Dr. Paula Horan explains how the Core Empowerment Training can help people to unveil a keenly honed intelligence which combines an element of intellectual incisiveness with emotional awareness for a richer and broader range of experience.

The words "emotional intelligence" have become something of a catch phrase.

More than being a trendy expression, they sum up the center focus of current leading edge exploration into the nature and workings of mind and cognition.

They indeed point to the root of some key fundamental questions:
Why is it that so much of what our minds do, remains below the threshold of conscious awareness?
What does this large degree of non-conscious cognition, thought processing and ensuing action mean for our experience of the world?
Why is our unconscious mind so all-pervasive?
Why do we have recurring experiences of being at the effect of the unconscious mind, to the degree that access to natural states of simple happiness seem to continuously elude us?

The Dalai Lama has co-authored several books on the subject of emotional intelligence and the psychology of cognition, together with leading western psychologists, such as best-selling author Daniel Goleman and the late Francisco Varela, a professor of cognitive science at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris.

Besides presenting a thorough investigation into the cognitive processes, this ongoing dialogue sheds light on ways that can successfully deal with destructive emotions and other forms of unconscious behavior patterns.

This approach has been a major focus for practitioners of Buddhist meditation ever since the Buddha launched his direct investigation into the workings and nature of the mind, more than 2,500 years ago.

Currently in several labs in the US, research is uncovering the secrets of cognition. Through the most advanced western technologies (for example, transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS), scientists now realize that we do not see the world as it actually is, but only in terms of what we already know of the world.

In other words, in states of non-conscious cognition (which is where most people are), memory shapes or dictates all of what we can perceive. We are thus deprived of free will and free agency. The moment we find access to being conscious and aware in the present moment, free will and free agency are restored.

Brain scans using the same TMS technology also show how the practice of different forms of meditation, learned through long retreats, in fact influence perception in such a way, that humans can rise above an otherwise unconscious existence. For all human beings, this step into conscious awareness is of primary importance for it enables us to live a happy, balanced and fulfilled life.