Our Spiritual Intelligence

I've talked and written about spiritual wisdom, the bedrock of the world's great religious and spiritual teachers. At other times, I've talked about simply being open and listening to what wants to be known. What I've been trying to get at is a sense that I've had for many years that we have inherent spiritual capacity, spiritual knowing wired into us as a species.

Each of us has a hard-wired capacity to be kind, to be empathic, to be reverent. Each of us has a hard-wired capacity to be fully aware and alive in the current moment. Each of us has the capacity to be helpful, to be useful, to participate, socially. Yes, each of us has wired into us, a spiritual intelligence that we are born with. It's obscured by our culture which is cognitively oriented, by our technology which creates an overload of stimulus, and by our intense focus on ourselves, our wants and needs.

I have suggested that in order to reclaim our spiritual intelligence we need to open ourselves to relationships with the natural world. If our attempt to be spiritually aware is based primarily in meditation and yoga, what happens for Westerners is a heightened awareness of our internal experience, which doesn't necessarily cultivate our spiritual intelligence. When we are absorbed in our relationships with the natural world, something else happens. We get outside of ourselves and come to respect what isn’t human, not just because it serves us, or because its collapse endangers us. Just as important is to have respect for what is precious, on its own terms.

As we come into relationships within the natural world, oddly, what happens is that we remember our spiritual intelligence. We remember a way of knowing free of our intellectual and personal preoccupations, our short sightedness and selfishness. Remembering our spiritual intelligence is crucial right now, so that we can behave in ways that truly respond to our planetary crisis.

Remembering my spiritual intelligence began fifty years ago at a remote spot at the Delaware Water Gap. I was sitting at a creek listening to the sounds of snow melt. It was early spring, birds were chattering, and I was alone and quite confident that I would remain alone, undisturbed. I lost track of time and became absorbed in the sounds, the bubbling and gurgling. After a while sound stopped and time stopped, and I fell into a deep state of emptiness. It was a first for me, sitting on a rock feeling alive and empty in the natural world. I repeated this experience weekly, sometimes twice a week, always in the same place. Sometimes I changed rocks. The seasons changed, the snow melt disappeared, and the creek quieted down. But it's still spoke, it's just that the tone change. And most times that I sat there; I fell into a deep state. Whatever I thought I knew, I no longer knew. I was simply open to whatever this little creek was saying because it seemed to be speaking to me. And oddly, I seemed to be able to comprehend and to respond to its communication as it varied by the season.

After I had fluency in my communication with this creek, I started a communication with wind and with clouds and with a pair of hawks. Now I have communication with hummingbirds in my back garden. Intimacy with the natural world, my experiences of its mysterious presence, my deepening intimacy with my spiritual intelligence, gifts me with an ever more surprising knowing.