Spiritual Intelligence (Sq): The Ultimate Intelligence

Spiritual intelligence is the intelligence with which humans address and solve problems of meaning and value. This is the intelligence with which we can place our actions and our lives in a wider, richer and meaningful given context. It is the intelligence with which we can assess that one course of action or life-path is more meaningful than the other. SQ has no necessary connection with religion.

It is usual for all human beings to long for and see that our lives are placed in some larger meaning-giving context, which may be family, community, work, religious framework or the universe itself.  It takes us beyond the present moment and ourselves.

SQ allows us to be creative, to change the rules and to later situations by extending the boundaries.

Spiritual intelligence operates out of the brain’s centre and integrates all our intelligences. It makes us fully intellectual, emotional and spiritual creatures that we are.

Characteristics of a highly developed SQ, according to Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall (2000) are:

1. The capacity to be flexible- actively and spontaneously adaptive

2. A high degree of self-awareness

3. A capacity to use and face suffering

4. A capacity to face and transcend pain

5. The quality of being inspired by value and vision

6. A capacity to inspire others

7. A reluctance to cause unnecessary harm

 8. Being holistic- tendency to see the connections or relations between diverse things

9. Greater tendency to ask why or what if questions and to find fundamental answers

10. Being field-dependent, that is, the ability to work against convention.