I encountered the following article while scanning the news Monday morning, 13 Types of Intelligence (Which Ones Are You?), The fact that they found 13 types of intelligence peaked my curiosity enough to cause me to click the bait. I knew about IQ, Intelligence Quotient, being blessed to be somewhere on the right side of that famous bell curve. I knew about EQ, Emotional Quotient, mainly because one of my former intimate partners once shoved a cassette tape (yeah, that long ago) into my face (well my hands) telling me that I needed to listen to it as I had an EQ…wait for it… of zero.
I am not sure I agree with their thesis that there are so many different types of intelligence. However, of the 13 types of intelligence listed in the article the one that captured my attention the most was, Spiritual Quotient (SPQ). I am by no means a religious person. I would like to say I am a spiritual person, but I have always struggled with exactly what that means. As a general rule, I do not feel spiritual, although at the same time I have endeavored to live an ethical life, even if I have stumbled more than I care to enumerate. But I did like the definition of your Spiritual Quotient in the article.
“Our spiritual quotient can be our most fundamental intelligence. It’s what we use to develop our purpose and meaning in life along with our vision for how the world should be. Our spirituality can determine our core values. It allows us to have faith in something bigger than our self and to strive to be a better person. It underlies why we believe the things we do.
Our underlying beliefs in our place in the universe creates our mental model for our moral and theological beliefs that creates the values that determine the actions that we take. Our spiritual intelligence is primarily where our sense of responsibility, humility, and happiness can emerge from. The more popular term for your spiritual intelligence is faith.”
I especially liked the phrase “Our spiritual intelligence is primarily where our sense of responsibility, humility, and happiness can emerge.” I would quibble with the use of the word faith as I see the concept of faith as expressed in the quote – in a religious sense – as a double edge sword so sharp and dangerous that it is best left sheathed. I am totally under the opinion that we need a belief in something outside ourselves. The meaning of life has always been open to debate, but without something bigger than ourselves, I am not sure there is meaning, except what we discover or assign to it. “We are born, we live, we die, and folks pick through our shit for pennies on the dollar” is frequently my synopsis of our existence (Señora has dragged me to far too many estate sales).
No real insights (do I really ever have any), the article just started me ruminating on the subject of spirituality, a subject that has perplexed me for seven decades now. I would love to find, for lack of a better word, a definition of spirituality that makes sense and talks to me, AND that is not a reiteration of the belief in things unprovable, aka religious faith. Ramble, ramble, grumble, grumble…
And so it goes.