So often times it happens that we live our lives in chains and we never even know we have the key.
The Eagles, “Already Gone”
I have been developing a theory that explains our human experience as the consilience of four distinct threads of intelligence, in what I name Quadratic Intelligence. While the threads themselves were identified long before I got to the drawing board, the quadratic model is my own innovation.
My preferred way of reading the model is organic, starting from the most primitive thread and proceeding along their evolutionary line of development until the full set is in view. Thus we begin in visceral intelligence (VQ), grow into emotional intelligence (EQ), articulate and expand rational intelligence (RQ; the conventional ‘IQ’), and at last awaken to the higher virtues of spiritual intelligence (SQ).
It’s important to understand that the four threads are not stacked on top of each other, but rather together comprise the braid of quadratic intelligence. There is a hierarchy among them nonetheless, with higher/later threads dependent upon the integrity of deeper/earlier ones. This same evolutionary sequence can be observed more broadly in the “tree” of animal life on earth: rooted in instinct (VQ), branching into feeling (EQ), flowering in thought (RQ), and bearing fruit in wisdom (SQ).
My model provides a useful way of representing the ideal of ‘self-actualization’ across the species and especially in our own.
As illustrated in my diagram, each thread of intelligence has its own focus and aim. Visceral health, emotional happiness, rational meaning, and spiritual well-being name these four ‘driving aims’ in humans, none of which can be neglected or removed without serious consequences to our overall quality of life.
Once again, each emerges out of and weaves strength back into the braid – although it is possible for the braid to get ‘knotted up’ in places, creating complications and dysfunctions throughout the system. My interest in the present post is to elucidate a particular kind of tangle among the threads of quadratic intelligence, in the formation of convictions.
My returning reader is likely acquainted with my working definition of conviction, as a belief that has taken the mind hostage and prevents it from thinking “outside the box.” It’s helpful to picture an otherwise curious, creative, and perfectly capable mind caught like a prisoner in a cage: a convict of its own conviction.
In my diagram I have placed the graphic of a cage at the threshold between our emotional and rational strands of intelligence, in order to represent the composition of conviction. It possesses a rational element, insofar as it is a meaningful proposition about something. It is logical, if not necessarily reasonable. It makes sense, even if it’s not very sensible. Other minds can understand what it means, although it may be completely without basis in reality or actual experience.
The reason we hold convictions – or rather I should say the reason our convictions hold us – really has little or nothing to do with their rational character as meaningful propositions. It’s from deeper down in the structure of intelligence that convictions draw their energy, in that all or nothing, black or white, one and only way commitment we make to them emotionally.
Whereas an otherwise reasonable proposition of opinion or fact remains open for verification because we are letting rational curiosity move us closer to reality, a conviction closes our mind off from reality in recital and defense of what must be true regardless.
In one way or another, every conviction is a passionate insistence on the conditions of our happiness – that we can’t be happy without this or that in our life, unless it is for us exactly what we need it to be, or not until some future time when our demands have been fully met. Partly out of ignorance and partly by deceit, we will often argue and fight for the truth of our claim without admitting our underlying unhappiness and desperate need to be right.
An all-or-nothing, black-or-white, one-and-only-way manner of thinking (RQ), therefore, is merely a rationalization of our unresolved emotional insecurity (EQ). We need to feel less vulnerable and exposed, so we insist that something or someone, somewhere or upon some future day, will make our insecurity go away for good.
Conviction, in other words, is perhaps the most obvious symptom of our chronic unhappiness.
If this wasn’t tragic enough – since nothing outside us, anywhere, can deliver on our demands and truly make us happy – the tangled knot of strong convictions further prevents the fruiting of our spiritual intelligence (SQ). Not only is energy tied up in forging those cages of belief, but it is siphoned away from the deeper insights and higher aspirations that would support our genuine well-being.
To understand these deeper insights and higher aspirations, we can take the two roots of our word “well-being” and follow each in a different direction. Well derives from the root meaning “whole,” so I’ll name that set our holistic aspirations for wholeness, harmony, unity, and fulfillment (as in “filled full”).
Our holistic aspirations open us to the revelation that All is One, and that the present mystery of reality lies beyond the meanings we construct and drape in front of it.
Being is the present participle of the verb “to be,” so I’ll name this second set our existential insights into presence, release, emptiness, and serenity. Our existential insights invite us into a deeper experience of the grounding mystery which is be-ing itself, and into the profound realization (or disillusionment depending on how difficult it is for us to let go) that our own identity is also but a construct without substance.
As we consider the existential insights and holistic aspirations of spiritual intelligence, an interesting paradox is revealed particularly in that curious juxtaposition of emptiness and fulfillment. From the perspective of ego this paradox appears as a self-canceling opposition or meaningless contradiction, for how can we experience emptiness and fulfillment at the same time?
But of course, this apparent dualism is only a function of ego consciousness itself, separated from reality by the convictions that simultaneously give us refuge and hold us captive.
As the spiritual wisdom traditions have been reminding us, all we need to do is drop the illusion and stop pretending, and this truth alone will set us free.
When our spiritual intelligence (SQ) is awakened we also become healthier (VQ), happier (EQ), and live more meaningful (RQ) lives. The good news is that, while we may struggle and suffer for a long time inside our small cages of conviction, the key to liberation is already in our possession.
