Spiritual Intelligence represents our drive for meaning and connection with the infinite – Stephen Richards Covey
I am sure most of us have heard about Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and Emotional Quotient (EQ) but how about Spiritual Intelligence or Spiritual Quotient (SQ)?
Before getting into SQ, let us consider how people perceive things in life.
The first point of experience comes from the senses (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and touch).
The second point of perception comes from the mind that accepts and rejects things based on the first experience. Examples include I like this food, I don’t like that music, etc.
However, how many of us realize that there is a layer beyond the senses, mind and that is intelligence. Intelligence is a master regulator that can direct our senses and mind to clear & right action.
We all utilize intelligence as part of our daily activities to achieve our goals. Traditional intelligence models were mainly focussed on studying Intelligence Quotient (IQ).
However, Emotional Intelligence (EQ) and Spiritual Intelligence (SQ) are getting integrated into mainstream systems to evaluate people’s capability now.
While rational thinking (IQ) and using the emotions (EQ) are excellent tools to achieve our goals, Spiritual Intelligence takes it to the next level by connecting us to our own inner self and facilitate intelligent decisions.
Pioneering works by Danah Zohar, Frances Vaughan, Cindy Wigglesworth, Ken O’Donnell, Michal Levin, Robert Emmons and many others defined SQ in various ways. For the brevity of this article, I will try to provide an explanation for SQ based on eastern philosophy. Firstly, it is important to understand the term spiritual. Though the term spiritual has been loosely used for different things now, the original meaning comes from the root word “spirit”. Qualitatively, the nature of spirit is essentially made-up of three aspects:
- The Essence or True Being
- Consciousness
- Unlimited Joy or Bliss
Most problems that we face are based on our false identification with materialistic things. The best solution to address our problems is to connect back to our spiritual nature through intelligence. As we can clearly see from above, the three aspects are completely non-material and absolutely spiritual. Spiritual practices such as meditation, mindfulness, breathing exercise, yoga, etc have the ability to bring peace, inner balance, clarity, and positive emotions. These tools will eventually lead us to question our true being, consciousness and ultimately brings bliss & joy.
Spirituality can’t be rationalized but has to be experienced! We are spiritual beings going through a journey of internal evolution. On that note, it is always a good practice to try tap into all three types of intelligence (IQ, EQ, and SQ) within us. This way, we will be avoiding auto-pilot lifestyle but functioning at our highest level of expression.
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