What is the relationship between spiritual and emotional intelligence?

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There is no such thing as spiritual intelligence. Oh I’m sure there’s some guy out there who took the concept of emotional intelligence and thought it would be a good idea to apply it to the world of spirituality. By “a good idea” I meant “would sell a lot of books.”

But spirituality is the realm where logic and reason take a backseat to feeling and wishing. There’s no way to apply the concept of intelligence to it. Intelligence is innate skill at doing something that most people have to learn how to do. For example, an intelligent person might be able to pick up on math more easily.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that different people have different aptitudes. Emotional intelligence is just a way of conceptualizing empathy. We know about empathy pretty well by this point, how it develops and how it breaks. I’m not a fan of the emotional intelligence framing but I can see how it can get people who are excessively intellectual to realize that there’s more to being awesome than just having a powerful intellect. I don’t speak out on it because I think it’s harmless.

The analogue concept of empathy to emotional intelligence as applied to “spiritual intelligence” is imagination. Maybe I’m just being a humorless Scrooge here but I can’t see the basic idea behind intelligence, i.e. an innate ability that some people have naturally but that you could learn about and train and get better at, has any worth when it comes to spirituality, because the skill is literally the ability to believe in things that aren’t there. Sure, some kids are more creative than others, some might be better able to visualize things, but how can you say that one kid’s daydreams are better then another’s?

What does spirituality get you? Whatever you believe it can get you. The better you get at spirituality, it doesn’t get any easier to believe in things that aren’t there. You are literally creating things out of thin air, through pure force of belief. I dove into the junction between reality and spirituality for years, and rather than demystifying it, the mystery has instead petrified. Opaque as ever, but now you can at least burn it for energy. You just have to find it first. Sometimes it takes a while to prospect for it.

You see, spirituality has to remain evergreen for it to retain its magic. For it to remain evergreen, it has to have the potential to affect you in a deep, unfathomable way. When I was younger, I entertained the amusing delusion that I was practicing “advanced spirituality” by doing intense visualization meditation and chakra work. That sort of thing fascinated me. The lessons I learned cured me of that insufferableness but because that fantasy was the main reason I was doing it, that line of spirituality closed off for me and I had to find a new vein to mine.

Could I have had more “spiritual intelligence” that would have caused me to learn the lessons I learned faster so that I could move on to the “real stuff?” The very thought is absurd. The driver of your spirituality is you, yourself, and the depths of your being. That’s the stuff you dig up when you dive into the spiritual. You can’t be any more innately better at it relative to others, because nothing about it can be compared to others.

Whereas people very much can be smarter than one another, or better at deploying empathy towards them.