Developing Your Spiritual Intelligence

Saints, legendary artists, poets, composers, inventors and spiritual leaders illustrate the gains that society accrues when people develop their spiritual life...their inmost animating energies, drives and awareness.

So it is with us. Whether we believe in destiny, God, or our inner, higher power as we nuture and productively express our talents, fascinations and inner realities, we bring fresh ideas and our own, enhanced presence into being. Actualizing these higher capacities...our need and drive to go beyond ourselves...we serve progress. This is so, no matter how seemingly insignificant our abilities.

Spirituality is not just an abstract, blissed-out or purposeless emotion, nor is spiritual development an out-of-reach, mythical goal. Spirituality is an intelligence in its own right...useful, tactical and immensely creative. With a high spiritual IQ we gain insight, wisdom, visionary or strategic, big-picture perceptual skills and the knack of right action. Our spiritual depths house our life's most positive force. This has everything to do with our growing in personal power and tangible, lasting, real world effectiveness and little to do with that dreamy, aimless quality so often equated (in the popular culture's mind) with spirituality. If aimlesness exists in one with spiritual drives, it is either temporary or caused by other factors.

To increase spiritual intelligence and behave in a productive way we first give of ourselves. For example, we will properly direct our attention or improve our self-discipline and our responsibility-taking skills. This means our finest inner directives ask us to slowly turn down the sound system of the world. These choices teach us the everlasting law: First we give, then we get. Over time, practically anyone who consciously wills it can develop his or her awareness, talent and full humanity. This affords concrete benefits, not the least of which is that life (given its revised, wholesome perspective) gets organized around the values and behaviors that serve both self and other. Included in this constellation of benefits are a host of improved personal skills....

@--<--< We begin to gain "whole-sight", non-dualistic perception.

@--<--< Our intuition is enhanced; we are guided from within ourselves, supernaturally.

@--<--< Our interpersonal life becomes more refined, less problematic.

@--<--< We revere life, order, and our own unique experience.

Interpersonal Refinements

Without question, mature spirituality refines and purifies our interpersonal life, usually by degrees. We take three steps forward into a healthier interactive style and two steps back (or more). Confusion, guilt or shame abounds if we're not vigilant. Surely this is where inner principalities war.

Consider the person who, after years of self-betrayal, doubt and fear, "suddenly" refuses to be victimized by others. Clearly the seeds of spirituality have grown enough for good to finally triumph over bad. I have known those who, in much this way, abruptly become sensitive to crude, unwholesome behaviors and who, only then, change their life for the better.

Many people report spontaneously leaving psychically suffocating friends, relatives and colleagues. An exceptional friend, a devout, twenty-year meditator, says she can no longer watch TV shows when meanness, violence or pornography are dramatized. For myself, I found that since 9-11 I cannot watch violence either, or most dribble found in the sit-coms. I now lean toward the Discovery channel, Court TV, Science TV, MSNBC, Animal Planet, National Geographic TV, History Channel, etc. I'm more into reality, I guess, since 9-11. That event and what has followed has really affected all our lives, in so many ways. Including our emotions and intellect. Oh, how I did love the exaulted feeling we all had of 'pulling together' in every move we made right after 9-11. Do you remember that? Have we lost it? You don't really want me to get started on that. However, lest I get off the track here.....let me continue.....

In the interest of self-realization, we yearn to be rid of all that belongs to our false self, our "old" person. Perhaps we press toward some hard-to-name goal that stretches us beyond our present comfort-zone. We may adopt healthier, more moderate personal habits.

The person who was addicted to work, status or making money may instead spend time alone or with loved ones. Someone else, who has been under-stimulated, may crave excitement in the form of travel or career advancement. Unhappily married people may summon the courage to seek counseling where they will face the unattractive...often unacceptable...side of their relationship (and themselves). Or, accepting the inevitable, they find the consequence of separation or divorce both physically and psychically painful.

A friend of mine started meditating. He had never intended to give up smoking. Suddenly he found the taste and smell of tobacco offensive. This physical example shows us how much work there is to do in bringing our behavior into line with our new standards, values and self-expectations.

Another value...It's one thing to say you forgive someone, and quite another to so thoroughly assimilate and be done with anger that we get on with our life, and let go of the past. When we truly forgive others, all that is left of anger is thankfulness for being alive. We then forget our abusers, wish them well, and do "get on with" our lives. Spiritual acvancement introduces loss. Inner shifts prompt outer revisions. This is what spiritual growth is all about.

As we grow older, spiritual emergence dictates its own special urgency. People for whom the first part of life has been unsatisfying now make a determined effort to change the second half. Their moves are fueled by their reverence for life and by the growing sense that they have limited time to honor their talents and gifts. Despite fear, they surrender themselves to the call and law of their own being. These internal shifts frequently follow a predictable route...As the material, everyday world fades into the background of our awareness, spiritual concerns take center stage. To accommodate this redirection of attention, we revise both inconsequential and signifgicant habits. We may alter daily routines, structure our time differently, and perhaps change the way we work.

Each altered course or shift in worldview also requires us to relinquish what has been. Before gaining something new, we release former things. This development, when it occurs in the collective consciousness, upsets the status quo of community, institutions and family habits. In the life of the individual, a similar clash and an experiential anarchy seems the norm...This means we don't know which end is up.

Disorder or confusion arrives whenever we revise our inner and outer life. How we deal with these alterations depends on our way of handling problems and our own psychological history. But few of us are prepared for the momentous disruption that interior shifts can bring. Reading about other people's experience is never like living through our own. Conversions of habits, values and relationships amount to a series of small deaths which we ourselves set up. Like moths, we are drawn to these dissolutions.

Next, we will look at the re-direction of attention, and some altered courses and experiences brought about from re-aligning with one's Spiritual self. Plus a personal story which will grip you....and will attempt to put all this into perspective for you.

To be continued....in my September issue of 'Touching Bases' Newsletter.....

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Jeanne