SQ

An interdisciplinary approach to human intelligence that blends 20th-century science, modern psychology, Eastern philosophy, and religion. The coauthors of The Quantum Society (not reviewed), Zohar, trained in physics and philosophy, and Marshall, a psychiatrist and a psychotherapist, reunite—in Zohar’s first-person voice, which blends ideas from both authors—to argue that besides traditional intelligence, or IQ, and the emotional intelligence, or EQ, proposed by Daniel Goleman, human beings possess spiritual intelligence, or SQ. Each is linked to a basic neural system in the brain; SQ’s is synchronous 40-Hz oscillations across the brain that bind individual perceptual and cognitive events into a more meaningful whole. Zohar and Marshall’s discussion of the brain includes examination of the so-called “God spot” in the temporal lobes and its relationship to SQ. The spiritually intelligent self is symbolized here as a six-petaled lotus, with the outer edges representing the ego; the middle layer, the associative unconscious, with its store of images, patterns, and relationships; and the center, the core of the self. Alienation from the center—from meaning and purpose—leads, they assert, to spiritual illness, and SQ is the means by which one can achieve spiritual wellness. The authors provide questionnaires by which to determine one’s personality type, six spiritual paths to follow to become more spiritually intelligent, and additional quizzes that assess one’s progress. In an offbeat mix of quantum-field theory and Buddhism, they liken the quantum vacuum, the background energy state of the universe, to “Buddha’s handkerchief,” the center of all things, “the mud out of which the stem of the Lotus of the Self” grows. Further, they propose proto-consciousness as a fundamental property of all matter, like mass, charge, and spin, with full consciousness possessed only by such structures as the human brain. A brave attempt to give New Age attitudes the imprimatur of science. (Illus., not seen)