What’s Your Spiritual IQ?

Have you ever experienced anything in your life that suggested there was “something more” to us than simply being meatball robots? Whether a remarkable dream, an encounter with a spiritual being, a synchronistic event that changed your life, or a profound moment in nature, perhaps you’ve experienced something that suggests the reality of a spiritual dimension to life. If so, what exactly does your special experience suggest to you? How do you imagine the nature of reality that gave rise to your experience? Finally, what consequences has that experience had for how you live? Does your vision of spiritual reality lead you to a certain way of behaving?

These three questions--1) What have you experienced? 2) How do you think about it, or vision it? and 3) What do you do about it?--are what I have asked Atlantic University students these past several years as I introduce them to the study of transpersonal psychology (that’s academese for “spiritual”). Similar to the scientific triad of experimentation, theory, and application, this set of questions is the basis for an open-ended life of spiritual inquiry and experience. As it turns out, it may now be considered the basis of “spiritual intelligence.”

In his book Thinking with your soul: Spiritual intelligence and why it matters (Harmony Books) Richard N. Wolman, Ph.D., defines spiritual intelligence as “the human capacity to ask ultimate questions about the meaning of life, and to simultaneously experience the seamless connection between each of us and the world in which we live.” The author is a clinical psychologist and has been on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School for the past twenty years.

In an attempt to link his concept of spiritual intelligence with the scholarly history of thinking and scientific research on intelligence, he has expanded the notion of intelligence to include spirituality by describing intelligence generally as a sequence of four events: noticing, knowing, understanding and action. This sequence is practically identical to the three questions I ask of my students.

What he and I have added to the normal idea of scientific intelligence is that of an expanded repertoire of knowing. What we may notice spiritually we may notice through our intuition, from introspection, through a felt sense, such as our connection with all life. Knowing is not always from book knowledge, but from our innate imagination which has a universal source of images by which to comprehend the meaning of experience. Understanding can come by way of book knowledge, especially spiritual literature and spiritual biography, which enables us to learn that our imagination that helps us know acts with similar patterns in others. This kind of understanding helps us to realize that there is a larger context of meaning and relationships behind our experiences and that there are valuable lessons to be learned, goals to be reached, in a spiritual life. And finally, action comes from the realization that the most important part of spirituality cannot be obtained while sitting in a chair, but requires our active relationship with life in order for our understanding to yield an emotional satisfaction. Similar to Edgar Cayce’s insight that in the application comes the awareness, Dr. Wolman’s vision of spiritual intelligence is that the fullness of understanding comes when we act upon that understanding to reap the pudding of proof.

          To enable a fuller understanding of spiritual intelligence, Dr. Wolman has researched the topic extensively with over six thousand persons using an 80-item questionnaire he developed, called the Psycho-Matrix Spiritual Inventory. His book provides this self-assessment device, and you may also avail yourself of it at www.psychomatrix.com. This inventory covers seven dimensions of spiritual intelligence: the sense of divinity, mindfulness of interconnectedness, intellectual inquiry, community, extrasensory perception, childhood spirituality and finding spiritual meaning in trauma.

          For many, the science and spirituality are opposing realities. My Atlantic University students and I have discovered that when you get down to the essence of each, they are both a search for a truth that can be lived. Science tied exclusively to materiality leads to a technological society that does not necessarily nurture life. Professor Wolman’s research, and his resultant sincere act of sharing through his book, gives concrete testimony to support the notion that a science of spirituality can be a spiritually inspired science. Such a venture helps us discover for ourselves the reality of a truth that not only sustains life but makes it worth living.