Spiritual intelligence (SQ) has nothing to do with religious orthodoxy, how much you know about metaphysics, or whether you possess super-normal abilities like yogic flying, seeing into the future, or bending spoons with your mind. Maybe it’s because I can’t do any of those things, that I define spiritual intelligence without appealing to special gifts. As I use the term, spiritual intelligence refers to our largely uncultivated virtue of consciousness which enables us to experience the depth and unity of existence.
This mode of consciousness is uncultivated not because it is buried in esoteric metaphysics or requires years of intensive meditation to develop, but rather for the comparatively more simple reason that our attention is tied up with other things. Specifically with things having to do with the construction, maintenance, and promotion of our personal identity, also known as ego.
But lest we think that any hope of awaking spiritual intelligence depends on our success in beating down, cancelling out, or otherwise eliminating ego consciousness, it’s imperative to understand that our spiritual awakening requires ego strength, not its diminishment.
A healthy ego is energetically stable and emotionally balanced, serving to unify the personality under an executive center of self-control. Because so many things can compromise the achievement of ego strength – early trauma, childhood abuse, a dysfunctional home environment, chronic illness – many of us end up somewhere on the spectrum of ego pathology, as what is generally called a neurotic ego.
Characteristics of this condition include insecurity, anxiousness, compensatory attachments, binary (either/or) thinking, inflexible beliefs (convictions), and difficulty trusting oneself, others, or reality as a whole. Perhaps not surprisingly, individuals who struggle in this way are often attracted to religions that insist on our sinful condition, our need to be cleansed or changed, and that promise a future glory for the faithful.
As I said, while only a small percentage of us are completely incapacitated by ego pathology, all of us are faced with the challenge of working through our hangups and getting over ourselves. In what follows, I will assume a sufficient degree of ego strength, enough to provide a stable point from which we, by virtue of an activated spiritual intelligence, are able to drop beneath and leap beyond the person we think we are.
My diagram presents a map of reality, along with the different ways that consciousness engages with it. The nested concentric circles represent the various horizons corresponding to distinct evolutionary stages in the formation of our universe. Thus the largest horizon, that of energy, was earliest and also includes all the others, as they represent its further (and later) transformations.
Energy crystallized in material form, physical complexity gave rise to life (organic), the life process gradually evolved abilities of detection, reaction, perception, and feeling (sentience), which after a long journey eventually developed the faculty of self-conscious awareness (egoic). This is the transformation which is heavily managed by our tribe, in the construction of personal identity and moral agency.
Identity is a function of what we identify as, and what, or whom, we identify with. Personal identity will always be located inside a social membership of some sort, where the individual identifies as “one of us,” and in turn identifies with other insiders and their common interests. The tribe shaped our emerging self-conscious awareness so that we would fit in, share our toys, wait our turn, and not rock the boat.
Our life has meaning by virtue of the stories that form our character and weave personal experience into the larger patterns of social tradition and cultural mythology. If we assume that the construction of a secure identity is the end-game of human development, then this is where we will stay.
Things can get complicated here because some tribes need their members to fervently believe that this way is the one and only way. Everything from religious orthodoxy to consumer marketing is dedicated to making sure that individuals are fully invested in “me” (identify-as) and “mine” (identify-with). As long as they can stand convinced that the tradition holds their key to security, happiness, and immortality, members who are under the spell of a consensus trance will be ready to sacrifice (or destroy) everything for its truth.
The global situation today is compelling many a tradition to pull in its horizon of membership, so as to include only those who possess certain traits or have surrendered totally to its ideology.
And yet, because human beings do harbor the potential for spiritual awakening, any effort to cap off the impetus of their full development will end up generating a spiritual frustration in the individual, which will ripple out from there into the membership as discontent, suspicions, and conflicts arise.
My diagram illustrates personal identity (ego) as occupying the center of everything and sitting at the apex of evolution, where consciousness bends back on itself in self-conscious awareness. As long as the individual is fully wrapped up in the adventures of Captain Ego, the rest of reality – that vast depth and expanse which are essential to what (rather than who) we are – goes unnoticed.
Underneath and roundabout our self-absorbed condition is the present mystery of reality. As the Polynesian proverb goes: Standing on a whale, fishing for minnows.
In reality, our existence is the manifestation of a grounding mystery (or Ground) which plunges deep and far below that little outpost of self-conscious awareness at the surface. This ground of being will not be found outside the self but only within, for the deep structure of reality itself is present also in us. Underneath and supporting ego consciousness is a sentient nervous system. Beneath and upholding that is the living organism of this body, rising gently in waves of vital rhythm. Still farther down – and, remember, deeper into – the life process are the crystalline lattices of matter. They in turn bind up and dissolve again into the vibrant cloud of quantum energy.
You’ll notice how the ever-deeper release of our meditation opens to us an experience of ever-greater capacity, the essential depths and fullness of what we are as human beings. Notice, too, that we don’t have to exert a vigorous discipline on the ego in order to get it out of the way. We simply need to let go, so that consciousness can be released from its surface conceit of personal identity and drop into the ineffable (wordless and indescribable) mystery of being-itself.
This is one aspect of an awakened spirituality: We experience the internal depths of all things by descending into our own. Everything below that magenta horizontal line, then, is deep, down, and within – not just of our own existence but of existence itself.
Above the line is out, around, and beyond the center of ego consciousness – beyond who we think we are. As we go down, then, awareness is simultaneously opening out to the turning unity of all things. The horizon of personal concerns gives way to a more inclusive sphere of sentient beings. As we identify as a sentient being, we also identify with all sentient beings.
This down (within) and out (beyond) shift of consciousness is what awakened Siddhartha’s universal compassion; he understood directly that suffering (pain, striving, frustration, and loss) is the shared condition of sentient beings everywhere.
Continuing in this down-and-out fashion, the descent of awareness into the organic rhythms of our body takes us to the still-farther horizon of all living things. And within/beyond that is the horizon of matter in motion, the revolving cosmos itself, which finally surrenders to the quantum energy cloud where this whole spectacle is suspended. So at the same time as consciousness is descending into the ground of being, it is also ascending through the system of all things, the turning-together-as-one (literally ‘universe’). Inwardly we come to experience the full capacity of our being, as outwardly we transcend to the awareness that All is One.
These are not logical deductions, mind you, but spontaneous intuitions of our spiritual intelligence. It sleeps in each of us, waiting for its opportunity to awaken and set us free.
