What Remains Beneath Everything

A person's capacities can be roughly seen through seven dimensions: IQ, PQ, EQ, MQ, BQ, RQ, AQ.

• IQ — Intelligence Quotient. Mental capacity. Learning, analysis.
• PQ — Political Quotient. The sense and judgment for reading how things are shifting.
• EQ — Emotional Quotient. The capacity to move other people.
• MQ — Moral Quotient. A person's moral bearing. What they recognize as good, and how they act on it.
• BQ — Beauty Quotient. The ability to find what is good, and to tell it apart from what isn't.
• RQ — Resilience Quotient. The capacity to hold under pressure. Like a dewdrop on a leaf. The wind moves it from one leaf to another, and it's still whole.
• AQ — Adversity Quotient. The courage to keep acting, keep holding on, in the middle of real difficulty.

Almost any rough reading of a person falls inside these seven. But the seven are not fixed. They move.

What moves them is the cultivation of the heart-mind. Which is the cultivation of awareness.

Awareness is what remains at the bottom of a person, after every appearance and every scattered thought has been stripped away. It is the most essential feeling a person can have toward the world, at its core. It is conscience. It is the love that runs through being alive.

The more desire, the more it covers awareness over. The shallower the practice, the easier it is to lose your footing, to drift with the crowd on the surface of the world.

The better the heart-mind is cultivated, the more EQ, MQ, and BQ change, not just in degree but in kind. Taste becomes exceptional. You start to see past appearance into what is actually beautiful, what is actually essential.

You know where the good things are. That feeling itself is remarkable. This, itself, is the mark of first-rate taste.

Some people have very high IQ and PQ. It lets them move fast toward what looks like success. But if the heart-mind hasn't been cultivated, if MQ and BQ are off, that speed carries them straight into danger, straight into trouble.

Only by laying down the foundation of practice, by raising a person's awareness, can a wider world come into view. The heart, EQ, MQ, BQ, decides your ceiling and how hard the climb is. The mind, IQ, PQ, decides your starting speed. The feet, RQ, AQ, decide your acceleration.