Introducing SQ: Spiritual Quotient

First there was IQ, and then came EQ. When Daniel Goleman wrote 'EQ' in 1995 he brought to fruition a line of thinking started in the early 20th century that non-cognitive aspects of thinking were essential components of intelligence. Until then it was cognitive thinking such as reason and memory that dominated the field of thinking on intelligence. Yet, EQ is actually older than IQ. Emotional intelligence existed well before we, as a species, developed our IQ. It’s just that we were painfully slow to recognise its existence and importance. Today it is well accepted that EQ is critical to leverage your IQ for success.

And now comes SQ - which actually is the oldest of them all. Observe carefully and you will see evidence that everyone is born with a different level of spirituality, or spiritual quotient. Some have a truly high SQ, and it shows from a very early age. They are conscience driven, sensitive to the world around them and the sufferings of the less fortunate, and seem born with some innate sense of spiritual awareness. Others, with low SQ, range in behaviour from just lacking these qualities to being quite the opposite. And these attributes can defy birth and upbringing. A sensitive, high integrity person can grow up in a pretty rough family - and vice versa; a god loving (not god fearing, fear is used by organised religion and has little to do with spirituality) meditative person can grow up in an atheistic family. It becomes more obvious when you look at the extremes of behavior and spiritual attainment - the difference between Buddha and Genghiz Khan, Jesus and Caligula, Mother Teresa and Hitler, Gandhi and Mao Tse Tung or Stalin.

What is SQ and what determines it? To me, spirituality in its simplest terms means your connect with your creator, the understanding that reality as we know it is just a part of a larger reality, all controlled by the first cause uncaused, the prime mover unmoved - God. I have come to believe in rebirth and the theory of karma and think that SQ is actually based on accumulated karma, which leads us into the spiritual realm. In addition to the testimony of spiritual masters, there seems no other way for your SQ (or the parameters of your birth/life) to be different to anyone else’s other than accumulated karma of past lives. The spiritual realm is like another dimension to life, which can open up depending on your karma. There are other ways to develop your SQ, like intense meditation, but you cannot get good SQ with bad karma any more than you can get roses from weeds. Good karma is a pre-requisite for success in the spiritual dimension. Once we are on the right path, our karma improves and the parameters of our next birth further improve to position us for even greater spiritual success. Spiritual development ends in transcending the limited reality we live in, moving on to a much greater reality, a transcendence that has been called moksha or nirvana. And if that is the end of the spiritual path for humans, the entrance to the path is through good karma.

So if we humans have a spiritual dimension, why is the world so messed up? Why do we see so much greed, dishonesty, selfishness and evil and so little spirituality? The truth is, spirituality doesn’t come easy. It is actually quite slippery and elusive, difficult to attain, and even if attained, difficult to sustain. There are some formidable challenges that stand in the way of spiritual development.

First and foremost, we can remain totally ignorant of our SQ, and live a life of total lack of spiritual awareness, seduced by the pursuit of material and sensory comforts, perhaps even choosing wrong actions and going backwards SQ-wise. IQ comes naturally though it does require cultivation, EQ sometimes needs a little more effort, and SQ seems to require the most. It’s a strange inverse proportionality. However, a spiritual guru can help you get in touch with your spirituality. In 'Autobiography of a Yogi' Yogananda describes how his guru Lahiri was just a normal government servant (though no doubt a good human being), until his guru Babaji who he had never met before contrived to meet him and awaken his awareness of his latent, very advanced spirituality. I once met a very remarkable swami who had an unremarkable childhood, and grew up as a non-believer. After graduation in electrical engineering from Jadhavpur university in Calcutta he went on a wander around India with a bunch of his college buddies. When in the south they visited Ramana Maharshi's ashram, and he who had never bowed to anyone in his life prostrated himself before Ramana Maharshi and never left the ashram till Ramana Maharshi died. So if even people with very high SQ can be unaware of it, and can need a guru's help to get in touch with it, what about the rest of us? And while a guru's help is the easiest and surest way to get in touch with your SQ, not everyone is lucky enough to find or be found by a guru. Or maybe it is a question of having enough SQ to merit a guru - according to the Upanishads, you don’t find a true god-realised guru, he finds you.

I recently attended a 10 day vipassana course in Kathmandu. Vipassana is a buddhist practice said to be the meditation technique the Buddha developed to gain enlightenment, and it is tough. You cannot speak for 10 days, cannot make eye contact with anybody, cannot read, write, sing, hum, watch TV, listen to radio or music. You meditate about 12 hours a day stretching from 4.30 am to 9 pm. So who goes for this? Hard core buddhists looking for nirvana? Not at all. The average age of the about 100 strong group was below 30, and more than 70% were foreigners, not Indian or Nepali. Apart from buddhist Japanese, there were Russians, some of them huge hulking guys who looked like they could be KGB agents fighting James Bond, there were Brits, Americans, French, Norwegian, Chinese, a catholic priest and a muslim from a very islamic country. All these people felt some inner urge to do this course. Nothing about it was aligned to their culture or religious beliefs. It required sitting cross legged on the ground 12 hours a day. You have to wonder why they came - it couldnt be just for the novelty factor, vipassana is too tough for that. People with an undefined inner yearning for spirituality are drawn to all kinds of places and practices which they think will help them. There are any number of supposed spiritual centres and gurus with tall claims, but so many are dilettantes or frauds and actually mislead people. Finding the right spiritual path can be a pretty bewildering challenge.

Another major stumbling block in spiritual development is that getting in touch with your SQ doesnt mean you will then stay on the path of spirituality. You can easily lose the plot and barrel on in your old ways, part of the herd in the headlong pursuit of material well being by any and all means. Not that there seems to be any intrinsic clash between material well being and spirituality. Living a good life is not intrinsically spiritually bad. The question is how you pursue material success. Its the means you use that determine your karma. Spirituality isn't easy and has to be carefully, consciously cultivated. It requires a measure of dedication, rigour and discipline, otherwise it can lapse, or dissolve into ritual and superstition. People frequently lead lives fueled by selfishness, greed, and dishonesty and expect to propitiate their god through religious ritual. Religion is sadly most often the enemy of spirituality.

People on the spiritual path are not necessarily brighter than average. That can also be a hindrance, as the simple minded can be gullible and easily fall prey to ritual and superstition. But if low IQ is a handicap, so is high IQ which often seems to present a blockage born of intellectual arrogance. Yet, spiritually enlightened people do appear to be very bright and articulate, but that could in some cases be a product of enlightenment not a cause of it. SQ does after a point seem to drive IQ. In his autobiography Yogananda explains the unleashing of knowledge using techniques like meditation. And, if you want to progress spiritually, you have to consciously use SQ to drive EQ: you have to behave better with people, show greater tolerance, greater compassion, greater equanimity. That requires change in behaviour, which as we all know is far easier said than done .

Faith is a major factor in spiritual development, but the faith has to be genuine, heartfelt, not fake and self serving, not inherited or based on superstition. The faith factor is part of the problem for people with high IQ. Acceptance, even partial acceptance without upfront demonstrated proof requires a great deal of intellectual humility and is difficult, but comes quite naturally once it ‘takes’ and demonstrates its logic and validity. Faith can and does develop slowly, not all in a rush in one epiphanic 'aha' moment. Like us, faith isnt born fully grown.

Ego is actually the biggest hurdle of all, and partly drives some of the other hurdles too. Ego distances you from the rest of creation and your creator. It basically puts you at the centre of your world, a fatally false premise. That place belongs to your creator. Overcoming ego is the supreme challenge.

Meditation is definitely helpful in getting in touch with your SQ and also in developing it. Stilling the mind allows our innermost spiritual impulses to surface. At the end of the vipassana course they showed us a film of the first vipassana course run at Tihar jail in Delhi, and the alchemic change it wrought in some of the most violent of prisoners. At the end of that course there were scenes of murderers weeping like children. There were stunning 180 degree turns in the attitudes of some. One man, who had killed five men in a few minutes in a gang fight, wrote to their families begging forgiveness. He was adopted as a rakhi brother by one of the widows in time, after he started helping out the families he had harmed, while still in prison. That expression of conscience was the awakening of latent SQ – not by any teaching about right and wrong but by an intense burst of purposefully designed meditation over 10 days.

I feel that my EQ has risen since I retired (not everyone in my family agrees). In the rush and tumble of working life you can develop a crust. Spirituality is an even further horizon. Now since retirement, with unspoken help from the one who became my guru, I am getting in touch with my SQ. I have moved from agnostic to believer, and can now relate my spiritual journey to spontaneous spiritual experiences in my childhood. These experiences were intimations of the SQ I was born with and which I ignored, which I never allowed to develop, which I consigned to the recesses of my consciousness and memory during my working years - though I never forgot them. While I have had transformational help getting in touch with my SQ, it was necessary for me to retire (and thereby hangs a tale), thus stilling my mind to an extent to be able to explore the terrain of spirituality. I do not believe I could have made any sense of the Upanishads for example, while I was working. You need a sense of repose to be able to comprehend and contemplate the spiritual dimension, to get in touch with your SQ. That’s when the journey begins.