Spiritual Intelligence
by Fraser Watts
The apparently simple little adjective, “spiritual”, is more complicated than it looks, and there are significant issues about what it means. It is currently being used in a variety of contexts. I will focus mainly here on spiritual intelligence, but also briefly note parallel discussions about spiritual healing, and the spiritual turn.
There is talk of “spiritual healing”, but what is “spiritual” about such healing? Some years ago Sarah Coakley and I jointly led a consultation on spiritual healing. In subsequent publications we have both grappled with how to conceptualise spiritual healing.
In her recent book, Spiritual Healing: Science, Meaning and Disenchantment, Coakley makes a distinction between healing that is not strictly physical and healing that is framed in terms of God. In my own book, Spiritual Healing: Scientific and Religious Perspectives, I had distinguished between healing that is attributed to spiritual practices, healing in which spiritual aspects of the human person are presumed to be involved, and healing that is attributed to spiritual processes.
Charles Taylor has talked about a “spiritual turn”, a turn away from organised doctrinal religion to a focus on spiritual assumptions, values and practices. More recently, there has perhaps also been a turn away from dogmatic atheism, which is also quasi-religious.
In an important recent book, The Spiritual Turn, Galen Watts has documented how a pervasive indigenous spirituality is to be found among Canadian Millennials. Interestingly, he found substantially the same spirituality in a charismatic evangelical church in Toronto, in the completely secular setting of Toastmasters, and in the hybrid ethos of 12 steps (Alcoholics Anonymous) with its talk in the “big book” of God as we understood Him. He emphasised that this pervasive spirituality is not just a watered-down version of religion, and traced its origin in the romantic movement, building on Habits of the Heart by Robert Bellah and colleagues.
The current ISSR research project on spiritual intelligence, part of TWCF’s initiative on Diverse Intelligences, has led the project team to grapple with the problem of just what is “spiritual” about spiritual intelligence. In a recent paper in Religions, Marius Dorobantu and I have made a distinction between a strong version of the claim that there is spiritual intelligence (which we reject), and a weak version, which we have endorsed and tried to develop.
The strong claim that there is a separate spiritual intelligence can be formulated within Howard Gardner’s theory of “multiple intelligences” framework. He originally listed eight different intelligences, each with its own evolutionary history, brain processes, cognitive operations, developmental history etc. If you examine the claim that there is a separate spiritual intelligence against his criteria, it fails on almost every count.
Nevertheless, we maintain that there are characteristic ways in which spiritually mature people do cognitive processing. That is found in spiritual practices, and John Teasdale’s recent book on What Happens in Mindfulness sets out a clear and convincing modelling of mindful cognitive processing, making use of a particular cognitive architecture, Interacting Cognitive Subsystems. In parallel work, I have modelled cognitive processing in the Jesus Prayer using the same cognitive architecture.
The spiritual mode of cognitive processing is also to be found to some extent in everyday life. The popular literature on spiritual intelligence, stemming from Danah Zohar, has emphasised the adaptive value of taking the broader perspective on life that spiritual intelligence offers. As Dorobantu and I emphasise in a forthcoming paper in Zygon, spiritual intelligence is not so much about processing different kinds of information from usual, and more about processing things differently.
The spiritual mode of processing has much in common with other intelligences that are more intuitive than propositional, such as aesthetic, moral and interpersonal intelligence. There has been a growing consensus that humans have two fundamentally different modes of cognitive processing (e.g. Seymour Epstein, Iain McGilchrist, Jonathan Haidt etc.). One operates largely at an intuitive level and has a lot of continuity with the intelligence of other higher primates; the other is more linguistic and distinctively human.
These two modes of cognition are often out of balance in our contemporary way of life, with an overreliance on conceptual intelligence, to the detriment of the holistic-intuitive one. Many spiritual practices, such as mindfulness and the Jesus prayer, have a way of rebalancing the two minds by silencing the conceptual mind to allow meanings to be processed at a deeper, holistic level.
Spiritual intelligence understands things intuitively, and often in ways not directly open to articulation. In the vocabulary of theologians, it is “ineffable”. It is also a highly embodied intelligence. We sense things in our bodies, especially in the parts of the body other than the brain where there is substantial innervation from the central nervous system. That is well understood in the conceptualisation of human nature found in the Hebrew Bible; we “know” with the heart and in our bowels.
It is also a holistic intelligence that understands things by putting them into context. It is more concerned with connotation than denotation, with sense rather than reference. It is a pattern-seeking intelligence that finds the same basic schemata in different contexts, for example, in how Christian thinking finds the “death to resurrection” sequence in many different places. It is a narrative intelligence that often understands things by telling stories about them.
It is also a relational intelligence that comes to understanding with other people rather than in a lonely individuality. It often draws on a collective understanding of things, which may initially have arisen from the trance dancing of early humans, what Durkheim referred to as “collective effervescence”. It is a participative rather than an objectifying intelligence. It doesn’t stand back and try to understand things from the outside, but recognizes that you can’t understand the things of God in an objectifying way. As Hegel put it, “God does not offer himself for observation”.
Though we see spiritual intelligence as primarily about a distinctive mode of cognitive processing in everyday situations, we don’t exclude coming to an understanding of reality through exceptional spiritual experiences. That doesn’t necessarily involve dualistic assumptions; we would prefer to understand it from the perspective of dual-aspect monism. Inner and outer, the spiritual and the sensory (or scientific) worlds, can be seen as two sides of the same coin. A better understanding of either one can lead to a better understanding of both. The routes are different, and involve different modes of cognitive processing but, in the end, there is one reality.
These issues will be explored further at the ISSR conference on Spiritual and Artificial Intelligence, in Swindon UK, 20-23 June 2023. We welcome submission of papers on spiritual intelligence, or any topic within Religion and AI. In due course I hope that ISSR may be able to build on the current project on spiritual intelligence with an exciting broader program of grant-funded research on different modes of enquiry and understanding that will allow ISSR to invite applications for subgrants.
