You are correct, many scholars of development/psychology do not recognize spiritual intelligence.

I’m going with the work of writers like Fowler and Wilber who would include among those recognized developmental lines a spiritual one, describing an unfolding awareness of the absolute.

Some states of consciousness can be trained, and when this involves attention deployment — as many forms of contemplation and meditation do — then these trained states tend to unfold in a sequential fashion. And when they do so, they tend to follow the natural order of gross to subtle to causal to nondual states (see James, or Daniel P. Brown).

When states unfold in some sort of sequence (largely because they are trained), we can call them state-stages (contrasted to structure-stages).

As for these state-stages — which generically move from gross experience to subtle experience to causal experience to nondual — you can open virtually any manual of meditation or contemplation, East or West, and you will find a description of meditative or spiritual experiences unfolding in essentially that order, with quite specifically those general characteristics.

I can think immediately of St. Teresa’s interior castles; the extraordinary cartographies of St. John of the Cross; the meditative cartography of Buddhaghosha’s Visudhimagga; the cartographies of the Church Fathers — such as St. Gregory of Nyssa, Origen, St. Dionysius (whose “way of purification”, “way of illumination”, and “way of unification” is as short and succinct a summary as you will find: purify the gross body via discipline and still the gross mind via concentration; find subtle interior illumination; surrender even illumination in a prayer of quietude and divine ignorance; thereby the soul and God find union in Godhead, one with the radiant all).

deesine on June 23, 2009 at 12:46 AM

progressoverpeace on June 23, 2009 at 12:56 AM

Hey, we got time here, right?

Ever noticed how unevenly developed virtually all of us are? Some are highly developed in, say, logical thinking, but poorly developed in emotional feelings. Some people have highly advanced cognitive development (they’re very smart) but poor moral development (they’re mean and ruthless). Some people excel in emotional intelligence, but they can’t add 2 plus 2.

Howard Gardner made this concept fairly well known using the idea of multiple intelligences. Human beings have a variety of intelligences, such as cognitive, emotional, musical, kinesthetic, and so on.

These can, and are, called developmental lines because the overwhelming amount of data shows growth and development — they unfold in progressive stages.

This explanation, however widespread, may be hair-brained. What’s your model: people just…develop…some fast…others slow?

deesine on June 23, 2009 at 1:11 AM