Spiritual Intelligence (eBook)

Introduction

In our quick-fix consumer culture, we’ve grown used to getting what we want, when we want it (even if we can’t afford it).

You can even buy a fake university degree from the Internet if you really want the prestige of hanging a phoney certificate on your wall. Most of us don’t go that far, of course! But for many people, to one degree or another, it’s all about appearances; how you get there in life matters less than looking like you’ve arrived.

Ironically, this attitude can take us quite a long way. We begin to excel as we hone and nurture our ‘life skills’ and try to stand out from the crowd, as if we’d been born into one great competition. We tell ourselves that this is really the way to go. The trouble is, we end up becoming experts in the art of illusion, not the art of life – we give others the illusion that we’re winning, that we’re really going places, and we begin to live under that illusion (or delusion) ourselves.

How big is your house? How fast is your car? Which school do your children go to? Wow, you’re really quite someone! I need to work harder to keep up with you…

Our hearts swell with pride when we see others glancing in admiration as we overtake them on the road of life – and we begin to believe the hype. We tell ourselves that we really must be someone (even if we don’t truly believe it deep down), because everyone else thinks so too… and so we set ourselves off on a journey that demands that we live up to that billing – to be the person others think we are. For the rest of our days, we have to hold on for dear life, in case we are found out.

The trouble is, we can travel so far on this journey, but ultimately we get to a point where we can go no further. We reach a dead end, without ever realizing our true potential – our infinite potential. Even the CEOs of the most successful businesses probably sense, in their hearts, that they can only get so far by playing a role, acting the big cheese, putting on a mask and driving themselves and their workers so hard that they forget who they were in the first place.

We end up wearing multiple masks as we struggle to be liked, loved and respected, and not ‘found out’… and so we build up layers like limescale on a kettle, until we forget who we were ever created to be in the first place.

Which reminds me: who were we created to be in the first place?

Stop to think

Remember the carefree days when you were so young that you had ‘achieved’ nothing in life, except for playing around and building tree houses and collecting worms and completing jigsaw puzzles…? Who were you then?

Stop to think for a moment. Listen to that child’s voice speaking to you. What did it sound like? What was it saying?

When did you begin to accumulate the layers in your life? When you began to pass or fail exams? When you were accepted or rejected for job interviews? How did those experiences shape you? Can you remember when you were asked out or rejected by your first love? How did that leave you feeling?

In what ways did you either learn to defend your sense of self, or to attack others in order to grow that sense of self?

What was the essence of you, before you learned how to make others happy, or to defend yourself in the playground? What was the essence of you, before you found a talent that would impress other people?

We relentlessly compare ourselves with each other, only to find ourselves wanting – wanting more and more. You might want your neighbour’s husband or wife, or their lifestyle, or their luck in life… But why? What is it that we really want, if we are truly honest? That is the most important thing we can begin to awaken to.

Do we want to be successful? Do we wish to be someone? Of course we do. And that is only natural. But it’s the way we channel these impulses that will ultimately help to determine who we really are.

Your heart is reaching out for more because it knows, deep down, that there is so much more to who you really are, and to what you can do with your life. Your heart is aching both to realize and recall who you really are. It yearns to reconnect with the reason you were created in the first place. It longs to find the ‘someone’ you really are: the unique you, with a unique fingerprint and a unique way of touching the world and leaving your mark upon it; the priceless one-in-six-billion you, with a unique iris, and a unique way of seeing the world and acting upon what you see.

Our story has far more potential than we realize. It’s about so much more than the stuff we accumulate, the numbers of zeros on our salary, and all of the usual things we put our security in. You cannot buy yourself a good story, nor embellish it with false trappings; hold your story up to the light of life and it will not be about the external things we are so often seduced by.

So what kind of story will people tell at your funeral? What kind of story will those who have worked with you, lived with you, loved you, really tell about the way you have lived and loved? You have the chance – before that funeral! – to craft something much richer, deeper and more beautiful than the usual script; but only if you dare to awaken to the possibilities – and to the harder fact that you are, at the moment, asleep. And that is where we must begin on this journey.

This is no quick fix, no off-the-shelf consumerist spiritual lifestyle choice. It’s subversively free of charge, as the best things in life really are. But it also comes at great cost: the cost of lifelong commitment, dedication, passion, sacrifice and selfless, self-giving love.

What is ‘spiritual intelligence’?

The spiritual writer Evelyn Underhill wrote, ‘We cannot say that there is a separate “mystical sense” which some men have and some men have not, but rather that every human soul has a certain latent capacity for God, and that in some capacity is realised with an astonishing richness.’1

Spiritual intelligence is for us all, because it forms part of our total intelligence, our whole being. Yet we so rarely access it – either because we have succumbed to the secular impulse of the last two centuries, which suggests (at best) that spirituality should be left to religious people in churches or synagogues, mosques or temples, or (at worst) because we believe it plays no part in our scientific, secular age.

Most of us live such busy lives that we rarely take time to reflect on the riches buried in our hearts and in our traditions – riches that help us to discover who we really are, and to find meaning and purpose within our seemingly random, fragmented and ordinary existence; riches that help us to make those soulful reconnections that so many of us, deep down, yearn to make – with the world around us, with each other, with our selves, and with the higher power often called God.

In the year 2000, the Oxford academic, philosopher and spiritual writer Danah Zohar coined the phrase ‘spiritual intelligence’. She suggested that it forms the central part of our intelligence, the part in which our values and beliefs are nurtured and in which we can work towards realizing our full potential as created beings. We have, for so long, focused on rational intelligence (IQ) as a way of improving ourselves and making our way in life; yet that is only a part of the story. Daniel Goleman introduced ‘emotional intelligence’ in more recent days, and has helped businesses and organizations to reflect on how their people can learn to manage their emotions and work more effectively and sensitively with others. More recently still, Zohar has argued that our spiritual intelligence can help bring meaning and purpose to our work and the world we inhabit.

She writes, ‘So many of us today live lives of wounded fragmentation. We long for what the poet T. S. Eliot called a “further union, a deep communion”, but we find little resource within our ego-bound selves or within the existing symbols or institutions of our culture… SQ is the intelligence that rests in that deep part of the self that is connected to wisdom from beyond the ego, or conscious mind; it is the intelligence with which we not only recognise existing values, but with which we creatively discover new values.”2

I do not seek, in this book, to explain her reasoning or theories, but to use the opportunities afforded by the very idea of spiritual intelligence to explore what it means to embark on a journey of transformation – a journey that includes both contemplation and action in equal measure.

How to use this book: four journeys of increasing depth, through four icons

I have divided the book into four sections that comprise four separate ‘journeys’, each of which goes a little deeper into our spiritual intelligence. We start with level one: ‘We are where we are.’ At this level, we look very simply at becoming more aware of who we are and how we might awaken to the richer possibilities of life. Level two takes us on a journey of awakening to ‘the false self’ – the identity we create for ourselves through the relentless chattering of our ego-driven minds. In the third section, we explore ‘the true self’. Who are we,...