People with intrapersonal intelligence are adept at looking inward and figuring out their own feelings, motivations and goals. They are quintessentially introspective. They analyze themselves and seek understanding. People with intrapersonal intelligence are intuitive and usually introverted.

A year or two ago I saw a rather amateurish but good Singaporean TV show (The Truth Seekers) that shook me to my core… and woke me up.

I may be a conspiracy seeker… but I have a hunch that we, humans, have been trained, for millennia,  by society to look the other way, to deny human nature, and escape into nice-nice, and sugar and spice, instead of confronting head-on what we call human nature.

In that show four people team up to solve unsolved crimes… and they start with their own family’s unsolved and painful questions, only to find out that life, people, events are not what they seemed to be, what they were touted to be… but much much worse.

In my last few articles I wrote about Reality for Dummies, and the dummies are all of us, everyone who had been blown smoke into our face, so we cannot dare to see others’ evilness, and therefore hide our own, even from ourselves.

We, as a species, have been painstakingly trained to become weaklings, replace reality with pretty pictures, and suffer as a result.

Carl Jung said: Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health

• Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people.
• People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls
• Depression is like a woman in black. If she turns up, don’t shoo her away. Invite her in, offer her a seat, treat her like a guest and listen to what she wants to say.
• Everything about other people that doesn’t satisfy us helps us to better understand ourselves.

But most importantly: The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.

If you are not happy, if you are not yourself, if you are not all you could be, then consider yourself mentally ill.

I don’t care what the psychiatrists say to define mental illness, I only care about taking you to a state where you can be happy, joyful, without positive thinking, without lying, without pretending.

If you consider “not happy” a mental illness, and it is, you can be taken to a path that leads to happiness.

Twitchy Little Bastards: The expression I borrowed from the Monday Morning Memo guy, famed advertiser, Roy H. Williams, is Twitchy Little Bastard. He wrote a book, Be Like Amazon, in the popular dialog format. That is where I read that first. But a google search reveals that Theodore Dreiser, Christopher Farnsworth, Jeremy Clarkson all used the expression. I have read the An American Tragedy long time ago, and still remember much of it.

Anyway, I borrowed that expression, TLB, Twitchy Little Bastard, to call your unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering, even for a moment. Hardship, difficulty, life itself. ((One ex-student emailed me an article, a new definition of life and intelligence of Life… that is intelligence’s ongoing and consistent efforting to make its mental representation of reality and reality match closely, to avoid surprises.

One of the symptoms of mental illness that effect most everyone is that they are always surprised. People, things, events don’t match their expectations. Your daughter won’t do what she is “supposed to do”. Your wife doesn’t do what she is supposed to do. You don’t feel happy doing nothing while you continue to expect to feel happy. Your visualization doesn’t create what you visualize about, no matter how much you expect that it would. You can’t use that very expensive program no matter how much you expect to be able to grow a base understanding just because you bought it.

You see, I don’t exaggerate when I call your typical way of being a mental illness. You have abandoned getting feedback from reality, and live in your imaginary fantasy world, that leads to all these surprises.

It is time to return to sanity.))

But especially unwilling to face the tiger, face what is ugly inside, face the evil inclination, face what kind of a person you really are.

My “diagnosis” about humanity is that as long as your TLB is 1, society, designed to be a mental institution, that pretty much keep you in line, keep you in check, and you’ll never know yourself, you’ll never become a person, and you’ll suffer.

When you look around, you cannot see that everyone around you suffers: they have their smoke screen up: smiling, laughing, busy, good mother, pious, caring (ugh), etc.

But, of course, your view of everyone is covered up with your own image… (the cardboard cutout of you) and you only see what you can see peaking out from behind… and normally you see how good others are… and how bad, how afraid, how worthless YOU are.

But you are not seeing reality. There is no worthless, bad, or even afraid in reality.

In reality you can see what you do, and you can also see your inauthenticity: you feel, hope for, intend one thing, and do another.

You also hear your inner chatterbox, and you can see that your actions are not consistent with that either.

Only when you, with some help, can see the insanity of how you try to hide, from yourself, how you really are, that you can get some respite. Oh, I am that…

I own a book, whose title is “I am that”, a transcription of the Mumbai guru’s talks, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.

I read the book. I was struck by the fact that this guru teaches that you are that thing, the soul, and your behavior, and your motivation, and your thoughts are something else.

But, of course, that is the kind of teaching that keeps you inauthentic and miserable. No wonder the whole world flocks to these gurus.

You are made up of a team of inner aspects, all claiming that “you are that”, and not just that nice-nice… ego, history, soul, mind, etc.

Indian gurus teach you to be schizophrenic, which is just one of the mental illnesses.

They teach you to “be that” while you are doing untold evil with your body, your mouth, your mind, to yourself and others.

Reality, the reality of who you are being, the reality of what human being is like… is swept under the rug.

Don’t even look at it… it is not you… they say.

But it is you! And until you can look at it, you’ll remain miserable, ineffective in the world, or only effective at staying evil and broken.

In my new system or teaching I have set up that participants are asked to talk to their partner, or if they want, to more than one partner, has been invaluable. They record the call, so I can give them feedback. It is more work for me, but now they cannot hide.

Some arrive to seeing glimpses of their ugliness faster than others, but they all have a chance. Because that is the point, seeing it is when their vibration can start to rise, their consciousness starts to get liberated from its cage.

I have this partner setup in the Playground, which is a year long program, and in the Accountability Forum, which is month to month.

The Playground is for those who want to learn to look the tiger in the eye, to live free of the restrictions of unreality.

The Accountability Forum ((by invitation only)) is for those who have a vision of a life that is beyond what they can achieve with what they have, tools, skills, attitudes, capacities, and are willing to work, for years, to build a foundation on which they can build that life… a life worth living.

I only have two participants in the Accountability Forum, which should not surprise you: that level of commitment is rare. They are the apples of my eye, because they are really here to be taken all the way to heaven.

Yeah, to heaven. They report back daily, and get feedback from me, participate with their partner once a week, and form a synergistic relationship both with me and their partner.

It’s a big commitment. But if you ask them, they will say that it’s the best thing that has ever happened to them.

Read the original article: Intrapersonal intelligence, the ability and willingness to look within and see accurately