What's your SQ?

Throughout the years, I have experienced many people being standoffish towards spirituality and ridiculing it – myself included. Why?

There are different entrance points to, why we ridicule something. For example, we ridicule others in comparison with our own beliefs and preferences = judging. We ridicule as a loving or playful banter (the recipient might not agree). We ridicule others in order to feel good or belittle someone, as a way of making ourselves look better.

Ridiculing can sometimes turn into inappropriate consequences of hate crimes and personal attacks. By putting others down, we want to make ourselves feel superior.

But it's my experience, we mostly ridicule, because we are afraid. Throughout my work, I have realised, fear is probably the 95% cause of all issues in our entire existence.

We fear the unknown and the different. We instinctively push it away, not wanting to look into/deal with it. It's the old classic human behaviour of ignorance. Ignorance being the simple fact of lacking knowledge and information.

Spirituality, just like other groups, communities and cultures in our society, experience ridiculing because we fear it. We ridicule spirituality and what it means, as for thousands of years the spiritual community has been equaled to: “weirdo’s” talking to imaginary beings or dead people, and seeking stuff that is not there”. Or spirituality is about reading peoples minds or predicting the future.

But spirituality is so much simple and so much more.

One perspective to spirituality

The meaning of spirituality has developed and expanded forever, becoming a broad concept with room for many perspectives. Simplified, spirituality can be described as:

...our human evolutionary journey, towards a sense of connection to something bigger than our human self. Typically involving a search for meaning in our human life. It's a universal human experience - something that touches us all.

A quick unfolding, spirituality refers to a wider range of experiences, including esoteric experiences. Modern spiritualists use the term spiritual(ity) to describe experiences of sacred dimension outside their human being. It's a belief in a “beyond the known and observable” realm. Spirituality is encountering our “higher self” and "inner being".

Just like with e.g. advanced Math, I could entertain for months about spiritual teachings. For example, explain: the Monades; the 12 Chakra-system; energy-fields; soul groups, etc.

But just like we don’t necessarily need to know, 2 plus 2 does not always equal 4 (yes, I have been shown the equation behind: 2 + 2 = 5), we don't need the advanced knowledge to spirituality, in order to neutralise our fear.

Advanced spirituality is often, what those “who have seen the light” try to compress into basic human comprehension, in a short span of time. Creating a sense of, spirituality being more complicated than it is. Often implying, it requires a “highly enlighten being” to understand it. Well it's not.

The beauty about spirituality is, we have our entire lifetime to understand our evolutionary journey, expand it, and grow into it. Unfortunately, many of us make the “rookie mistake” of assuming, we must understand and live it all at once.

Instead, let's keep the definition short and to the point for now (we can always expand it with time):

Spirituality is ACKNOWLEDGEMENT and ACCEPTANCE of, I, as a human, don’t know it all or have control over everything in my life. As there is something bigger than me, that has the steering wheel.

Well, if this simple fact doesn’t scare the shit out of us, I don’t know what will.

Spirituality in correlation with mental health

This is why we experience a tremendous change in our mental health, when allowing and accepting spirituality in our lives. Throughout our entire human evolutionary journey, our inner and outer world changes. And we might not always be ready for it. Or have the adequate knowledge to cope with it.

Our mental health is the state of well-being in which we realise our own abilities, to cope with the natural up's and down's of life. Thus, at times, our mental health will have to cave to the changes we experience internally and collectively. Some will cope with it over time. While others, will struggle tremendously, and maybe not even "make it".

You can see this in the increased statistics of suicides (nationally/globally), and mental health disorders occurring both with grown-ups and children. If you hold it up against historical changing times, you can se a tendency.

Our mental health is bound to be affected by changes in our human lives, environment and consciousness, ALWAYS!. It's something we need to acknowledge, accept and allow.

It's just like when infants experience their many evolutionary jumps in their first years of living. During these evolutionary jumps, their mental health is literally A-wall. Why they get more agitated, disoriented and uncomfortable.

Throughout our entire life, we will continue experiencing these evolutionary jumps - both as children, teenagers, and adults.

This is the simplicity of spirituality.

And we need to start working towards this obvious acknowledgement, and create a society, where we learn to cope with our evolutionary journey and spirituality -also as children, teenagers and adults.

We need to acknowledge, accept and allow diversity and constant change is a core stone to our lives. And when fear interferes with our mental health, we can always begin to educate ourselves some more.

A simple tool to understanding spirituality

Instead of fearing spirituality or the (inevitable) process of it, we can measure how we handle our journey of evolution and spirituality, with the following tool. This way, we can have a bit fun with our evolutionary changes.

Just as we have the indicators of our human quotients:

1. IQ (intelligence quotient)

2. EQ (emotional intelligence quotient)

I present to the world, in correlation and highly intertwined with both our IQ and EQ:

1. SQ (spiritual intelligence quotient) = “a person’s ability to be acceptant of diversity and the unknown (measured by the level of fear, ignorance and ability to educate themselves, towards what the person doesn’t know)”.

So, what is your SQ score?