By Jerry Kvasnicka
SIQ stands for “spiritual intelligence quotient.” It has to do with the spiritual discernment and consequent expression in living that results when consciousness is primarily informed by the universal essence that connects us all rather than by reaction to external factors. For personal and planetary health, SIQ is far more important than plain IQ
When I look out at the world that human beings have made I am tempted to repeat the words of one my favorite bumper stickers: “Beam me up, Scotty, there’s no intelligent life down here.” Yes, there’s plenty of IQ, plenty of “brilliant” ideas concocted by the human mind. But there’s very little SIQ, without which life as it was created to be cannot flourish on earth.
People with high IQs developed nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them. People with a high IQ developed genetically modified organisms, “blessing” us with GMO crops and foods. People with high IQs developed pesticides and herbicides that are killing our bees. People with high IQs devised a process for getting oil out of the ground called fracking that uses massive amounts of water, contaminates the water and causes earthquakes in some areas. People with high IQs devised land use policies that contribute to desertification. And people with high IQs came up with the internal combustion engine; it runs our cars and trucks but spews carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that contributes to global warming.
Problems spring from solutions!
Oh, what wonderful things have been given to the world by people of high intelligence! News commentator Eric Sevareid hit the mark when he said, “The chief cause of problems is solutions.” Another way of putting this is, “Today’s problems are yesterday’s solutions.” The human mind, uninformed by Spirit or what we might call Universal Being, was never intended to govern this planet.
In the United States hundreds of thousands of laws have been put on the books by the U.S. Congress, all for the purpose of solving problems and creating a just, peaceful, prosperous and happy state for everyone in the country. Has anything even remotely resembling this come to pass? Certainly not, and the underlying reason is low spiritual intelligence.
Religion lowers spiritual intelligence!
How is spiritual intelligence increased? An obvious answer might be: religion. Nothing could be further from the truth. Human religion lowers spiritual intelligence. Why? Because it is the product of the human mind and human imagination, not of any real connection with Spirit. Religion interposes a veil of beliefs, doctrines, creeds, holy books, rites, rituals, relics and assorted salvation formulas between Spirit and human consciousness. Spirit has a difficult time penetrating this veil, if it can get through at all. Clogged with religion, human consciousness tends to languish in a helpless victim state of identity.
“We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” This bumper sticker states the truth. But most human beings in effect affirm the opposite: “We are human beings trying to have a spiritual experience.” And I might add that they use religion and all of its paraphernalia in an effort to induce this experience and have some kind of connection with God. But as long as identity remains at the level of a mere human being trying to connect with a remote and often punitive God, spiritual intelligence remains at a low level and the world continues to slide down the road to oblivion.
To increase SIQ it might be useful to begin with the affirmation “Be still and know that I am God.” Being still, clearing mind and heart of all the mental and emotional clutter from out of the past, human consciousness is then in position to experience the communion with God that is already present. Yes, we are already in communion with God and always have been. We just haven’t been aware of it and feel we need to somehow manufacture it by external means.
God is worshiping you!
Worship is one of these devices. For many human beings worship involves coming together in a church, mosque, synagogue or temple to reach out to a distant God via prayers, hymns, scriptures, sacraments, etc. But for those who have awakened to their already-existing communion with the Most High, worship becomes something radically different. David Karchere, spiritual director of Emissaries of Divine Light, beautifully describes this:
“It’s not hard to see how the efforts of human beings to be religious, or even spiritual, so often cut across the already-existing reality of the presence of what God is, if that word God has any meaning at all. And what really has to happen for there to be a change in human experience is a breakdown of whatever veil there is in the human mind and heart that doesn’t understand how the reality of God is worshiping them now, already.
“Knowing that you’ve been worshipped, is worship of God an effort? Do we have to go through some great ritual, ceremony, or reach some high religious fervor in order to worship God? If we need rituals and ceremony, it’s to break down the veil that’s present in our own heart—the veil of unseeingness, the veil of ingratitude—so that we can know what’s already true: We are being loved, we are being worshipped. Knowing that you are loved, knowing that you are worshipped, is it hard to love and worship back? Is that an effort? Not at all.”
This is a radical departure from the common conception of worship and of communion with God. Instead of making an effort to worship God, this is saying that God is worshiping us! And so worship becomes primarily the celebration of an already-existing fact. Yes, we can still engage in singing, praying and various forms of ceremony in a service of worship, but the experience is different when the dynamic is celebration of divine imminence rather than reaching out to a distant God.
You are a Temple of the Living God
“Be still and know that I am God.” Speaking this, feeling this, living this, being this raises spiritual intelligence. As I do this I come home to the truth of who I am: a spiritual being, a representative of Universal Being, an angel incarnate. As Uranda, founder of Emissaries of Divine Light, observed: “Truly man, as God created him, male and female, is the Temple of the Living God.”
To this one might reply, “Well, I certainly don’t feel like a spiritual being, let alone a being that God is worshiping.” Okay, but could it be that your feelings are giving you false information? Your mind and emotions, like mine, have probably been conditioned for decades to believe that you are a mere human being, a victim of circumstance and, if you’ve been exposed to Christianity, a helpless carrier of original sin. The first step toward spiritual intelligence is to delete this mental and emotional default programming via a process of conscious deprogramming.
Replace habitual reaction with divine action
How does this work? It’s very simple. Begin with the assumption that you are a spiritual being, a representative of God on earth. Pretend if you must. Then no matter what comes to you or who comes to you, simply act as though God might act in relation to that circumstance. No matter how habituated you are to react to the situation on the basis of impulses arising from the conditioned self you have known, respond to the situation from your highest vision of how a spiritual Being made in the very image and likeness of God would handle it.
This begins to establish a spiritual baseline in consciousness and from there spiritual intelligence may increase. Because the more you override habitual reaction in favor of activating the highest and finest qualities of character and the unconditional love at your core, the more you realize, “Why I am this! This is my very nature!”
We know what we express. Express Spirit and know Spirit. Invest everything we say and everything we do with Spirit and our SIQ continues to increase. And this not only increases individual SIQ but, perhaps more importantly, raises the spiritual intelligence level of the whole body of humanity and serves to save our precious Planet Earth from the excesses of ordinary IQ.