# i7 : Spiritual Intelligence >[!Info] >The [[Intelligences|sensitivity]] to the meaning or ultimate significance of things. > >A highly stacked i7 usually leads to questioning the purpose of one's life, human life in general, or of the universe itself - and thus entering into the realm of Spirit, that which is beyond what can be known by the body, heart or even the mind. Here, **faith** - deep trust in something beyond our power or comprehension - is born and maintained. > >i7 seems to be unique to Modern Humans, and only about 50 thousand years old. It grants us wholly unique advantages and maladies - hope even in the direst circumstances, or despair in agreeable ones, all depending on what we believe in. It is this intelligence and the [[Drive 7 - Meaning|drive it oversees]] that make truly recognizable humans, with our need to know the significance of this great big play, never finally satisfied even by gluttonies of food, love, or knowledge. > >Crucial to note is that since the rise of Modernity and exaggerated by Postmodernity, i7 has gone from arguably being the most respected intelligence in culture to one of the least. It has been having a resurgence in its own subculture however, starting with the New Age in the 60s and exploding recently due to the platforming of its diverse advocates on the internet and social media. Now, in the apocalyptic times of the Meta-Crisis, i7 is coming back in full force from the Trumpers to the Transhumanists, trying to provide stabilizing meaning amidst all the chaos. Welcome back, old friend. >[!tip]- A Note from the Author [I](app://obsidian.md/Ari%20Nazem) am i7 dominant and probably by a considerable margin. After 20 years of harnessing it for ends other than those that are native to it, and generally neglecting it in favor of the intelligences society likes today and thus helped me satisfy my [esteem drive](app://obsidian.md/Level%203%20-%20Status), for the last 4 years I have thrown myself into i7 fully, giving it total authority over the steering of my life's ship. > > So with that in mind, take this as a heads up that this page is infused with more of my personal experience than most others, which of course are also filtered though my lenes, but may come from observation of others instead of personal experience. To that end, it may be more accurate in terms of understanding the intelligence from an embodied perspective, but also more specific to its manifestation in me, which is undoubtedly influenced by all my other parts. > Thank you for being here and I hope you enjoy! # Overview | Ancestor Species | [[7 - Modern Humans\|Modern Human]] | | ------------------------ | ----------------------------------- | | **Emerged in Evolution** | ~50 Thousand Years Ago | | **Associated Location** | [[7 · ⚪️ · Crown]] | | **Alternative Names** | Meaning, Significance, Purpose, Why | # Often Seen In - Religious leaders - Priests / priestesses - Pastors, preachers - Rabbis - Mullahs - Gurus / lamas - Swamis - Spiritual guides - Philosophers - Shamans - Witches - Mystics - Monks - Prophets - Visionaries - Rebels with a cause, revolutionaries - Movement starters / organizers - Activists - People in deep subcultures - Theologians - Mythologists - Life coaches - Depth psychologists - Psychics - Dream analysts - Psychoanalysts - Meditators looking for insight - Storytellers, fable makers - Evangelists, missionaries - Artists with messages - Cult leaders - Hippies, new age people - Logo / branding designers # High i7 Strengths - Strong inner intuition that guides decisions and actions - Receiving signs or messages from beyond the intellect - Intuition for the significance or symbolism of things: words, colors, images, dreams etc - Powerful curiosity and stamina for asking why, and following it down to the bottom - Sees associations and symmetry between systems of varied scale or substrate - When seeing something at one scale or instance, also sees its ramifications or symmetry across other scales and instances - For example, seeing a physiological disease in the body generates at the same time the idea that a symmetric malady could manifest in the psyche, i.e. physical cancer and psychological addiction (a part dominating the whole at the expense of the organism) - Deep trust stemming from seeing all events as having a reason, even if not understood now - This can also be called faith, or a strongly held belief in the fundamental goodness and justice of the universe, resulting in hope, motivation, and reassurance even when times are rough. Anti-nihilism. - Naturally feeling a profound connection with others, nature, and the universe - Able to recover quickly or weather deep adversity through faith - Openness to and higher incidence of synchronicity, coincidence, and luck - High incidence of, receptivity to, ability to handle, and knack for experiencing and interpreting mystical experiences and alerted states of all kinds - dreams, trance states, flow, psychedelic experiences, etc - Consistently feeling gratitude for and noticing life’s wonders and gifts - Seeing the interconnectedness of all things - Humility in recognizing one's interdependence with all life, the planet, the sun, the universe - Feeling awe-inspiringly dwarfed by the majesty of all that is - Appreciation for the mystery of life - able to accept some things as beyond human understanding or reason - able to accept some things as being beyond our control - Comfort holding paradox (two opposing perspectives being true at once) - Respect for polarity, seeing how all things are only possible in relation to their opposite - Often leads to respecting the value of pain, darkness, negativity, loss, uncertainty, etc - Ability to see archetypical dynamics, making accurate predictions of future events - Most personality structures and life events are instances of deeper archetypical patterns. i7 has a strong intuition for these personality, relationship and situational archetypes, allowing it to quickly see the trajectories of scenarios (or "see the future" in more mystical terms) and advise or act accordingly. - Can uphold values even when mind, heart, and body have lost interest or willingness - Ability to help others see the big picture, appreciate hidden lessons, and restore faith - Feeling (and in some cases seeing) the fields / energies / auras of people, places and things - Heightened receptivity to spiritual teachings, and the increased impact of smaller quantities of spiritual instruction and guidance - Often people with high i7 can have their entire life changed by exposure to a single quote, mantra, concept, symbol, image, vision, dream, or event. # High i7 Weaknesses - Reading into every little thing as being very important, to the point of confusion - Taking things very seriously, needing everything to have a meaning, a hidden lesson - The archetype of the Fool is a healing salve for this. Not everything has to make sense! - Being overly trusting, faithful, idealistic, optimistic, sometimes without evidence to support it, which can lead to disappointment - Trusting things will work out, while shirking one's own responsibility to make it happen or even just make it more probable - God can't find you a wife if you never go outside; The winds of Luck can't help you if your sail is closed; Manifesting doesn't work unless you do. - Due to seeing archetypical trajectories, can feel like something negative that could happen in the future is all but confirmed and is essentially happening in the present - i.e. racking paranoia - Dissatisfaction with everyday worldly experience, detaching from it, seeking the "more real" spirit world - Seeking more guidance before having put what was already learned in practice - or, the addiction to revelation - Susceptibility to the [Pre/Trans Fallacy](https://integrallife.com/pre-trans-fallacy/) - the confusion of pre-rational (childlike) experiences with trans-rational (awakened) ones, easily confused by the fact both are not rational - Becoming detached from, misunderstood by, and unintelligible to the dominant culture of the modern world and its people - including friends and family - Constant contact with one's own shadow and that of others, which can be very draining - another way to say shadow is unhealthy unconscious patterns, something a strong i7 can easily see - Getting lost in spiritual concerns over practical necessities of life, short patience for the mundane, struggling to stay grounded in material reality - Seeking the perfect, archetypical ideal and resisting the messiness of reality - Difficulty relating to those with different belief systems - Imposing one's spiritual journey or insights on others who don't resonate with them - Overall depression, grief, horror at the current state of the world - And many, many more! # Low i7 Weaknesses - Sees the universe (animals, plants, ecosystems, the planet) as dead and thus as simply a resource to be exploited - Tends to believe we are the body and thus engages in dopamine maxxing over accumulating good karma - Overemphasis on material things, bodily sensation and appearance - Lacking inner intuition to guide decisions and actions - Rarely receiving signs or messages beyond the intellect - Difficulty grasping the significance or symbolism of words, colors, images, dreams, etc. - Low curiosity and stamina for asking why, accepting surface level answers or purely tangible or mechanistic explanations - Struggling to see ramifications and symmetry between different scales, systems, and instances - Nihilism, or lacking deep trust in the fundamental goodness and justice of the universe - Feeling disconnected from others, nature, and the cosmos - Difficulty recovering from or processing strong adversity or unexplainable loss - Difficulty metabolizing surprise or spontaneity - Closed off to synchronicity, coincidence, and luck - Low receptivity to the power of dreams, mystical experiences, altered states - Rarely feeling gratitude for life’s wonders and gifts - Reductionism, struggling to see the interconnectedness of all things - Anthropocentrism, lacking humility in recognizing interdependence with all life - Struggling to appreciate life's inherent mystery, needing everything to be logically understood - Difficulty holding paradox, needing clear, singular perspectives - Viewing pain and darkness as purely negative - Difficulty seeing archetypical dynamics and trajectories - Struggling to uphold values when mind, heart, and body lose interest or willingness # Commonly Confused With ### Confusion with i2, Aesthetic Intelligence In many cases, out of the other intelligences [[i2 - Aesthetic Intelligence|i2]] can be confused with, i7 may actually be the most common. Both i2 and i7 have strong preferences and ideas about how things should be aligned, placed, curated etc. For both intelligences, aesthetic objects are not simply themselves, but radiate out extra information that influences one's behavior towards / with it. However in the case of i2, this radiation off the aesthetic object (a taste, a sound, an image) is a sense of its attractiveness or lack thereof, in the case of i7, its deeper significance or meaning. So, let's say I ([[Ari Nazem|Ari]]) am wearing my black faux fur winter coat. A friend of mine with high i2 may compliment me on its vibe and look. A friend of mine with high i7, on the other hand, may appreciate its a visual representation of [[The Dark Mother|Dark Mama]] given its wild and animal motif mixed with darkness. Both will have opinions on it, but from different places. Another example is with logos. A high i7 person may make a logo based on its symbolism, the motifs in it that resonate with other ideas, whereas someone with high i2 might make one that just looks good first and foremost, with less baked in meaning. ### Confusion with i4, Emotional Intelligence High stacking or development of both i7 and [[i4 - Emotional Intelligence|i4]] often result in valuing compassion, service, and surrender to a higher order than one's own needs. Both of them are also often interested in the concept of ethics, or right action. However, the generator function of i7 is to find what is finally True in the cosmos, and thus what it all means. i7 wants to know what type of story this universe is, what type of game is being played here[^2], and how to be its hero or winner respectively. i7's ethics comes downstream from that view, and can sometimes differ greatly from what humans intuitively desire, like love, having children, community, etc (like in the case of becoming a monk). The generator function of i4 on the other hand is concerned with human beings and their emotions, and its ethics flows downstream from that. Isolating oneself in a cave for years in silence for some spiritual purpose flies in the face of what i4 values, which is intimacy, closeness, and vulnerability with other humans. So i4 ethics often look very similar across human cultures and time, whereas i7 ethics can look drastically different, and many of them historically have downplayed inter-human love as secondary to love of the divine, and potentially even being a slippery slope to sin. ### Confusion with i6, Abstract Intelligence Both i7 and [[i6 - Abstract Intelligence|i6]] deal with abstract or intangible ideas. The respective realties they are sensitive to are both immaterial, and both are only loosely related to the 5 senses (body) and emotional system (heart). Both take place within the internal world, and can go relatively unseen when actively being exercised - besides the assessment that "they're thinking" in the case of i6, or "they're seeing / being told / experiencing something" in the case of i7. The contents of the thoughts and the messages received are invisible to those on the outside, in stark contrast to say, [[i1 - Kinesthetic Intelligence|i1]] or [[i5 - Expressive Intelligence|i5]] which are almost entirely externally visible. However, the immaterial things they are sensitive to are entirely distinct. i6 does not see what things *mean* (or their "value"), instead seeing their mechanism, their patterns, how they *work.* The meaning for i6 *is the mechanism*, that is what the thing is *doing*, which it sees as a sufficient answer to the thing's purpose. What is the meaning of math? What is the value of a parabola? These are questions for i7, not i6. However, i6 has its own answers to these questions, of course. Maybe: "Because they help us solve problems, predict behaviors, and build technology that improves our lives." i7 shoots back, "Sure, but why is that Good? Why is that inherently meaningful, or worthy?" So drops "Hume's guillotine": the perennial [Is / Ought distinction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem). Science - an i6 method of knowing - can say what "is," but cannot extrapolate that into what "should be," a question for i7. i7 sees patterns too, but these are patterns of value, of importance, or significance[^1], not technical mechanism. i7 is almost rudely uninterested with the *how* of what is going on, and is instead thirsty for the *why.* When an event occurs, i7 wants to know its meaning, not its functional cause. A bird's call, a striking image, an odd coincidence or repeating pattern are all seen as signs to be spiritually interpreted, instead of events to be objectively understood. Even so, while distinct, these intelligences can be found together in a powerful combination that is unmistakable at high levels of potency. Deep probing into the meaning of the universe, with rigorous logic and intellect piecing it together into neat systems. These people often lead the great transitions between the stages of cultural evolution by mapping out with rigor and clarity the emerging worldview. Famous i6 x i7 combos are people like Plato, St. Augustine, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Derrida, and [[Ken Wilber|Wilber]]. # Archetype Resonances Coming soon! # Coda, or, Wake Up, Little One! While writing this page, a quote I love came to mind. It says "It is impossible to be an atheist when living in a forest." Upon remembering it, a reflection came through, which I initially placed at the end of the page as a coda. Now, you can find it here: [[i7 Coda - Wake Up, Little One!]]