Inner Intelligence

What is Inner Intelligence?

Inner intelligence is the “I” space of each citizen. It is the seat of intentional consciousness, attention, interior experience and intelligences or lines of development, e.g. emotional, cognitive, spiritual.

Intentional consciousness in a city is highly complex and highly dynamic. If we were able to examine the city like a PET scan or fMRI scan does a brain, we would see that intentional intelligence is constantly being turned on and off, energized in different centers, and that intelligence is widely distributed. We would also see its sleeping, waking, dreaming cycles as individuals came and went from centers of rest, recreation, work and transportation. We might even start to see a city divided into left hemispheres (where the doing tasks of work and industry are located) and right hemispheres (where the being and belonging relationships of home and recreation are located). Or we might see the city’s cognitive, emotional and cultural intelligences

So What?

The Inner intelligences of the human condition relates to a person’s subjective sense of wellbeing. The value of examining the intentional, subjective quadrant of a single life is that it gives us the container to appreciate the emergent qualities of consciousness, particularly as they relate to attention and intention. We gain the capacity to make life worth living precisely because we can examine it. Ultimately all attention and intention in the city is experienced at the level of the individual. It is only aggregated into political will through the coordination of multiple individuals.

The challenge we now face as a species is not only to define what are the bio-psycho-cultural purposes that align with the purposes of our cities? And what is the course of development that will support our achieving those intentions?

On the broadest scale, we need to create a life-long learning system that optimizes human potential with appropriate attention and intention. Developing our citizen intelligences will determine the extent to which our cities will be sustainable. To do this in an evolutionarily respectful way, we must design our education system(s) so that it allows individual, family and cultural variation. Such variation needs simple rules that allow learners to experience learning unique to their potentials (i.e. not one size fits all) while at the same time creating citizens able to contribute to the achievement of city