CLIPPING #58 — Spiritual Intelligence

Danah Zohar is a physicist, philosopher and management educator. Her books with her husband Ian Marshall include The Quantum Self, The Quantum Society and SQ: The Ultimate Intelligence. Her introduction of SQ includes these words. “By SQ I mean the intelligence with which we address and solve problems of meaning and value, the intelligence with which we can place our actions and our lives in a wider, richer, meaning-giving context … .”[1] She argues that all of our intelligence (IQ, EQ, SQ) can be linked to three basic neural systems in the brain. “Human beings,” she adds, “are essentially spiritual creatures because we are driven by a need to ask ‘fundamental’ or ‘ultimate’ questions.”

“SQ gives us our ability to discriminate. It gives us our moral sense, an ability to temper rigid rules with understanding and compassion and an equal ability to see when compassion and understanding have their limits.” Zohar/Marshall cite brain research that describes oscillations that “dance” across the entire brain to make sense of experience. The oscillation leads the specialized parts of the brain to converge into a whole. The authors conclude that this oscillation is the closest we can come to identifying the part of the physical brain that corresponds to the soul.

High SQ people look for the big picture, are led by their values, welcome diversity and adversity, ask a lot of “why” questions, are willing to stand out from the crowd and practice servant leadership.

Have you launched any oscillations recently?

I invite you to visit the website alignmentnetwork.org and learn about a new and engaging pathway for spiritual discovery.

Irving Stubbs — www.alignmentnetwork.org

[1] Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall, Spiritual Intelligence — The Ultimate Intelligence, Bloomsbury