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Invoking the spiritual in campus life and leadership

Journal of College Student Development,  Nov/Dec 2001  by Rogers, Judy L,  Dantley, Michael E
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As previously defined, the spiritual dimension is the deep layer of the self where humans are in touch with questions of meaning, value, vision, wholeness, and connection. The physical, mental, and emotional layers of the self are permeated by the spiritual dimension; the spiritual dimension integrates all four. "Spiritual intelligence, in essence, represents a dynamic wholeness of self in which the self is at one with itself and the whole of creation" (Zohar & Marshall, 2000, p. 124). A central quality of the spiritual level is transcendence (Emmons, 1999). Spiritual intelligence takes people beyond their current reality, beyond their problems, joys, ego needs, and plans and puts them in a broader context. It allows people to break the boundaries of rational thinking. According to Danah Zohar (1997), spiritual intelligence is the source of human creativity. It is the source of thinking that precedes categories, structures, and accepted mind-sets. It is thinking that moves beyond current paradigms and through which individuals create categories, change structure, and transform patterns of thought. People use their spiritual intelligence when they face turmoil and transition in their lives, when they have to reinvent themselves to succeed in changing contexts. "A person high in spiritual intelligence is able to use the spiritual to bring greater context and meaning to living a richer, more fulfilling life, to achieve a sense of personal wholeness, purpose and direction" (Zohar & Marshall, 2000, p. 111).

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Annie Dillard (as quoted in Palmer, 1992) described the journey to wholeness, and thus spiritual intelligence, as a process of going "down and in." She argued that the spiritual journey moves not upward toward abstraction as is traditionally portrayed, but rather moves downward to the "hardest concrete realities of our lives" (p. 7). On the way down, we all meet our demons. Only if we ride these monsters all the way down can "we find the most precious thing of all: the unified field, our complex and inexplicable caring for one another, the community we have underneath our brokenness, our life together" (p. 7). Promoting nonviolence as a response to oppression, invoked by Mohandas K. Gandhi in India and continued by Martin Luther King, Jr. in the US, is an example of transcendent thinking, of finding the "unified field" of which Dillard speaks. The use of the principle of nonviolence to overthrow oppression is a mark of the high spiritual intelligence of these two leaders.

An emerging theme in the spirituality in the workplace literature is that organizations that strive to incorporate quantum perspectives seek to nurture and tap into the spiritual intelligence of organization members, as well as the emotional, mental and physical. Let us now examine more closely the role of the spiritual in organizational life.

THE RELEVANCE OF SPIRITUALITY FOR OUR WORK LIVES

The voices that speak from the framework of the new science make a convincing argument that the bias for a distinction between people's public and private selves in the organizational context is an outmoded one. Zohar (1997) purported that the distinction between public and private lives is an illusion created by mechanistic structures that arose out of Newtonian thinking. Since their inception, modern organizations have grounded their ways of operating in Newtonian science. Thus, in Western society, there exist large bureaucratic structures that are viewed as machines with separate interlocking parts. Organization members are seen as cogs in the machine. Just as organizations are fragmented, people are also expected to divide themselves into their public and private personas. Organizations are (ideally) a place to express one's intellect, and perhaps one's physical skills depending on the job, but one's emotional and spiritual dimensions are typically not welcomed or nurtured.


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