Review of "Spiritual Intelligence: the ultimate intelligence" - by Danah Zohar

Is modern Western society "spiritually dumb"? We seem to have lots of ordinary intelligence (IQ) ready to solve our problems, and yet we continue to rush unchecked towards ecological crisis; is this a lack of some sort of "spiritual intelligence," evidence of a low collective "SQ"? Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall argue that society is indeed spiritually dumb. Following on from Daniel Goleman’s highly influential argument that IQ needs to be supplemented by Emotional Intelligence (EQ), these authors set out to do the same thing with SQ: to pin it down, explain its links with physiology, fit it within a new characterisation of the human person, and offer suggestions as to how to improve our individual SQs.

Their quest originates in a profound experience of personal integration, movingly described by Danah Zohar, and builds on a wealth of material, original and quoted — I liked the many wise insights in the final chapters about appropriate spiritual paths for different personality types. On reading, I immediately felt that this was an idea whose time had come. Spirituality has emerged from its purely sectarian-religious connotations and is now being regarded in many education and business circles as a central human faculty. So the questions being posed in this book are precisely the right ones for our time. But I was left asking, does this book rise to the challenge presented by this opportunity, does it produce something really new? More specifically, have these authors, who broke radically new ground with their first book The Quantum Self, now lost the plot? I want here to say a little from my own perspective about what "the plot" might be, before returning to the book.

The central spiritual disease of our time in the West is the mechanistic world-view, acquired from 300 years of Newtonian science and constantly reinforced by the mechanistic thinking that is still scientific orthodoxy. Because of this, the majority of us live in two worlds: the world of the machine given to us through the influence of science on society (genetic engineering as the ultimate technological fix for all ills), and the world of spiritual longing that is our birthright as human beings. And many of us find the tension between the worlds at times pretty disabling. "The Plot," the underlying message of Zohar and Marshall’s books, is the unfolding discovery, gradually percolating through the newer parts of science and still surrounded by controversy, that the findings of modern physics have ended the two-worlds division and restored to us a universe where spirituality makes sense. If this is right, then we can legitimately think in terms of a universe where intellect and spirit come together, where we can for the first time work coherently on ecological challenges that are simultaneously social, technological and spiritual.

The central factor in this emerging cultural change, as these authors have boldly pointed out in earlier books, is quantum thinking. The whole world - not just peculiar objects prepared by scientists in laboratories, but every being in its own particular way - is grounded in quantum theory. What does that mean? In one of the most influential articles on the subject, the respected philosopher of quantum theory Abner Shimony gave in 1989 a 1-paragraph list of its key features, which include "objective chance" and "objective entanglement of ... bodies, and hence a kind of holism." The first means that the universe is not a machine running like a tram on predetermined tracks, but it is fringed with uncertainty, offering at every moment freedom for new creative acts. The second (which Erwin Schrödinger, one of the theory’s founders, regarded as its most significant point) means that these creative acts come in ways that can be co-ordinated over large distances, leading to a universe that is interconnected through a kind of inner harmony. Scientists are still struggling to unpack the implications of this and are some way from a consensus - the situation has if anything become more confused over the last two years. But, despite some competing theories and counterclaims, we are moving to a picture where the essential being of the conscious human person is to be found in the web of interconnections in which they are held. (I should add that there is a third element, the quantum vacuum, playing a considerable role in the book, but space prevents me describing the problems with this.)

How are these first two key ingredients of quantum theory handled? Objective chance is given a small but well presented section under the heading "the Uncertainty Relation." But the second factor, the interconnected nature of the universe, has been pushed to the background. This is reflected in a shift in the science used. In their earlier books, the connectivity of quantum theory was vital in providing a proposed explanation for consciousness. The new book, however, hardly mentions this. Instead, the centre stage is occupied by the phenomenon that has recently come to the fore in neuroscience: a particular frequency of electrical oscillation in our brains which has been shown to be present whenever we are conscious. This is claimed to be the foundation of spirituality: "this centre [of the self] is associated with the 40 Hz neural oscillations...", "it is through these oscillations that we place our experience within a framework of meaning and value, and determine a purpose for our lives."

Unfortunately, these oscillations are nowhere near being rich enough to support the spiritual wealth that the authors demand from them. There is evidence that the oscillations express connections between the different parts of the brain involved in perceiving an object, say a cup: it appears that the part involved in seeing curved shapes and the part that might be involved in formulating the word "cup" manifest oscillations that are in phase. But a vast chasm separates this discovery from assertions such as those above. Without a robust theory of connectivity and consciousness we cannot even get from the brain oscillations, that appear when a cup is in front of our eyes, to our awareness of a real piece of china out there. Much less can we derive meaning and purpose for our lives. In turning away from the continuing research on quantum theories of consciousness, the authors fall back into a two-world view. One world is that of conventional mechanistic neurology, firmly confined within the skull. The other is a spiritual world derived from various religious traditions and from modern psychological theories of personality types. Because there is no credible connection between the two, there is no effective challenge to the strangle-hold of older mechanistic science on our society.

Down-playing the interconnection of the world also sends out conflicting messages about the nature of spirituality itself. Although they at times grasp the essence of the connectivity of spirituality ("We are too cut off ... when I am deeply spontaneous I know that I am the world"), yet spiritual intelligence still comes across largely as an individual matter. The focus in not on our spiritual dependence on other beings, but towards the autonomous individual. "Intelligence," after all, suggests something that I possess privately, as purely my own responsibility, and spirituality thus becomes privatised. Spiritual growth, however, can only come from the Other, whether it is encountered in community, in nature, or in the transcendent that is reached via our deeper/higher selves - these are all legitimate routes. They note, rather tentatively, that "The centre is ... the heart of some wider, perhaps sacred or divine reality ... It is ... from the centre’s place within both self and cosmic reality that our spiritual intelligence emerges." But what had happened to the power, the love, the awesomeness, the numinosity of this access to the cosmic dimensions?

In many passages of poetry or allegory there is indeed a new, inspiring and challenging strand struggling to come to the forefront of their hesitant text. I hope that in subsequent work they can grasp its strength and write the book that this might have been. A quote they give from Rabbi Heschel epitomises the spiritual reality that must be contacted:

There is a loneliness in us that hears. When the soul parts from the company of the ego and its retinue of petty conceits; when we cease to exploit all things but instead pray the world’s cry, the world’s sigh, our loneliness may hear the living grace beyond all power.

Now, for the first time, science is starting to give a world view within which both this vision and the rigour of mathematical theory can stand as allies.