How Do We Find Values in the Contemporary World?

Spiritual Intelligence: How Do We Find Values in the Contemporary World

The focus of this brief research report is to examine the issue of finding values in the contemporary world. Values, in the context of this research study relates to principles, standards, ethics, deeply-held beliefs and guides for living however, values also is akin to 'meaning'. Therefore, this research study examines how values and meaning is constructed in the life of a contemporary individual.

There has been much written in recent years concerning cognition and emotional intelligence. Studies in these two areas have yielded positive constructs, which individuals and social groups have successfully developed individually or in terms of the group upon the bases of cognitive and emotional intelligence behaviors and functional processes. Little explored however, is the area relating to what is known as 'Spiritual Intelligence."

What is Spiritual Intelligence

Spiritual intelligence is reported as a "higher dimension of intelligence that provides access to advanced capabilities." (SQ Institute, 2009) Spiritual intelligence is reported to regulate the IQ an EQ by "replacing the feeling of separation with an awareness of the connection between everything. Instead of feeling isolated and separate, SQ feels the unity that binds everything together.. Benefits of Spiritual Intelligence include those stated as follows:

(1) ability to find deeper meaning and real purpose;

(2) ability to change negative thoughts and emotions into positive feelings;

(3) ability to increase personal fulfillment and perform at ones' best in any given situation; and (4) assist others and help improve society through use of a higher dimension of the individual intelligence. (SQ Institute, 2009)

II. Intelligence Dimensions

When the inquiry into intelligence first began, intelligence was "restricted to intellectual intelligence (IQ). Then in the 1980s, emotional intelligence was identified as another aspect of intelligence that held "equal importance." (SQ Institute, 2009) In recent psychological and neuroscientific studies, "spiritual intelligence…is identified as a further dimension of intelligence that is even more significant." (SQ Institute, 2009) Spiritual intelligence is reported as "associated with hemispheric synchronization nd whole-brain activation. This is the same state of the brain that supports meditation and the experience of presence.

III. Spiritual Intelligence Skills

Spiritual intelligence skills are such that can be divided into four quadrants include those as follows:

1. Higher Self / Ego self-Awareness

2. Universal Awareness (awareness of interconnectness, etc.)

3. Higher Self / Ego self Mastery

4. Spiritual Presence / Social Mastery (SQ Institute, 2009 )

Spiritual intelligence is knowing that ones' own ones' mental life can be ordered on "more than one level at once. On one level, we may be thinking, discussing, seeing, calculating, meeting all the demands of external affairs. But deep within, behind the scenes, at a profounder level, we may also be in prayer and adoration, song and worship and a gentle receptiveness to divine breathings." "Facts remain facts, when brought into the Presence in the deeper level, but their value, their significance, is wholly realigned." (Illini Christian Faculty and Staff, 1999)

It seems that what really happens is that Holy Fellowship is such that reaches "behind these intellectual frames to the immediacy of experience in God, and seeks contact in this fountain head of real, dynamic connectedness." (Illini Christian Faculty and Staff, 1999)

IV. Features of Spiritual Intelligence

Features of Spiritual Intelligence are reported to include those as follows:

(1) Capacity to be flexible, actively and spontaneously adaptive.

(2) High self-awareness.

(3) A capacity to face and use suffering.

(4) A capacity to face and transcend pain.

(5) The quality of being inspired by vision and values.

(6) A reluctance to cause unnecessary harm.

(7) A tendency to see connections between diverse things.

(8) A marked tendency to ask 'Why?' And 'What if?' questions and to seek fundamental answers.

(9) Being 'field-independent' - possessing a facility for working against convention. (Mindwise, 2004)

Included in the qualities that are used to access the spiritual intelligence of the individual are those gained in the areas of flexibility and adaptability to situations, levels of self-awareness, capacity to transcend physical or psychological pain, connection to Creator, inner life importance, seeking meaning and purpose in life, beliefs cannot be viewed as black and white, trust in the divine to provide, healing from beliefs that are untrue but that were learned from culture and family. (Mindwise, 2004)