Below is an excerpt from the book Spiritual Intelligence by Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall, which presents the experiences of one of its authors during a UNESCO conference in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. One evening, they were taken to visit the city theater, where:
“There were cracks and burn marks on the ceiling. The walls were pockmarked where plaster had been destroyed by bombs and shells… There was no air-conditioning and it was dreadfully hot.
When the orchestra members appeared in sagging white shirts and poorly cut trousers, their music was listless and despairing. They could not raise their performance above their own and the city’s depression. The audience became bored and many, including myself, fell asleep. The agony seemed set to go on forever. And then, in a flash, the atmosphere changed.
An elegantly dressed singer in a black tuxedo, Zurab Sotkilava, stepped to the center of the stage. A beloved Georgian, Sotkilava was at that time the leading tenor of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre. He was visiting his home city in honor of the UNESCO delegates. Swelling his chest, he sang magnificently, beginning with Verdi arias and then moving into traditional Georgian songs.
As he sang, the theater came alive. It was as though the voice was not coming from his throat, but from Georgia’s distant past—somewhere in the collective human unconscious, linking it with the suffering and tragedy of the Georgian present. He was a channel, bringing to the oppressed and discouraged orchestra and audience energy and hope from those other dimensions… He was spirit in action, acting as a conduit from the depths to place the present in a wider and richer context—a powerful example of spiritual intelligence.” — Danah Zohar & Ian Marshall
Even if you feel that you are alone and moving among “discouraged orchestra members,” and the ceiling above your head is cracked, there is a way to do something. Allow yourselves to become conduits in your lives for a vision that is greater than yourselves, and in doing so, you will understand what spiritual intelligence in action truly is.
Kameliya
