciousness without the limitations inherent to ‘I am sinful, therefore I am; ‘I am impersonal, therefore I am;’ ‘I am illusory, therefore I am not;’ ‘I think, therefore I am;’ or ‘I have a brain, therefore I am,’ and replace them all with a single orientation that includes the entire range and complexity of human consciousness: ‘I am emotive, therefore I am.’
Only then is there a chance to create a world where CQ and not IQ is the globally accepted measure of the evolution of our personal being, and with it, a spiritual renaissance that no longer needs beliefs and traditional and modern institutions based on them to unify our secular aspects with our spiritual. And in that way make possible the experience, not of an outer illusory utopian ‘heaven-on-earth,’ but a personally-validated inner state of ‘earth-as-heaven,’ one heart at a time.

Stace Barron

Stace Barron