So have you now fully mastered EI? Well do not worry because neither has anyone else but practice changing your beliefs and behaviour in manageable bites and treat each day as an opportunity to practice more skilful EI. You are now ready to move up to understanding and practicing Spiritual Intelligence (SI). Congratulations! You do not have to be totally emotionally intelligent to be able to experience and practice SI in some aspects of your life. In any area of your life where you truly understand and practice EI you are ready to move up into SI in that area. Few people are so saintly that in some situations they do not sometimes regress and act in a childlike or emotionally unintelligent way. But if the general direction is up and one of inexorable general progress towards practicing EI in more and more of our life then that is the best we can hope for.
SI is the combination of applying EI with the practising of a number of spiritual behaviours ,which I will elaborate for you, such as listening to your intuition, living in the moment, and feeling love and compassion for yourself and others. SI is expressed as the awakening of the missing piece of most people that addresses the ache that we all feel that there must be more than this to life. SI comes entirely from within and is the route to happiness. It has nothing to do with any religion, guru or deity. One way of seeing SI is that it is about living life at the level where we appear to be connected with each other, and to be at one with, and an integral part of the universe. Some describe SI as ‘Insight’, or ‘Awareness’, and Buddhists describe the SI goal as ‘Enlightenment’. Whatever we call it, it is very rarely a sudden and total transformation-a finishing line that we cross and suddenly we are perfectly spiritual people. It is much more likely that you will be ‘better’ in some areas than others and behave with more skill in some areas than others. Enlightenment may be achieved for periods of time, sometimes only for an instant, and in some situations.
What does it feel like to be spiritual and really see Reality? Some of its main characteristics are to feel love for yourself, your loved ones, and for the beauty and magic of the universe and life.
Rather than thinking about this in respect of ‘areas of your life’, see it instead in the context of ‘moments of your life’. We are creatures that only exist and think in the moment. People pursuing spirituality often puzzle over why they cannot feel spiritual all the time, i.e. practise SI all the time. Why do they regress? Why does the effect of meditation wear off? Why do they have relapses and lose their cool, allow things ‘to get under their skin’ etc? Well the answer is to turn the question around and see it the opposite way. In any given moment of your life unless you are behaving with EI then the spiritual view of the world i.e. Reality is barred from you at that moment. In order to enjoy being spiritual at every moment you must not be at the mercy of your ego and negative emotions. It really is that simple. So to recap, these are the negative emotions that you must not allow moment by moment, as they are a false reality suggested to you by your mind. If you can progressively not allow these negative emotions you will progressively achieve more moments of SI in which you truly live in the moment and see Reality in all its splendour. Progressively this will become not ‘second nature’ but your real nature.