19 Do you like the ‘sound of silence’? YES/NO
20 Do you care for our planet? YES/NO
21 Do you love yourself? YES/NO
22 Do you pick up your rubbish? YES/NO
23 Do you feel there is an individual or some power/energy greater than you? YES/NO
24 Are you hopeful? YES/NO
25 Are you enthusiastic? YES/NO
26 Are you compassionate? YES/NO
27 Are you grateful for your life? YES/NO
28 Are you respectful and considerate of others? YES/NO
29 Are you creative? YES/NO
‘Men go abroad to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the oceans, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.’
(St. Augustine)
The first principle of Spiritual Intelligence is the realization that you are a miracle and are wonderful! There is no doubt about it, and you should hold yourself, and others, in awe. Each one of us is more precious, valuable, rare, beautiful and priceless than the most precious and rare ruby or diamond.
A miracle is defined as any ‘amazing or wonderful’ thing or event, or ‘a person or thing that is a marvellous example of something’ – as in ‘a miracle of design’. The word ‘miracle’ derives from the Latin miraculum, a wonder, or wonderful thing. You cannot argue – all the evidence supports the fact that you are amazing. Consider the miracle of your own engineering:
We also know that you are more unique and more different from each other person on earth than any snowflake is from its fellows.
Moreover, we know that the atoms of which you are made come from the stars. You are, in the very real sense of the word, a Starchild!
Each one of us is capable of the most amazing feats of courage, endurance, heroism and sacrifice, as well, unfortunately, as the worst excesses of greed, selfishness, depravity and cruelty – this is the miracle of being human.
‘Be humble for you are made of earth.
Be noble for you are made of stars.’
(Serbian Proverb)
The Bigger Picture
A common activity for young children all over the planet, who are just beginning to explore the wider dimensions of their world, is to send a letter to a friend or pen pal, addressing it as follows:
My friend Jane Fitzgerald,
16 Paradise Street,
London,
England,
Europe,
The World,
The Milky Way,
The Universe.
These children are beginning to sense, as the Spiritually Intelligent do, that the universe is their home, and that they live in a series of bigger and bigger neighbourhoods.
It is the universe’s vastness that creates a sense of excitement, wonder and awe, and which raises all kinds of spiritual questions about the meaning of our existence, and our individual place and significance in that universe.
‘Every now and then,
Take a good look at something
Not made with hands;
A mountain, a star,
The curve of a stream.
There will come to you
Wisdom and patience,
And above all, the assurance
That you are not alone in the world.’
(Sidney Lovett)
And this universe is vast:
Imagine how many atoms (the building blocks of all matter) there must be in the Universe, when just one grain of sand from many of the hundreds of thousands of beaches on our small planet contains millions of atoms.
Spiritually Intelligent people actively cultivate an awareness of the magnificence of every living thing and the vast and gigantic beauty of the universe. This awareness has been furthered dramatically by the invention of telescopes and space probes and, of course, manned space flights. Thanks to these instruments, exquisitely beautiful pictures of planets, stars, galaxies and inter-galactic clouds where stars are born, trillions of miles above us, have been beamed directly into our televisions and living rooms. This dawning Spiritual awareness is beautifully encapsulated in the story of astronaut Edgar Mitchell.
I met Edgar Mitchell in 1973, a couple of years after he had flown to and around the moon on the Apollo 14 mission. His
