Core Intelligence

Intelligence isn't what it used to be. Tests were designed, way back, to measure various defined intellectual capacities. In those days we measured verbal IQ, non-verbal IQ, we had stannines, bell-curves and cultural bias.

Now we have emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence, ecological intelligence, intuitive intelligence and industrial intelligence. Astute books have been written about these, and I am sure more intelligences will be found as we go along.

I am interested in intelligence, because when I feel unintelligent, as I frequently do, I seek to feel intelligent again. Feeling intelligent is better than feeling unintelligent.

How do you know when you are being or acting intelligently? This question has fascinated me all my life because I was brought up in a way that encouraged me towards scholastic intelligence, spiritual obedience, economic ignorance, emotional servility, sexual idiocy and subjective clarity. I have had the good fortune of experiential influences in my life to have changed the balance of all this, and have learnt things that have changed my mind, direction, values and intelligence. I am sure that I am intelligent, but I can't prove it, not even to myself.

For a very short while I worked in the context of that well-known oxymoron, military intelligence. My job was to carry the files from the top secret cabinets to the meetings and put them away again after the meetings.  They trusted me not to open the files which was probably the height of  stupidity. What I did learn, however, was that if your enemy knew more about you than you knew about the enemy, you were likely to lose the battle.

In the functional world, intelligence relates to data-gathering, analysis, decision-making, policy, action, delivery, feedback. In the personal and interpersonal world, intelligence relates to insight, balance, wisdom, values, right action and one special core aspect which I deem to be impenetrable and inscrutable because it lies beyond the  reach of language and even thought. Fortunately, or unfortunately, this core aspect lives cheek by jowl with the mixed up sphere of emotion and instinct. These very alive imperatives remind us that we come from the belly of a very hot earth, and that our earthiness and starriness are linked in unclear ways.

This core intelligence is humbling, but not to the point of inaction. It is electrifying, often to the extent of premature commitment such as religious zeal. It can be restrictively instinctive, resulting in maternal over-protection, sexual addiction, purposeless aggression, over-identification, by way of examples.

I don't know what it is, what to call it, whether humans can conceptualize it, whether anything can be done to domesticate it.

It is an aliveness, even more, Presence, before which we had better lose all pretensions at intelligence, and learn, as quickly as possible, to relate, communicate and above all, grow in recognition. We tell ourselves strange stories, moving myths, poignant poetry and use music, architecture and art to appropriate this aspect of core intelligence that words fail to capture.

In my view, this mysterious core intelligence is a matter of grace: if you aspire too much, it evades, if you desire too much, it escapes. If your heart remembers the heat of conception with ease rather than urgency, perhaps the dream will be remembered more clearly.

Does the idea of intelligence actually apply in respect of such a view?

I think it does, if we move away from a neurologically-centred basis, and go towards subjectivity itself, realising that neurological activity and subjective awareness are not an intelligent enough combination.

The "I" of the "I", the heart of the heart, the soul in itself, the spirit, if you can catch it, the Holy Spirit, if you are prepared to recognize: these are all a little dazzling, and can't be reduced to an academic thesis or a statement of conscience.

If I believe I have captured the castle, perhaps I should go back to bringing the files.

 

Fervour and faith

If there's one crucial distinction I've learnt about it's this one. I was raised in the midst of extremely fervent people. They encouraged me to be as fervent as they were about the focus of their fervency, but I was not able, at that age, to work out what it was. Fervour is about boiling, that's what the Latin word means.

This refers to passion, enthusiasm, intensity, over-emphasis.

This has little to do with faith, which means nothing more than the dependency you display when you sit down on a chair.

You rarely think about sitting down. You just do it. You depend entirely on that chair not collapsing under you. You don't expect it to collapse. You don't do a risk analysis. You don't doubt. You simply sit.

This is a better understanding of how faith works. No matter how loudly and widely you proclaim your trust in the chair, your declaration means little. Just sit. Anyone who's interested in noticing you, will. And those who don't care, never will. So why the fervour?

The sad and solemn truth is that humans have a way of encouraging each other to participate in group commitment, and fervour is a first option. Rugby. Cricket. Strictly Come Dancing. Master Chef. Catholicism. Rangers. Protestantism. Manchester United. Al-Quada.

Fervour easily results in over-committed behaviour. You deny thinking for yourself. You refuse the bigger picture. You put passion before sensibility. You make yourself a martyr. You kill others as you martyr yourself.

Whatever, you kill life.

Fervour and faith are not the same.

Faith creates life.

Fervour, done inappropriately, kills it.

If you don't have the intelligence to work out the difference, better back off from making proclamations, especially to yourself.  It's not merely about embarrassing yourself: it's about the bigger thing you haven't risen to. Much more is at stake than you realize. Fervour can be stupid and often is...how many beers do you drink because your side has won? Faith is never stupid: it sits, and if the chair collapses, that's a different kind of problem.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 





In the beginning

Stories have traditional ways of beginning. "Once upon a time" opens the curtain for a fairy-tale, "it was a dark and stormy night" is the beginning of a horror story, and "in the beginning" opens the myth of genesis.

Where do we come from? Why is it all such a mystery?

Somehow our thinking just isn't capable of making the link from the temporal to the eternal. I believe our ability to feel gets there quite easily, and that the distance between thinking, feeling, language and openness has been put there by us, the human race, in mistaken ways. The short story "Papa, snake and I" shows how power and powerlessness is created at many levels of consciousness, and is pervasive. Much of our mistaken thinking arises from a bewildering acceptance of powerlessness, an unwillingness, not an incapacity to resurrect from a deadly emotional situation. The lack is one of emotional agility, which is the other side of the coin to which we are more accustomed: intellectual capacity.

In the beginning.

From  here on, to make sense you have to commit yourself to a style of thinking and emotion. It's a decision. Maybe you pat your Bible or another holy book and say "that's it, it's all in here, and I know I can never understand, but I know I trust, and that's as far as I can ever go". Or maybe you frown slightly, and say, "We have many scientific tools, the task is immense, maybe not in my lifetime, but maybe one day...".

Perhaps, in your mind's eye, you see stories of cosmic proportions and hear breath-taking celestial music that you know, painfully, you can't verbalize, yet it's all there in the palm of your hand, ready to be known in ever-more detailed ways.

We are part of the planet. We came from the planet. We were put on the planet. We are descendants of aliens. The mud got alive, and we evolved. An amoeba got alive and we evolved. God created us.

You pick the sentence that appeals to you. The sentence makes no difference to what actually happened.

Perhaps, like my Irish friend, you can feel what happened. Perhaps, like Jan Smuts, you can sense the all-embracing arms of holism, and the ever-expanding holographic contact that this sense implies.

I spent four years working at the South African Astronomical Observatory, spending many hours of the night looking up at the stars. I once spent nine months going to bed each night, lying on the bed looking up at the ceiling, but in reality I was crawling along the edges of a cosmos I could barely imagine, sensing with acuity whatever may be sensed at a place like that.

Sometimes I have the impression that we, as conscious beings, are the inside-out of just one level of a totally aware universe, like a hand and a glove that have swopped places. I've said before that God, for me, is not so much of a person as Presence. So, in the beginning, was there something that happened as the fiery core of this planet hurled itself into the tension that holds atomic structure together? Music and the table of elements can't be so orderly by accident. Ever heard of your core star and your haric line? There's more to human light than meets the eye. And there's much more to human consciousness than the intellect can offer on its own.

I think that to re-visit the beginning, you have to re-decide a poor decision you made somewhere between childhood and adolescence, when you accepted a certain level of powerlessness because it seemed you had no choice in the matter.

You were wrongly informed.

That which was in the beginning is now, and is yet to come. Stay with the mystery, and mystery will become more normal, and you will see with the eyes of your eyes and hear with the ears of your ears, and begin to know with heart's knowing.

I'm sorry I can't be more specific and show a video of what happened in the beginning, when life sprang from the planet. I do however have the sense that we can leap-frog Jung and go from  personal unconsciousness to group unconsciousness to planetary unconsciousness, because I have faith in the acuity of the imagination. All levels of imagination and cellular memory go pretty far, and if you are prepared to experience where these take you to, forgetting about Facebook, your boss, your bank balance and social problems for some time, I can guarantee a surprise. It's a matter of focusing, or more specifically, bio-focusing.

 

Living myth

There's a point where an individual fits into an historical context, where individual physiology is matrixed by cosmic aeons and a point where individual consciousness merges with infinite mystery.

Imagine this remarkable point of departure, entry, contact being tucked away in the elusive core commonly known as "you" yourself.

That's how very mysterious, powerful and extensive you are. Your boundaries are not limited to the here and now, nor to the appearance or disappearance of money from your purse, also not to the various moods that persuade you from time to time that some things are more important than others.

One of the biggest feats that humans aspire to is to tell the story into which they fit for real. So important is this that they even kill each other for the sake of the story that they cling to. Families can be split by preference for a story, nations upset and faiths kept at war. The stories are many and varied, authored by people of all kinds including pioneers, puritans and pirates.

I was fascinated by stories from an early age, blessed to have one Aunty Carol who was no relative but stayed in our home, and created stories with me, and  told them over and over. I still have no idea where she came from. She died when I was twelve and went to heaven, and still embarrasses me with a keen interest in what I do with my life. Carol Russo. If anyone knows anything about her background, I would very much like to know more about her personal history.

Most of my academic work revolved around working out what a story is, what the idea of "story" means, what the relationship between identity and story is, how consciousness and narrative interweave, how social awareness and story create authority.

Three books come to mind immediately: The Body of Myth by Sansonese, The Cry for Myth  by Rollo May and The Roots of Civilization by Marshack.

These and many more shaped my thinking. Gradually I learned that shaping my thinking wasn't as important as challenging my feelings. I began to probe where I would not have probed before, losing important boundaries of fear along the way. When I read Freke and Gandy's The Jesus Mysteries, a huge light came on. It took me ten years after that to recognize what was being illuminated to me: that truth does not arrive as one single though possibly long narrative that rests on a platform of absolutely accurate details.

No scientist will ever arrive with the truth. No theologian will even be able to package it. No spiritualist can unravel what happens after death. I watched Carl Sagan's Cosmos regularly and more than once and accepted that the impossible immensity of the universe requires equally huge dimensions of thinking.

The truth and an accurate story overlap in a court of law, but not in a universe observed by a human mind. The human mind has to lose a bit of egotistic glue and "resinate" a bit more with what's going on in the observable and intuitive aspects of temporal and infinite living.

Each individual is a star-gate through whom meaning, purpose and intention flow. As you are honest to tell yourself and others what flows through you, you participate in living your own myth, which is guaranteed not to be limited to yourself. It's a living myth, not a merely accurate account but a creative movement reflected by what's going on in your life, your personal history and your growth and in particular your changing beliefs.

One of the biggest fears I grew up with was connected to loyalty to belief. The more free I am to believe what makes sense, the less I am compelled to believe for the sake of loyalty, which has always been a hallmark of human conflict.

Choose why you believe.

Once you've hammered your flag into the mast, that 's it , that's also not it. Decision can be changed.

A lot of people believe rubbish. That's why humanity doesn't do well. The emotions set up, the mindset sets, decisions assist bad choices. There's something in the core that doesn't make sense, but it's still chosen.

I think it's called badly interpreted instinct. Humans are wired to act instinctively. They obey because they feel to do so, they engage because they need to, they love, too bad, because they don't want to meet doom alone.

The living myth reaches out, quite despite humanity. Humans are a nexus of the universe, a very real one, a corner that requires quite a manoeuvre from that which is human , and more, I'm not sure how they will officially admit that humanity stops short, necessarily, of knowing much more than tomorrow's weather.

There's a challenge in just being conscious: meet your story...

Far from what you may have been influenced, the story is wide open to relief, a  new sense of reality, release.

I can guarantee this: simply ask "what is my story?" and if you mean, it, so much will change.......

 

Coaching, believing and energy.

You coach what you believe, whether intrinsically or explicitly. What you believe boils down to how you perform your naturally spiritual energy, the stuff that wells up and flares spontaneously. You can control this to a large extent, but not absolutely. You can join an organization that offers structures, policies, rules and channels for your energy, yet, at bottom, it's a wild, untameable pagan kind of energy. I say that because humans aren't the hub of the universe. There are pre-  post - and  meta - human aeons to the universe, and to think otherwise is to miss the whole point of being human. An individual is a cloud of atoms held together by an undiscovered principle.

The body itself, as anyone who has gone to Bodyworlds would know, is beautiful. Personality, as anyone who has lived should know, has dumbfounding potential for wisdom, stupidity, creativity, inventiveness, destructiveness and depth.

What you reckon you believe, without putting energy into it, goes nowhere. That's like having a theory about marriage, without ever having made a human commitment. On the other hand, when I watch Paul Carrack perform, I don't have to ask what he believes. I'm participating just by watching, listening and feeling.

Although I'm no surfer, I think that judging energy is like being out on the ocean, checking the waves. Some you try, others you ignore, a few you dare, and there are those you master. You don't get cross , impatient or angry with any of them. Your feelings have little relevance compared to what happens when you take action.

What impresses me about action is that it's inevitable. Each moment is filled with potential action, the most basic aspect of which is aware attention. Where we go from there is a matter of choice.

Coaching is a matter of combining telling and demonstrating: a performance of energy that's perlocutionary: something is enacted, not merely verbalised. No story can be told without participation. No alertness is wasted. No action is inconsequential. Everything can be changed at a moment's notice, and can be made new. The good news is no mere Sunday School story. It's rock hard reality, about change, growth and the incorruptibility of what's eternal, the evidence of which arises in the spontaneous feelings and awareness of the here and now. You can layer them up as high as you like with cleverness and sophistry, but you can't disguise them. You have to know what to do with fear, despair, grief and sadness. If you haven't done this for yourself, you can't coach this. You don't know what you're doing. If you haven't tried to work out what you believe, you can't coach anyone how to approach the action of believing.

Approaching your own source, your own energy, losing ego-orientation, accepting humility, embracing vulnerability, recognizing truth: these pursuits will result in the ability to communicate with conviction, commitment and clarity.







 

Authoradigms

This is a strong focus of my next book. Thomas Kuhn set a trend by writing about the paradigm and what this concept means in respect of setting and dealing with vast change. He provided an idea and a model for grand conceptual change.

The given way of thinking, held by the authoritative thinking in sway, undergoes transformation in the following way:

There's an emotional element to this, though, and I see it dancing in the box of authority.

I am an ultra-expert on authority. In my fourth year of this lifetime, I took on God, which is daring, to say the least. What this means is that I refused to back off from any particularly strong sense or feeling. I made enemies early.

However, they refused to be enemies. Whereas they spoke condemnation to me, as I was way beyond the pale, their hearts were kind, and I could sense, feel and know this.

It was a difficult situation.

Whose authority was in charge?

I made it mine. No matter how much their thoughts and attitudes gave me eternal damnation, mine would give them freedom. I wanted this for all, even them, it didn't feel as though, at bottom, they were a "them". They felt closer than that, although I could not easily reach them.

There is one verse in the book of Revelation that still tugs my heart:, and is echoed in "The Holy City":

"and all who would may enter there, and no-one was denied..."

This is echoed again in a mantra that was indelibly written on the wall of my five year old soul:

"He drew a circle that shut me out;
I was a heretic rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win:
We made a circle that drew him in."

I was taught this by a gleaming, smiling Irishman who was one of my father's best friends, from his :"bachelor's club".

He put the heat on me when I was an innocent four to five year old.

"Young Walter, are you saved?"

"Yes!"

"Ah but are you properly saved? Can you feel it like I do?"

"Yes!"

"Are you sure you're going to a saved and not a lost eternity? There's no mistake in this, y'know."

"Yes!"

"Can you feel the call on you? It's a mighty call that knows no saying no, y'know!"

"Yes!"

"Take it clear now: eternity's not a long time: it's forever!"

Well if you've got that in your personal account, you've got balance if nothing else, because it's a great depth to know, inviting vertigo, at least.

From there I made it my business to know where I stood with eternity.

I learnt the following:

Humans don't know who or what they are.

If they progress, ego will usually get in the way.

Eternity isn't an out there waiting for you when you die, it's a here and now.

Eternity has started already, and if you aren't deliberately participating, you're losing ground.

Presence is everything.

Surprising presences are present.

Acceptance and forgiveness are also everything.

Back to the authoradigm:
Approval doesn't make you competent.
Acceptance doesn't make you authentic.
Acknowledgement begins to realize.
Alignment creates.
Action prescribes.

Human authority is a nonsense. History should have taught us this, by now. The endless circle of payment, certification, registration goes in the opposite direction to the circle of attention, modelling, competency, growth, recognition and admiration.

Authority is an emotional negotiation. If you back off before you begin, you're not the author of the story that's going to happen. If you take charge as an opening gambit, you may not author the final version, but at least you'll have a voice.

An authoradigm exists where there's a bubble of non-negotiable competence. If you can do cobbling, book-binding, surgery, sewing, sport, spelling, admin and apps, there isn't a great margin for error. All of these have to work well, and you will soon be told if you aren't doing it well. Poetry, music, cooking and sex are more open to criticism, and taste matters more, here, than finding a solution.

Even leadership has an element of taste to it. I spent two years in one of the most efficient armies of the second half of the twentieth century. There, I learnt about teamwork, brute force, precision and deadly intent. I know how to apply these, but not many in my university department had the taste for such leadership. I also had the good fortune to spend two years under the tutelage of one of Cape Town's foremost educational managers who taught me about research, unflappability, self-discipline at the core, creative and accountable problem-solving and professional cheerfulness. These have been far more to the taste of all I have met, but I have one problem with this set of skills: I am more than this.

The "more" to which I refer connects with the business of coaching. I am convinced that coaching is primarily about growth. Who can be said to be an authority on growth? For me, growth is different to mind-tickling. A lot of gurus write and speak well enough to make you laugh, get fascinated, look for more, and then have a need to scratch the itch, the memory of which can last quite long.

Growth means irreversible change, because not only do you not want to go back, in fact you can't. It's new wine in new wine-skins, and no longer 750 ml but a litre. You can't fit back in, like T.S Eliot's Journey of the Magi. "No longer at ease in the old dispensation".

The authority for this is in the doing of it. The eye of each needle has a different shape, when you pass through it, and each moment is an eternity unto itself.

Whereas authority depends on ownership of a grand narrative, or at least, a short story, an authoradigm holds the proficiency, competence and clarity of a given alpha through omega. Threading the needle, writing the book, completing the sonata, sharing the meal, opening the present, filling the grave, firing the rifle, hitting the target. Style as well as substance. I remember the look on my GP's face when he was taking out the stitches that my plastic surgeon had put in: "Wow, these stitches are so small and perfect, Wally!" I'm glad, because they were on my face, and cost about a thousand rand, each.

But I'm going too micro.

Authoradigms are the emotional platforms for paradigms, and paradigms don't change often. Human emotions are fairly predictable, and whereas an individual may convert, manifest, individuate or otherwise grow, global patterns are slower to change.

Taking charge, telling the story, creating the narrative, supplying the uncreated loop: these are not merely cerebral activities: they necessitate daring, conviction and felt purpose.

The authority of many spheres is facing challenge: naturopathic and homeopathic vs allopathic medicine; orthodox religion vs personal spirituality; gender issues; capitalism vs neo-capitalism; modernism vs post-modernism; open-mindedness vs closed-mindedness.

The book on all this will have to go into much detail. This is the point to make now: what you accept is what you allow yourself to feel. Change your emotional permissions by losing your need to be accepted, approved of, even loved, and you will change by growing and grow by changing. Acceptance and authority are first cousins at least, sometimes twins. The sense of one depends entirely on the sense of the other. Pathological acceptance of external authority defeats consciousness. Criminal rejection of external authority kills conscience. Somewhere in the middle we walk a tight-rope of permeability and resistance.

 

Checking in and checking out of civilization

I've been traveling. For two and a half weeks I've moved into tomorrow, come back to today, slept through yesterday, caught up with three decades ago, dreamt that I died and set my Swiss watch through a number of time zones. I also checked in and out of airports and hotels.

The checking in and out made me think about living in South Africa. I grew up in a first world, somewhat British South Africa, in the southern suburbs of Cape Town, where the neighbourhood was safe, friendly and things were quite different to what was happening a few miles away in Langa, Nyanga and Gugulethu.

I wasn't checked in for that, didn't have a boarding pass. I grew up in a civilised neighbourhood where the neighbours were always polite (although the Greeks were a bit noisy from time to time). Across the road they were English, other side of the block, Scottish, next door, Jewish, down the road, Australian, a few blocks away, Irish. Swiss down the way, and so on.

We drove to work, we caught the bus, we caught the train, we paid our bills, the toilets flushed, we celebrated Christmas, Easter, New Year, went to each others' funerals and went to the local schools, and knew which wind would bring rain.

We were checked in. Our parents had supplied the boarding passes; history, pioneers and governments had provided the social and material infrastructure, and we were on that side of the line.

Now, in South Africa, that zone has been declared exactly that: a zone.

"Please board in the following order" said the official voice: "First class and business class, then families and disabled passengers, then economy class, zone d and c, then zone b."

If you want to be dispassionate about the zone you're in and the zone you aren't in, you have to take a look at the aeons of civilization that divide historical awareness. The first and third worlds are time-curves of proficiencies that have come and gone. Proceeding from pre-history, the Cro-Magnons made it through to digital software in plasmic screens and beyond. Pyramids were the apex of civilization once, although not many owned one. Geometry and standing stones both carried weight. Algebra and astronomy discovered a spherical world that has proceeded in more than one straight line.

Now you tell me how to balance out macadamised roads, the Wellington boot. the chip, (of a fried slice of potato, not a silicon one) with a president who has five wives, twenty-one children and wears a suit but not a condom, and is in charge of my ex-first-world country. No-one will believe me when I say that this is not a complaint. It's a statement that I have not checked in to where he is, and he has not checked in to where I am. Neither of us has the boarding pass.

Civilization is not continent specific. It's a big word that refers to aspiration of magnificent proportions. I am not necessarily anti-Zuma. I just do not prefer to wear a leopard skin, dance and sing monotonous rhythms for hours on end when I lose an argument and walk about permanently wet in the showers of transparency.

Checking in and out is both formal and expensive. You don't want to make a mistake. This is where I part company with that other zone in which I don't belong. I want to be in the zone that takes me to the destination in respect of which so many have made sacrifices, discoveries, journeys and commitments on my behalf.

Let Zuma (for the sake of argument) honour his zone and I'll honour mine. He has put himself in first class, using my money to pay for his ticket, and that skews the honour, already. Yet this is not a complaint. We're just checking.

Another thing about journeys is that they never end. We may pass through where we started, according to T.S.Eliot, and recognize the place for the first time, although if you do that, in my view, you're pretty badly jet-lagged.

The bottom line is that you can wear whatever you want, or not, you can prattle all the political rhetoric ever invented or to yet be entertained, but you can't pretend that first class is economy class or that economy class is first class when you're in the same Boeing together. I've been in both (thanks Howard) and I know the difference.