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 āamazing or wonderfulā thing or event, or āa person or thing that is a marvellous example of somethingā ā as in āa miracle of designā. The word āmiracleā derives from the Latin miraculum, a wonder, or wonderful thing. You cannot argue ā all the evidence supports the fact that you are amazing. Consider the miracle of your own engineering:
your body is made up of 200 intricately sculptured and mechanically perfect bones; 500 muscles with billions of muscle fibres, and seven miles-worth of nerve fibres to keep it all co-ordinated
your eyes, ears, nose, skin and mouth are each so sensitive and complex that scientists are at a loss to explain how they all work, let alone replicate their functions adequately
your heart is the most amazing mechanical pump yet devised, beating an average of 36 million times every single year of your life
your brain contains a million,
million brain cells ā equivalent to 167 times the population of the planet ā each single one of which is more powerful than the standard personal computers we are relying on more and more!
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 ā this is the miracle of being human.
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:
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 universeās 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.
And this universe is vast:
our Earth is just one of the nine planets in our solar system that circles our sun
our sun is tens of thousands times bigger than our Earth, and yet is only a small example of the
ten thousand million suns that make up our local galaxy, on the edge of which we spin
our galaxy is one of a
million million galaxies, each one millions of light years across, and each one separated on average by a distance so great that if you travelled at the speed of light for 100 years you would still not bridge the gap!
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 experiences had radically changed his life, and he had established an institute for the study of humanity and the environment. He told the following story:
The Astronautās Story
The training at NASA for the flight to and around the moon was very, very, thorough. The astronauts had simulated every stage of the flight in terms of duration and daily activities ā they had literally āgone to the moon and backā while on Earth!
Indeed the training had been so thorough that Mitchell reported virtually no emotions of fear or exaltation when they took off, because it felt so familiar and ānormalā.
This familiarity continued all the way to the moon, everything running smoothly, on schedule and, as far as the crew were concerned, almost robot-like. They arrived and began to prepare for their journey to the ādark side of the moonā.
This, like everything else, had been rehearsed. The trip was to take only an hour or so. The significant thing about being on the dark side of the moon was that for the first time on the journey, the sight of the earth would be totally blocked from view, and no radio or television waves could either penetrate or go round the moon. The astronauts would be totally excommunicated from Earth!
Mitchell said that the first five minutes on the dark side were fine, but after that the simulation training began to peel away, and concern, a touch of fear, and his imagination began to kick in. He began to think more and more about Earth ā about his wife and children, his home, his neighbourhood, his friends and the places they met, and the changing colours of the seasons.
As his imagination expanded, time began to stretch, as it does when you are waiting for someone you love who is late. But this was not just one person Mitchell was waiting for. This was everyone and every thing that he loved. He began to wonder whether there were some strange time-warp effects on the dark side of the moon, and whether he and the others were trapped in an eternal night. Mitchell reported that the minutes began to feel like days; the time behind the moon was becoming eternity.
After what seemed like aeons, they came out the other side.
And there, at last, was the Earth!
But the Earth was not as Mitchell had imagined. In his mind it had been the giant planet on which the universe of his home and family existed. What he saw now was a tiny blue planet floating in the vast inky blackness of space. Surrounding it was a fragile, wafer-thin covering of white ā our entire atmosphere. Mitchell...
