"There is a brokenness
out of which comes
the unbroken,
a shatteredness
out of which blooms
the unshatterable.
There is a sorrow
beyond all grief
which leads to joy
and a fragility
out of whose depths
emerges strength.
There is a hollow space
too vast for words
through which we pass with each loss,
out of whose darkness
we are sanctioned into being.
There is a cry deeper than all sound
whose serrated edges cut the heart
as we break open to the place inside
which is unbreakable and whole,
while learning to sing."
Rashani Rea
out of which comes
the unbroken,
a shatteredness
out of which blooms
the unshatterable.
There is a sorrow
beyond all grief
which leads to joy
and a fragility
out of whose depths
emerges strength.
There is a hollow space
too vast for words
through which we pass with each loss,
out of whose darkness
we are sanctioned into being.
There is a cry deeper than all sound
whose serrated edges cut the heart
as we break open to the place inside
which is unbreakable and whole,
while learning to sing."
Rashani Rea
We may be so familiar with feeling fragile, sad or worse, that a dark mood may almost feel like home, the "story of me," who we (assume we) are, our (assumed) identity, our 'normal.' We may also assume that our quality of life is chained to & rigidly determined by life circumstances, which we see as bleak.
UNTIL somehow, even if just for a brief moment, we clearly see how this entire mess is ONLY a story. Eckhart Tolle's spontaneous awakening from severe depression is a dramatic example of this. Many dramatic awakenings are being reported with psychedelic-assisted therapy - exceptionally moving stories of Navy Seals suffering from combat PTSD are beautifully documented in the 2025 documentary "In Waves and War" https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/82047468. But most awakenings are gradual progressive life-long processes, during which spiritual practices help to uncover our innate spiritual intelligence.
THEN we might notice that we are ACTUALLY this awareness, this witness to the "story" - NOT the story itself. Initially, this is a subtle felt sense of a shift, almost like remembering an old memory, impossible to put into words. A silent, peaceful, wise, loving intelligence that is our Self, our True Nature, who we truly, actually are.
WE CAN, with the help of spiritual practices - like meditation and self-inquiry - start to embody this, our real identity, for slightly longer stretches of time, very gradually connecting these stretches that are marked by peace & joy and are remarkably, wonderfully independent of life circumstances.
Repeatedly practicing Loving-Kindness meditation toward ourselves & others can, over the years, melt the armor we no longer need, resulting in periodic ‘heart openings’ – feeling of warmth radiating forward from the heart area, occasionally accompanied by ‘uncaused joy’ – spontaneous, prolonged blissful peace & happiness for days, weeks or longer, without any change in our external circumstances.
We're fully aware of all the usual challenges of life, however, we're experiencing life from a peaceful, wise, remarkably objective perspective, that is radically different from feeling helplessly trapped in a bad drama.
This is the process awakening, a mystical experience, the flowering of spiritual intelligence, etc. Wise people throughout history have considered awakening to be the very purpose of life. Our own culture desperately needs to be reminded of the importance of spiritual intelligence.
Mark Vernon, former Church of England priest, now psychotherapist & author, introduces his book "Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps":
Mark Vernon, former Church of England priest, now psychotherapist & author, introduces his book "Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps":
“Spiritual intelligence is a type of perception, although unlike types of empirical perception that see, hear, touch, taste or smell, it works by spotting what is alive & implicit. It delivers the felt sense, often first glimpsed out of the corner of the mind’s eye, that our experience of things is connected to a wider vitality, that what we grasp is only a fraction of what might be understood, that there is more underpinning existence to become alert to this presence is like becoming aware of light, which is not itself directly visible though simultaneously shines from all the objects it illuminates.
Spiritual intelligence is a kind of intelligence to with humble awareness, rather than slick analysis. And when someone has spiritual intelligence, you will think they are inspiring more than clever. It is a wonderful capacity and a source of delight, comprehension & purpose. It is also basic to being human.
But my fear is that it has become so overlooked and so sidelined in the modern world that people are inclined to be sniffy about it and deny that it exists altogether.
The word 'spiritual' is of course contentious. People can spend years trying to define it. For others it’s straightforwardly a turn off as it evokes superstition or woo. I’ve resorted to it partly because it is useful in signaling my conviction that there are more things in the world than can be accounted for by a materialist philosophy.
Also, if spiritual seems slippery, that is only in the way that defining what is good or beautiful or true seems slippery, though we know these things the instant we are in their presence. The realization lies in the recognition, not any definition which will inevitably be too tight.
My book – “Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps” – is in part a product of my involvement in a research group organized by the International Society for Science and Religion that is looking into these things. I feel it has become crucial to get a felt handle on the notion of spiritual intelligence, in contrast to other kinds, and in particular, artificial intelligence. The immediate concern is that AIs are already so pervasive that we are at risk of forgetting what it is to operate without their slick planning cunning manipulation and tremendous capacity for problem solving. The challenge is to ensure AIs benefit us more than threaten us, which requires us to understand more fully what it means to be human. If we can be brightly aware of the capacities we have, which no machine does, even as the technology continues to improve, we might have a chance of staying human in the age of the machine.
Emotional intelligence isn’t enough I’ve concluded, partly because it looks as if AIs will be increasingly able to mimic the qualities that Daniel Goleman originally highlighted as proficiencies of emotional intelligence.
The first two competencies he lists: social skills and empathy, machines can already be programmed to fake.
The next two, motivation and self-regulation, machines simply don’t need as it is in their nature to keep going without hesitancy or deviation.
Goleman’s fifth characteristic, self-awareness has so far eluded computers, and my guess it always will, though the danger is that it can be imitated so as to confuse humans, and it’s already doing so.
I put it like this, if artificial intelligence is mostly about solving problems by spotting patterns, and emotional intelligence is mostly about relating to feelings by understanding them as opposed to being swept along by them, spiritual intelligence turns to the steady presence that runs through, above & under it all.
This awareness is transformative, not because it is successful at what it does like an AI, nor because it fosters flourishing like emotional intelligence, though it might, spiritual intelligence enables the individual & groups of individuals to become increasingly aligned with the deeper pulses of reality. It takes us to the shoreline of knowledge where learning becomes a type of listening, consideration a type of resonance, and personal change a type of expansion.
With spiritual intelligence education becomes an activity that seeks to draw out and recollect, rather than pour in and test. The truly deadly thing is to fail to notice you are experiencing, because you have become lost in the experience. It is this self-forgetfulness and alienation that the pervasiveness of machines can bring about, not because they have woken up, but because their impressive presence has made us fall asleep. The risk is that we become like them, not that they’ve become like us.
What I am proposing as spiritual intelligence is related but different to the ways it has been defined so far by the writers who have attended to it. It has been thought of as a skill that can handle values or as an ability to discern purpose or as a concern for ultimate issues like life and death. Experts have turned to it as a complement to emotional intelligence, rather than as the capacity that is onto the realm in which the imminent meets the transcendent, as I am suggesting.
There are two problems with these older approaches. One is that they commit the flaw of much modern psychology by trying to remain metaphysically agnostic, instead of concluding on the basis of experience & evidence, coupled to intuition & desire, that there is a ground wellspring & sustaining presence within our existence.
Psychologists typically attempt to hover above reality and comment on behaviors or observations, but this is not metaphysically agnostic. It is adopting the materialist assumptions of the physicist, which might work well when studying the objective world, but fragment when studying the subjective, because unlike the Cosmos, the psyche cannot be inspected in a detached manner. The so-called replication crisis is a result.
Second, spiritual intelligence is not a kind of know how, but more basic. It is know that – know that our plane of existence has qualities of being and consciousness and constancy and peace. That awareness will undoubtably help with our emotional intelligence, as I explore in the book, but spiritual intelligence as I see it is not a proficiency, because it is not something to be achieved. It is a perception, which you could say is born of a knack or a grace or a crisis, though it only appears to elude us in retrospect, because it is closer to us than we are to ourselves. It invites us to turn back to our ground of our being, and re-build from there.
My sense is that now is a good moment to become aware of its awareness for another reason. Many thinkers, including my colleagues at the research Network Perspectiva, believe that we live in a time of crisis, that is actually a meta-crisis. They mean that the challenges of the 21st century, from environmental collapse to social alienation, are not problems prevailing systems can fix, for all the specific policies and decisions may be able to impede pandemics and put out some of the fires, rather the problems have in large part been caused by the prevailing systems themselves. So while systems will have to be redesigned, and more basic tasks must be attended to, remembering what it is to be human.
My seven steps are a set of reflective reorientations that turn the attention towards spiritual intelligence, deepen the understanding of it, and thereby locate it more consciously in life.
Second, spiritual intelligence is not a kind of know how, but more basic. It is know that – know that our plane of existence has qualities of being and consciousness and constancy and peace. That awareness will undoubtably help with our emotional intelligence, as I explore in the book, but spiritual intelligence as I see it is not a proficiency, because it is not something to be achieved. It is a perception, which you could say is born of a knack or a grace or a crisis, though it only appears to elude us in retrospect, because it is closer to us than we are to ourselves. It invites us to turn back to our ground of our being, and re-build from there.
My sense is that now is a good moment to become aware of its awareness for another reason. Many thinkers, including my colleagues at the research Network Perspectiva, believe that we live in a time of crisis, that is actually a meta-crisis. They mean that the challenges of the 21st century, from environmental collapse to social alienation, are not problems prevailing systems can fix, for all the specific policies and decisions may be able to impede pandemics and put out some of the fires, rather the problems have in large part been caused by the prevailing systems themselves. So while systems will have to be redesigned, and more basic tasks must be attended to, remembering what it is to be human.
My seven steps are a set of reflective reorientations that turn the attention towards spiritual intelligence, deepen the understanding of it, and thereby locate it more consciously in life.
The first step is to retell the origin story of human beings. This is important because stories are like filters and the current crop of big history accounts of homo sapiens treat the spiritual element as if it were a delusion, which whilst once useful, can be filtered out now. I present the case, emerging from research in human evolution, that what I’m calling spiritual intelligence, developed in significant ways with the emergence of homo sapiens, and played the fundamental role in the development of culture and technology. We are homo spiritualis, and need to recall that now.
Second step, or perceptual shift continues this story into the annals of history, and explores how individuality and individual freedom emerged. The basic freedom is again often forgotten now. It is not freedom of choice, which is freedom from hindrance; or freedom of expression, the freedom to speak or do; but the more basic type of freedom, to recognize what freedom is for, which in a nutshell is to know ourselves in all our depth. Freedom grows as spiritual intelligence becomes established.
Step three is a type of discursive meditation on what it’s like to tune into spiritual intelligence. The upshot is a growing perception that reality is simple, not in a naïve sense of not complex, which is clearly not the case, but in the deeper sense that the myriad things arise from a spiritual commons, which spiritual intelligence can know.
Step four considers how spiritual intelligence relates to the inner life of the individual or the soul. It explores the ways in which developmental psychology and psychotherapy have charted this interiority that argues that without the metaphysical ground that spiritual intelligence brings, these methods of easing suffering and promoting development have no goal, and so can leave people journeying and journaling almost indefinitely.
A fifth step follows because when the soul settles into the being that sustains it, the tricky but transformative reality of death can be approached anew. Mortality reveals itself with spiritual intelligence to be a kind of natality, an insight that can be found in any wisdom tradition of merit with the advice to learn to die before you die.
Step six argues that spiritual intelligence precipitates a radical shift in our perception of ethics. It must move on from being understood as about morality – which tends to foster guilt & shame, and is readily weaponized, and so unwittingly weds us to alienation. Instead, the older tradition of virtue commends itself – which focuses on the qualities & characteristics that not only incline us to what’s good, but enable us to embrace more & more of life, especially when hard.
Spiritual intelligence offers a radically different way of being in the world, which is the focus of the final step seven. We might come to love realization instead of being wedded to growth & progress. We might value notions like awakening and conversion, alongside management and development, not least when thinking about education & ecology. In particular, the experience of time can be transformed. These capacities are essential now and will be increasingly essential in the future, so I commend the book to you.”
Second step, or perceptual shift continues this story into the annals of history, and explores how individuality and individual freedom emerged. The basic freedom is again often forgotten now. It is not freedom of choice, which is freedom from hindrance; or freedom of expression, the freedom to speak or do; but the more basic type of freedom, to recognize what freedom is for, which in a nutshell is to know ourselves in all our depth. Freedom grows as spiritual intelligence becomes established.
Step three is a type of discursive meditation on what it’s like to tune into spiritual intelligence. The upshot is a growing perception that reality is simple, not in a naïve sense of not complex, which is clearly not the case, but in the deeper sense that the myriad things arise from a spiritual commons, which spiritual intelligence can know.
Step four considers how spiritual intelligence relates to the inner life of the individual or the soul. It explores the ways in which developmental psychology and psychotherapy have charted this interiority that argues that without the metaphysical ground that spiritual intelligence brings, these methods of easing suffering and promoting development have no goal, and so can leave people journeying and journaling almost indefinitely.
A fifth step follows because when the soul settles into the being that sustains it, the tricky but transformative reality of death can be approached anew. Mortality reveals itself with spiritual intelligence to be a kind of natality, an insight that can be found in any wisdom tradition of merit with the advice to learn to die before you die.
Step six argues that spiritual intelligence precipitates a radical shift in our perception of ethics. It must move on from being understood as about morality – which tends to foster guilt & shame, and is readily weaponized, and so unwittingly weds us to alienation. Instead, the older tradition of virtue commends itself – which focuses on the qualities & characteristics that not only incline us to what’s good, but enable us to embrace more & more of life, especially when hard.
Spiritual intelligence offers a radically different way of being in the world, which is the focus of the final step seven. We might come to love realization instead of being wedded to growth & progress. We might value notions like awakening and conversion, alongside management and development, not least when thinking about education & ecology. In particular, the experience of time can be transformed. These capacities are essential now and will be increasingly essential in the future, so I commend the book to you.”
