Look to the stars, says Mark Vernon
There is a type of understanding called spiritual intelligence which this book is about. It is a kind of intelligence to do with humble awareness rather than slick analysis and, when someone has it, you will think they are inspiring more than clever. It is a wonderful capacity, and a source of delight, comprehension and purpose. It is also basic to being human. But my fear is that it has become so overlooked and sidelined in the modern world that people are inclined to be sniffy about it and deny that it exists altogether.
My aim is to provide a nudge that may awaken some minds from such dogmatic slumbers, and secure spiritual intelligence more firmly in others. And fortunately, often, only a nudge is required because anyone who delights in a sunset, gasps at an insight or relaxes during an embrace – which is to say everyone who has thoughts, feelings and experiences – can only do so because the side of life that spiritual intelligence sees is operative and active. So what is it?
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 and 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 which, whilst typically seeming still and quiet, appears, upon closer inspection, to be unvaryingly, universally, energetically present. 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. Moreover, we can learn to abide in this awareness by simple, if highly distractable, processes of recollection.
What spiritual intelligence detects is given multiple names: fire, energy, soul, spirit, ground, emptiness, meaning, power, Brahman, Tao, God, origin, source. It is a way of knowing that can sound esoteric, though it lies behind the experiences that people routinely regard as the most important in their lives. It is operative every day in homes and hospitals, as moments of compassion and connection amidst suffering and distress. It is behind the capacity to recognize and admire beautiful words and moral patterns. Dante insisted that we only have to look up to activate it, which is why the stars and sky, treetops and mountains instantly convey awe and a sense of the beyond that spiritual intelligence instinctively trusts and loves to know. With eyes attuned to see and ears to hear, echoes of the wisdom that runs through the whole of life can be detected, caught in a phrase, or made more explicit in a myth or song.
Reflecting on the notion of being tends to do the trick for me. What that brings inwardly into view is that my being rests in an existence that is independent of me and effectively boundless. I say boundless because it must be the existence of everything else that exists too: it makes no sense to say that my being is my own, private possession. As the verse of the Persian poet Saadi celebrates: “All human beings are members of one frame, since all, at first, from the same essence came.”
Similarly, I can’t think that the awareness in me and in you and in others arose independently, on as many occasions as there are conscious creatures on the planet. That would be as odd as saying my hands and your hands just happen to look the same – although at the same time, and like our hands, our awareness is our own in the ways in which it is distinctively gnarled or dexterous. Further, given that your and our being is shared, it must ripple out to connect with being itself, or to put it more correctly: our being is a ripple in being itself, like as many swirls funneling in the air or eddies twisting in the water. There is a medium in which personal consciousness occurs, which is sometimes called mind at large or pure consciousness.
Being is shared. We can be confident that the inner life we know privately within ourselves is the same in kind as the inner life that others know because the physical apparatus that correlates with inner life looks the same in all cases, and is given the name matter. As the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer argued, we can use what it is like to be ourselves to reach towards the world at large. “We must learn to understand nature from ourselves, not ourselves from nature,” he remarked.1
The physicist Erwin Schrödinger made similar points in a different way in his book What is Life? Casting an eye across Christian mysticism and the insights of Indian Vedanta, and noting that other traditions could be drawn on too, he spotted a common teaching, arising from two everyday observations. First, we never experience our consciousness in the plural. That’s the fact captured in grammar when “I” is called the first person singular. Even someone with a multiple personality disorder is one personality at a time, and in a dream we are always only one of the characters.
That is doubly suggestive because the whole dream, with its many figures and details, springs from one mind – namely our mind – which leads us to Schrödinger’s second observation. If the dream-I is usually unaware that there is this one mind which generates everything that it interacts with and sees, by inference our waking consciousness is the same: there is a singular, pure consciousness that is its origin too. The many minds, as diverse as there are sentient beings alive, are an aspect of the one consciousness, like the characters in a dream.
This is an extract from Mark Vernon’s new book Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps.
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