Role models of SQ

SQ21: The Twenty-one Skills Of Spiritual Intelligence is a guide to your own hero’s journey. As role models we can look to the noblest human beings we an think of, people like Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Socrates, and Mother Teresa. What sets them apart is more that intellectual smarts (IQ) or great interpersonal skills (EQ). It is their spiritual intelligence (SQ).

John Mackey, Forward, SQ21, p.vii

Don McClean sang in his classic song, American Pie, that the three people he admired most are the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

In Paul Simon’s great song, You Can Call Me Al, he sings “Who will be my role model when my role models are gone?”

Having been raised as a Catholic, I was encourage to read about the lives of the saints and to celebrate their feast days when a mass was dedicated to them in their honor.

Who is the most spiritually intelligent person you know? Do you aspire to emulate their SQ? How do you do this?

The Interior Spiritual Life

Most people have heard of IQ, the intelligence quotient. Some people have heard of EQ , emotional intelligence, and fewer people have heard of SQ, spiritual intelligence. What is spiritual intelligence? Spiritual intelligence is the awareness and relationship that a person has with their Transcendent Source which provides them with wisdom, courage, temperance, justice, and peace.

The Transcendence Source is the non dual Oneness from which we were separated when we were incarnated into a physical body and to which we will return when the physical body dies.

Hopefully, over the course of a lifetime a person’s interior spiritual life grows and deepens and the person’s potential flowering is actualized.

People increasingly in our contemporary times, when polled, say they are not religious, but consider themselves spiritual. If you ask them what they mean by this, they start by saying that they don’t go to church and aren’t a member of any religion but they believe in “God or something bigger than myself.”

Almost everyone has some sort of interior spiritual life whether they are consciously aware of it or not. All human beings reflect on the three main existential questions: why was I born, what is the purpose of my life, what happens when I die? The answers to these questions are the foundational building blocks of the interior spiritual life.

If you are interested in learning more about what comprises an interior spiritual life and how to intentionally further develop it, subscribe to Nurturing One’s Interior Spiritual Life, to obtain some ideas about how to understand it, and expand it.

The four Hindu life stages: Where are you?

From Spiritual Seniors on 09/07/25

The Four Ashramas: Life in Stages

In classical Hindu thought, life is a journey divided into four ashramas, or stages. The first is brahmacharya, the period of the student, when the young learn discipline, faith, and knowledge. The second is grihastha, the householder, devoted to marriage, family, work, and social responsibility. The third, vanaprastha, arrives when one has fulfilled those duties and begins to step back from worldly obligations. The fourth, sannyasa, is the life of renunciation, when a person seeks union with the eternal.

What distinguishes vanaprastha is its transitional nature. The forest dweller is not yet a renunciate. They may still live with their family, continue to advise children, and still play a role in society. But the center of gravity shifts. The inward call of wisdom balances the outward call of responsibility. A person is no longer defined by striving, but by seeking. No longer measured by conquest, but by clarity.

I am a Psychiatric Social Worker and have been practicing for 56 years and continue to practice individual, couple, and family therapy in my private office three days per week at age 79. 

The major life transitions of the second half of adulthood are the empty nest and retirement. Many of my client seeking help with depression, anxiety and somatic preoccupation are not managing these life transitions well. They are confused, lost, see no path forward and our culture and its institutions don't help them much.

The Hindu teaching of the life stages is a very helpful map that provides some guidance to what eldering might look like and the developmental challenges that people face as they grow older. Schacter-Shalomi and Miller call this process "Age-ing to Sage-ing" in their book by the same title. Becoming a sage is not just growing older but growing up which means actualizing one's potential.

One of the purposes of this blog, Nurturing One's Interior Spiritual Life, is to facilitate the development of a map for growing up. Further articles on this topic of ageing to sageing will be forthcoming.

What will make me happy?

So first we have to understand what I mean by “life.”

It must not be simply growing old, it must be growing up. And these are two different things. Growing old, any animal is capable of. Growing up is the prerogative of human beings.

Only a few claim the right.

Growing up means moving every moment deeper into the principle of life; it means going farther away from death—not toward death. The deeper you go into life, the more you understand the immortality within you. You are going away from death; a moment comes when you can see that death is nothing but changing clothes, or changing houses, changing forms—nothing dies, nothing can die. Death is the greatest illusion there is.

Osho. Maturity: The Responsibility of Being Oneself (Osho Insights for a New Way of Living) . St. Martin's Press. Kindle Edition.

Growing old and growing up are two different things. The choice is ours. Many people are in denial and unconscious of the fact that they have a choice. Socrates taught that an unexamined life is not worth living. If most people are asked, "What makes you tick?" they become uncomfortable as if they have been put on the spot.

If you ask people what they want out of life, they will say something like “to be happy.” The bigger question is what will make you happy and most people look to external things. But true happiness is peace of mind and that comes from within. Peace comes from cultivating the virtues of wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice in their lives.

People come to a point in their lives gradually or suddenly when they realize that what they have been taught by society is illusional and that there has to be a better way to live their lives.

This is what is called “the dawning” when it dawns on us that external things will never make us truly happy. What gives a person peace of mind is the cultivation of a virtuous way of being in the world. This way of virtue provides satisfaction, fulfillment, and peace.

The Stoics teach that the four cardinal virtues are wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. What are these four qualities? How can they be cultivated and practiced? Subscribe to this blog and study with us as we consider these questions in future articles.

In the center of the hurricane there is no judgment

 The map is not the territory. The symbol is not the reality.

We all misperceive what is in front of our eyes, ears, smell, touch, because we perceive through our filter and lens of experience which skews our perceptions in expected and prejudiced directions. We perceive through the lens of what psychologists have called the "self fulfilling prophecy".

Is the glass half full or half empty? Is that event a blessing or a curse, a good thing or a bad thing? History usually gets written by the victors, the oppressors, the more dominant people in the relationship.

So the wise person is not judgmental because (s)he knows that judgement is flawed, imprecise, skewing interpretation and meaning in an prejudicial direction. The wise person knows that only God, Spirit, Mother Nature, Tao can take the ever flowing, changing, oneness of life into account.

Many religions teach that the world of the ego is an illusion. We are watching shadows flicker on the wall of Plato's cave, The meaning we make of our existence very much depends on our perspective, on our limited experience. Recognizing our ignorance we are moved to humility and we become nonjudgmental. We yearn to move from this ego world, what Christians call the world behind the "veil of tears" to the non dualistic Oneness of God which is our Transcendent Source.

As Jesus said, "Judge not so that you will not be judged." Matthew 7:1

Mindfulness meditation is a very significant spiritual practice wherein we just witness all the tricks and antics of what the Buddhists call the "monkey mind" and attempt to clear our cluttered mind and enter into the center of the hurricane.

Grief and gratitude at the end of life.

As we near the end of our lives the question that can be addressed is “did we do our best with what we knew with the resources available to us given the circumstances?’ 

If the answer is “yes” then we can die in peace. If the answer is “no” then we can make sense of our mistakes and attempt to articulate what we have learned from them.

The activities, relationships, and functions on the ego plain are impermanent and wind up being ephemeral when it comes to Truth at the cosmic level of consciousness. The Tao works its way as things go along both good and bad, healthy and sick, rich and poorer til death do we part from this vale of tears. 

The predominant emotions at older age are grief and gratitude and in embracing both we experience peace.