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What is your spiritual IQ?
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Just because you score high on an IQ test doesn’t mean that you will live a happy and satisfying life.
A number of years ago, Howard Gardner, published a book called Multiple Intelligences. He offers an alternative view on the meaning of intelligence. He says that intelligence is not limited to math and verbal skills but takes many forms. From musical and artistic competency to those who seem to possess profound interpersonal and moral skills, high intelligence comes in many packages. .jpg)
Gardner sees “spiritual intelligence” as a knotty proposition. Rooted in non-material reality, “spiritual intelligence” is not only abstract but often fraught with cultural baggage.
Fear not.
We human beings know spiritual intelligence when we see it. And we see it best when concretely manifest in the lives of living, breathing human beings. We see it in Jesus and in the Buddha. We see it in Gandhi, King and Nelson Mandela. We see it in Aung Suu Kyi, the Dalai Lama and in Dorothy Day. An elevated spiritual IQ is not limited to one person or one religion. It cannot be quantified but you know it when you see it.
Based on my own experience combined with an understanding of the world’s religious and spiritual traditions, these appear as defining characteristics of an elevated spiritual IQ:
- The capacity to open to life here and now. The mind is conditioned to live in the past or the future. To live in the Now requires a commitment to control, rather than to be controlled by the whims of the mind.
- Accepting the impermanence of everything. This thought, this experience, this moment is always changing. My work is to remember that the last thing that happened is only and always a prelude to the next.
- Suffering is a gift. The purpose of suffering is not to make us miserable but to stretch us. The purpose of suffering is to transform us. We begin to awaken to who we really are whenever we become more than we have been.
- Every living being is rooted in the same Divine Ground, if only we will wake up and see it. We see this truth not through analytical thinking but by intuition—a deeper knowing than that of the intellect or emotions. The Divine Ground cannot be comprehended, only experienced. To walk on this ground is to see that everything is interdependent and interrelated.
- The consciousness of interdependence is the ongoing call to do no harm to others—or at least as little harm as possible. The consciousness of interdependence is the continuing call to resist the illusion that I can live a separate life.
- Life is a mystery to be experienced not a problem to be solved. Ignorance is holy. Only when I am lost do I find myself. And the less I know, the more I am open to this present moment. Spiritual intelligence gives us the capacity to arrive at a destination—and sooner or later we realize the destination, as the cliché says, is always the journey.
As Wendell Berry put it:
Within the circles of our lives
we dance the circles of the years
the circles of the seasons
within the circles of the years,
the cycles of the moon
within the circles of the seasons,
the circles of our reasons
within the cycles of the moon...
Again, again we come and go,
changed, changing. Hands
join, unjoin in love and fear,
grief and joy. The circles turn,
each giving into each, into all,
Only music keeps us here.
I hope my spiritual IQ is a rising circle.
How about you? What you would add or subtract?
I don't know who first said it, but this I believe: "We are not human beings on a spiritual journey but spiritual beings on a human journey."
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