Crisis calls us to act beyond the usual. This pandemic experience sets an unprecedented crisis that makes us reinvent ourselves. This is where the opportunities in crisis are derived. It gives us the opportunity to engage all that we’ve got to survive and thrive. All our intelligences need to be tapped to generate our best coping and growth—and this refers to the collective intelligence of the heart, the mind and the spirit. And the ultimate intelligence and the most fundamental that works in these trying times is our Spiritual Intelligence (SQ). The SQ is what will make us step forward toward who we really are—as individuals and as humanity. With SQ, we should be able to answer the question “what does it take to be human” amid and beyond the pandemic?
This pandemic may move us to re-boot our individual moral compass toward a better and different world. The quarantine enables us to have moments alone reflecting with our conscience and listening to that innate inner voice which all along knows the right things to do. SQ can make us more purposeful, meaningful and responsible, regardless of our religion.
Defining Spiritual Intelligence
The rational and material intelligence, based on “what I think” is measured by the Intelligence Quotient. IQ discovery in early 20th century led to the measurements of left-brain linked rational, logical, problem solving skills. The emotional or social intelligence, anchored on “what I feel” is measured by Emotional Quotient. EQ in the mid 80’s asserts the right-brain linked power of emotions as source of human energy, information, connection and influence for personal, emotional and social abilities. Adversity Quotient was also introduced in 1997, a complementary framework that tells us how well one withstands adversity and the ability to surmount it and predicts who gives up and who prevails. The past columns of this writer featured these.
The Spiritual Intelligence which foundation is on “what I am” and is measured by the Spirituality Quotient (SQ). It was attributed to Dana Zohar and Ian Marshall in a pioneering book “SQ Connecting with our Spiritual Intelligence.”
Spiritual intelligence is regarded as the ultimate intelligence and is the ability to access higher meanings, values, abiding purposes, and unconscious aspects of the self and to embed these meanings, values, and purposes in living richer and more creative lives. SQ is a transformative intelligence that allows us to break old paradigm and to invent new ones, to reframe problems and situations, to dissolve old patterns, to be open to finding new ones and to access energies that come from something beyond the ego, beyond just me and my day-to-day concerns.
The Twelve Applied Principles of SQ
Zohar asserts the twelve principles of SQ. In this article, these principles are translated into action agenda amid the pandemic toward the golden opportunity for us to apply as individuals toward recapturing the values that, together, humanity can do it.
We have to be attuned with the deepest values that we live for and for which we are willing to die for. It is anchored on the self-awareness, which core is on who we are and which radiates on how we give this life forward to others as a gift to the God within us.
There is just too much of self-centered pursuit without realizing that we swim and sink together in this pandemic battle. Living a vision and value-led life commits to excellence seeking for the best that one can give as a service not to self but for others.
Compassion is “to feel with” where yours is perceived and experienced as mine. Be it suffering or poverty, one need not pity but genuinely empathize to care for the poor because fact is I am also poor.
Humanity is trapped by the illusions of the past comforts and the anxieties of the future such that the present here-and-now is neglected and given less value. We tend to solve the new problem with old solutions, or with the same old solutions that led to the present problem, which is plain stupid. AQ calls it spontaneity and makes us drop the baggage and focuses to live, now!
As Humans are the most arrogant species in the planet entitled to consume it as if everything is for us, humility dictates that we are just part of and is connected to a big whole. Listening to the voice within enables us to listen to each other with openness that your point of view is as valid and probably right and as invalid and probably wrong as someone else’s point of view.
The chaos brought about by our pandemic response challenges our ability to stand in the middle of, or even against, the crowd. It puts us in the room to be different and who has no obligation to just go along. Combined with humility, this principle enables us to make that difference.
Quantum physics, which is the expertise of Zohar, theorize that there is no such thing as separation, and therefore the world is an unbroken whole. Holism makes us realize that we are all part of the whole in a vast interconnected field, we become more cognizant of the implications of what we do in the lives of others within our circles and even in the universe.
Celebration of diversity enables us to appreciate the beauty of and the potential development derived from a different point of view. It adds up to our expanding awareness of ourselves in the bigger context of life.
The volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world should make us ask infinite questions toward a finite answer. We should be able to ask, the deep fundamental question, why? This principle of SQ incites the better VUCA as vision, understanding, clarity and agility, which are what we need to move forward.
We need to positively use adversity and regard suffering as a means to grow. This is possible when we stand up not as victims, and as we convert setbacks as time-out moments to discover new ways.
The reset brought about by the pandemic in almost all aspects of our lives gives perfect timing for what SQ refers to as reframing—a change in paradigm. Business may want to see itself as generators of employment and wealth not for the narrow short-term mindset of profit but for the products, services and solutions for the betterment of society and humanity.
The sense of vocation gives greater meaning to what we do as we are convinced that we are all called to do something. With sense of vocation, we get more engaged to excellence in everything that we do because they matter.
The SQ’s challenge to achieve the personal consciousness of who we are, why we are here and what we can do, individually and collectively in a vast system adopting our temporal life in this universe, make us more alive inside as we continue to make footprints forward to become better persons contributing to the better future of a better humanity for a better universe, under one sacred supreme Being within and around us.
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