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Welcome!

Welcome to my thoughtstream on the topic of creative change. I appreciate your visit and hope you’ll stay a while.

Tracts of Revolution explores the dynamics of human creativity as it swirls in our cells, pulses through our bodies, connects us to each other, and constructs the magnificent panoply of world cultures. You will find two distinct currents to this thoughtstream that may interest you.

“Conversations” are blog posts reflecting on the creative works of authors and artists of our present day and recent past. These creators communicated their visions of reality and the human future through words and other art-forms, partly to share them with the rest of us, but also because they finally couldn’t resist the force that seized and inspired them. I name that force “the creative spirit,” and am convinced that it inhabits all of us – while only a relatively few of us are courageous (or foolhardy) enough to “go with the flow.”

I have a lot to say about spirituality and religion, but this shouldn’t lead to the conclusion that I consider the creative spirit especially religious or “spiritual” in a more narrowly religious sense. The authors I bring into conversation are both religious and nonreligious, believers and atheists, metaphysically-minded psychonauts and down-to-earth humanists. In my opinion, it doesn’t matter what ideological camp you inhabit, what country you call home, what language you speak, which way you’re oriented, or whether you are charming or abrasive. You and I are creators, and it’s time we take responsibility for this incredible power with which the universe has endowed our species.

For a more practical and therapeutic approach to creativity, check out my blog Braintracts. Over the past 30+ years I have developed a life-change program that helps individuals take creative control of their lives and step more intentionally into the worlds they really want to inhabit. This approach is brain-based and solution-focused, pulling from the current research of neuroscience and the best practices in human empowerment (counseling and coaching).

The Medieval art/science of metallurgy investigated the molecular secrets of changing natural ores into metals and other alloys. The process was mysterious and the research traditions of those early scientists often took on the shroud of an almost gnostic mysticism. Mentallurgy is my attempt to remove the shroud of secrecy from the question of how the power of attention is transformed into the attitudes, beliefs, moods and drives behind human behavior. If you don’t particularly like the world you presently inhabit, then create a different one! Mentallurgy can show you how. Click over to www.braintracts.wordpress.com

Back on the Way

Ever feel anxious? How about lonely? Depressed? Have you been there before?

Maybe you’re there now.

It may bring a bit of relief to learn that anxiety, loneliness, and depression have been the dark shadow of human consciousness for thousands of years.

You’re not the first, and you’re not alone.

As human consciousness evolved, the emerging challenges and opportunities of a complex social environment generated the pressure to adapt by forming a recurrent loop of self-conscious awareness (ego) in the individual.

Now, in addition to perceiving one’s environment and reacting to it, this new egocentric vantage-point awakened a capacity for standing apart from others and everything else, seeing oneself through the eyes of others, and accessing one’s own inner (subjective) experience.

Game changer.

From the position of what psychology calls ego strength, referring to a well-centered, emotionally balanced, and neurotically stable personality, consciousness is free to flow along three distinct channels.

  • A psychosocial (“self-other”) channel leading outward to the stage of interpersonal relationships and social life.
  • A psychosomatic (“mind-body”) channel leading inward to the grounding mystery of consciousness itself.
  • A psychospiritual (“soul-spirit”) channel leading upward into transcendent experiences of higher wholeness, belonging, and inclusion.

Storyline A

Immediately when you were born you were welcomed by a provident community of caretakers and other admirers who made sure that your needs for safety, nourishment, protection, and love were adequately met. Over time as these bonds of healthy attachment were strengthened, your trust, regard, and appreciation of others in your life developed a natural intelligence along with the skills for social connection and interpersonal intimacy.

Today, this psychosocial (self-other) channel of consciousness keeps you engaged in relationships and invested in those with whom you feel safe.

Connection and love are essential needs of every human being, and without them (or enough of them) you feel disconnected, isolated, unloved, and lonely. Thankfully, in your case these needs were adequately met, resulting in the cultivated abilities of social bonding, establishing trust, building rapport, negotiating differences, resolving conflict, reaching compromise, and contributing your gifts for mutual benefit.

As a provident early environment nurtured your psychosocial intelligence and equipped you with the skills for cultivating connection and love, something else was going on deeper inside you. A psychosomatic (mind-body) channel was reading and reacting to those positive conditions by calibrating your nervous system to an adaptive internal state.

Held and surrounded by what you needed, a default resting state of calm composure was set as the default link between your temperament and environment.

Psychosomatic science confirms just how deeply involved consciousness (mind, psyche) is with the vitality and functional health of the body (soma).

Feelings (body) and thoughts (mind), states (body) and stories (mind), moods (body) and myths (mind) form an inseparable braid of intelligence that can be cultivated for essential wellbeing.

With a clear psychosomatic channel established, consciousness is able to release and descend to a stillness within for grounding and peace. This inner surrender to the grounding mystery of being is the original meaning of faith – before some religions got tangled in the web of belief, turning faith into the acceptance of orthodox doctrines and belief in the existence of god.

Still in most traditions and practices of contemplative spirituality, the goal of meditation is to empty out into the grounding mystery of boundless presence and inner peace.

The (psychosomatic) upflow of consciousness from this inner wellspring and outward to the (psychosocial) field of relationships and the social stage, continues along a psychospiritual (soul-spirit) channel that empowers a leap beyond the merely personal to a higher wholeness of transpersonal fellowship and unity.

Transcendence is about “going beyond” the anchors, boundaries, and horizons of personal identity and its managed world. Breaking through its cocoon of personality and meaning, consciousness takes wing into higher dimensions of participation, belonging, and community. Now, elevated and standing outside but still containing your ego (the psychospiritual definition of ecstasy), consciousness joins the consilient harmony of individual voices in a communal Ode to Joy.

Storyline B

Immediately when you were born, you awoke to a Reality that wasn’t responsive to your needs. For whatever reason, your taller powers and family of origin were not able or just didn’t give much attention to your cries for safety, nourishment, protection and love. As this went on, the normal and necessary bonding of attachment, trust, and affection was not adequately facilitated, and consequently you were deprived of the opportunity to develop your natural intelligence and skills for social connection and interpersonal intimacy.

To compensate for an improvident Reality, your attachment became more neurotic and desperate, unable to let go for fear of being abandoned. Under such compulsive demands, however, no amount of attention and assurances were enough to convince you to relax your grip and just trust the process.

Internally, you were in a chronic state of anxiety. Not having the safety and support of healthy bonds to satisfy your psychosocial need for connection and love, your nervous system didn’t make the body a calm and restful place.

You can understand how some religious and ascetical traditions might regard the body as a prison of the soul, characterizing salvation in terms of mortifying (suppressing and killing) its desires and gaining final escape for the soul from the body’s coiling tension.

Many forms of suffering and illness are the symptom and effect of an impeded psychosomatic channel, where the mind (psyche) has dissociated from the body (soma) and regards it as hostile territory. A lack of grounding and inner peace drives neurotic attachment in your relationships, as you expect and demand that others make you feel secure – or at least less insecure.

Your irrational and unrealistic expectations, however, are only a setup for further disappointment, renewed ultimatums, and a growing resentment. Just as you can’t let go (release) inwardly, you find it impossible to let go (forgive) the inevitable failures of others to deliver on your demands.

Feeling chronically anxious and episodically lonely, what is happening on the psychospiritual channel of consciousness? Actually there is little to no supply left for the higher wholeness beyond yourself, for the unity of life and community of persons that promise the joy of belonging to something greater.

Instead of joy, you feel depressed – “pressed down” into a hole of melancholy, hopelessness, and despair. Instead of ecstasy, you feel stuck in the muck.

If you find yourself in Storyline B, the good news is that you have finally found yourself!

The journey ahead invites you to get grounded and stay centered, then reach out to make connections that will inspire and support a leap beyond yourself into the harmony and higher wholeness that have held you all along.

Politics in a New Key

The wisdom teachers of history have been right all along: We can’t solve our most persistent problems or gain liberation from suffering as long as we stay in the same frame of mind that generated our trouble in the first place.

That frame of mind, the teachers tell us, perceives Reality through the lens of cómponence – my word, not theirs. It’s actually a neologism (a “new word”), as far as I can tell. The accent on the first syllable is intended to distinguish it in speech from the plural of “component,” referring to a part or piece in some larger array of parts.

As a noun, cómponence describes reality in terms of what it’s made of – the countless components that sit and swirl about, colliding or skirting each other on their various trajectories through space-time.

Western science has made cómponence the central dogma of its theoretical paradigm. Each thing, whether atom, organism, planet, or galaxy, is a part of some larger organization of similar things, all coexisting in a system. But also, each thing is itself a system or conglomeration of smaller things. The cosmos can conceivably be analyzed into smaller and smaller units, right down to those quirky quarks deep inside the atom. Keep splitting things apart and you’ll find more things inside.

This culturally conditioned habit of perceiving Reality exclusively through the lens of cómponence is where our problems and suffering really lie, according to the wisdom teachers.

My diagram situates the cómponent realm within a larger frame that will help us gain liberation from many of its traps and troubles. Let’s keep our attention on this “middle realm” for a bit longer, using politics as our filter on the lens. American politics happens to be highly polarized at the moment, with Republicans and Democrats – but currently more on the Republican side – seeking to uproot and destroy their political opponents.

The very concept of an “opponent” only has meaning inside a theoretical paradigm of cómponence.

Here we have two (or more) things standing apart from each other, a Republican and a Democrat, each centered in an identity claiming “for” some things and “against” others. Yes, each of them can be analyzed in terms of class, gender, age, character, personality, temperament, race, biology, chemistry, and physics – the many components they contain and what science might invoke to explain what kinds of things they are.

Once upon a time, “Republican” and “Democrat” were understood as two opposing identities that represented two distinct political philosophies, two distinct sets of beliefs and values concerning how a free society should be governed. Their opposition was enjoined in the spirit of debate, negotiation, and compromise for the good of the commonwealth and “a more perfect union” – not a zero-sum combat for unilateral defeat and annihilation, as what it has devolved into lately.

When our minds are locked into cómponence, the competition between Republicans and Democrats can occlude our vision of their possible cooperation, even though cooperation among separate identities is perfectly aligned with the worldview of cómponence.

More realistically, that’s likely what the founders of American democracy had in mind to begin with: a productive competition of opposing views and values, on a political playing field governed by the rules of cooperation.

Just as with American politics, the oppositional dynamic in cómponence can quickly devolve into a campaign of mutual annihilation. This is partly because the separate identities involved are themselves somewhat unstable constellations of personality components. Each Republican or Democrat is in some degree motivated out of insecurity, craving, ambition, conviction and ignórance (willful ignorance) to defend and gain a win for their position.

Beating the other and driving them off-stage – preferably into extinction, since it would make things easier going forward – quickly becomes their raison d’être (reason for being).

The wisdom teachers would not necessarily argue that cómponence – or in terms more consistent with their message, the realm of separation and duality – is bad or wrong, or even that it’s an illusion, although a few traditions take that tack. At the very least they would assert that cómponence is not an exhaustive account of Reality.

For one thing, there is at the root of all things something that is no thing. Variously named No Thing or nothingness, the grounding mystery of Being or being-itself, this is the principle of essence – again, not a thing but the power of being (Greek esse) in all things. Out of its mystery, Being differentiates into beings to become the cómponent realm of “ten thousand things” (as the ancient Chinese wisdom tradition speaks of it).

Everything in existence is the manifestation of this essence, which is something Western science also confirms, although its commitment to the theoretical paradigm of cómponence has historically prevented it from crossing the threshold into what can’t be named or known.

Quantum physics has intrigued and confounded us with its paradoxes of particles and waves, forms and fields, complementarity and uncertainty, “something” which is no thing that is somehow the ground of all things. Nonetheless, science being science, it cannot restrain the compulsion to dig deeper into this ground in search of more things inside.

This addition of essence to the objective realm of cómponence is still not yet a comprehensive account of Reality, according to the wisdom teachings. Seeing our Republican and Democrat each as a manifestation of a grounding mystery that lies deep within, and far below, the identities they obsess over confirms that at some level they are not really separate – or even all that different.

Behind their party masks and political uniforms, they are both human manifestations of Being.

But we need to see them both as participating in something greater as well – not merely something larger (a scale of cómponence), but a higher wholeness that includes them in its More. We’re talking about the 1+1=3 dynamic of consilience, the exponential process of two or more things becoming One, where the case change indicates a leap to a higher order of communion and complexity.

Our concepts of “community” and “universe” carry this notion of consilience that inexplicably transforms the many into One. The many on their own spontaneously come together as One.

As human beings possessed of spiritual intelligence, it’s almost certain that the founders of American democracy had this consilient idea of higher wholeness in the back of their minds as they envisioned “a more perfect union.” A healthy democracy thrives on the diversity of its citizens, including their energetic debates over how best to co-create and manage a nation that can include everyone.

Figuring It Out

More than any other time in human history, we are obsessed with personal identity. This isn’t to suggest that people in earlier times were ignorant or indifferent to it. Research into human psychological development strongly suggests that identity formation is universal.

We all go through it. Quite a few of us, however, don’t get through it – that is to say, for whatever reason, we get stuck on the way.

Our current Age of Identity and its thematic obsessions has its epicenter in the generation of late Millennials (Gen Y) and Gen Z, born between 1990 and 2010. A larger percentage of this generational cohort seem to struggle more deeply and dramatically with questions of who they are. For any number of reasons, many of them seem caught in a squeezing spiral of neurotic energy, a kind of whirlpool threatening to pull them down into the Abyss.

While this generation exemplifies the suffering of identity confusion, it also serves as a case study for helping us better understand the dynamics in play for all of us on the way to becoming somebody special.

My diagram situates identity within a system of dimensions and developmental achievements that provide context for our exploration. In the middle of everything sits the separate center of self-conscious personal identity – the ego, although it’s not labeled.

The “I” (Latin ego) is the actor who, looking outward to our social situation, inhabits and performs the various Roles that identify us to others and give us a place on the interpersonal performance Stage. When it goes well, we enjoy a sense of belonging to something that matters.

The actor-ego can also look inward, where our Soul rests in quiet solitude with the body. Unlike the immortal prisoner-soul of some religions, here it simply refers to the animate consciousness which imbues the body’s physical structure with present awareness. This deep communion of body and soul invites ego to release from its effortful management of identity and relax into being, surrendering to the Ground or grounding mystery of existence.

When development goes reasonably well, identity can thus look both outward and inward: outward through Role to the Stage in its quest for belonging; inward through Soul to the Ground in its quest for communion.

For quite a few of us, however, development doesn’t go so well. Again, for whatever reason, these individuals are stuck in a closing spiral and unable to either connect outwardly for a sense of social belonging, or release inwardly for a sense of spiritual communion. Identity for them is a trap they can’t seem to escape, rather than a means or vehicle for the higher (belonging) and deeper (communion) experiences that all centered persons seek.

As captives of identity, dissociated from others on the social Stage and estranged from their own inner Ground, existence becomes an exercise in defining themselves, perhaps medically or surgically redefining themselves, until they can feel centered in who they are. Identity is deconstructed and reengineered in pursuit of the self-recognition they need.

Their obsession over identity spins them around a center that is not a true center but a drain pulling them deeper into anxiety, frustration, exhaustion, and finally depression.

Along the vertical axis of my diagram are arranged the critical achievements in healthy identity formation. At the midpoint of this vertical axis is identity itself, where the personality eventually achieves ego strength – the position of stability from whence the individual can engage outwardly and release inwardly.

The full set of developmental achievements should be read “organically,” as charting the growth of a healthy human personality from deep in the Ground to its place out on the Stage.

When we are infants and young children, the pressing need of our animal nature is to feel safe. As our taller powers provide us with protection, warmth, and nourishment, our nervous system is calibrated to a state of calm and open assurance. By their mediation, we come to know Reality as provident and responsive to our needs.

This internal state of composure and existential faith is called security, and it serves as the foundation for everything to come.

A calm and composed nervous system will provide a clear path later on, when ego is ready to make its descent into communion. The inner self of the Soul is one with the body, whose calm composure offers a kind of latticework of rhythms that cradle awareness through its release from self-conscious reverie in identity and deeper into the grounding mystery of being.

Security is this deep anchor and clear channel of present awareness.

Because our inner security is fostered in close bonds with our caregivers, it very naturally evolves into spontaneous responses of empathy, trust, affection and sympathy, together known as intimacy. The “feeling-with” of sympathy, the Greek equivalent of our Latin compassion, is a social sensitivity with roots in empathy, referring to our capacity for understanding the needs, feelings, and expressions of others from the reference of our own human experience (literally feeling-in).

We spontaneously reach out to help or comfort another because we know what it feels like to be in pain or lost, to lose something or someone we loved, or to feel alone and confused.

Security and intimacy are together the experiential foundation of identity. A centered sense of self can only find its center to begin with as we feel securely grounded within ourselves and intimately connected to another.

With ego strength and a centered identity, we can confidently move onto the Stage for the orientation we need to play our part. Whereas the Ground within is intrinsic to our essential nature as human beings, the Stage beyond is a key feature of a larger performance theater known as our world – the social construct of values, stories, traditions, institutions, and beliefs that serves as our context of meaning.

Those of us who are stuck and struggling to find ourselves are not helped through legislation that identifies and protects the rights of individuals caught in the sticky web of “intersectionality.” At the end of that path is only more confusion, isolation, and loneliness.

We need to work together in creating community where all of us can feel safe, loved, capable and worthy. Where everyone has a place and a valuable contribution to make.

Fate and Destiny

Some people argue that the human condition is determined by factors deep in our DNA, in mechanisms of survival, adaptation, and extinction embedded in the genetic code of our species. These biological determinists call us back from getting caught up in fantasies of human transformation and thinking we can break free from the bonds of Fate.

Those who say that temperament is Fate – temperament referring to the genetic inheritance of human biology – have neighbors across the halls of academia who add the co-determining factor of environment to the picture. They point out that genes are switched “on” or “off” in response to external conditions and events.

The temperament of individuals caught in chronically unsafe, inhospitable, or hostile circumstances will adapt by becoming more anxious, reactive, and vigilant. Genes and their host organisms don’t survive in a vacuum, but are constantly reading and reacting to their environments.

These neighboring theories are actually siblings in natural science, of the empirical approach to knowledge that resolves only to work with the reality outside our minds. Concepts, hypotheses, explanations, and prophecies – all constructions of mind – must either be drawn inductively from experimental observations or get down to the facts as quickly as possible to prevent drifting away into creative (i.e., idle) speculation.

Together, temperament and environment can be seen as the internal and external dimensions, respectively, of human Fate.

Using that term doesn’t mean that the factors on either side cannot be altered somewhat through various interventions. We’ve known we can alter the external environment for thousands of years now; culture itself is both the product and fallout. And very recently we have discovered how, if not yet to what extent, we can change the genetic instructions in our DNA and possibly reengineer human biology itself.

What most scientific accounts leave out of the picture are the very things that make the human adventure so interesting: our subjective experience as persons, our individually unique perspectives on reality, our universal need for security, belonging, orientation and significance, and the sense each of us has of a Mystery at the center of Everything – however dim and nearly forgotten.

Such interests and concerns were historically the province of spirituality, nurtured under the supportive guidance of religion for thousands of years.

The diagram above shows the axis of scientific dimensions, internal temperament and external environment, intersected by a second axis with its poles in things that don’t lend themselves to objective examination. An image of a bow-and-arrow suggests that the real dynamic of human transformation is to be found here.

Having identified the first axis with Fate, with factors that seem largely outside our control, I will associate this second axis of the bow-and-arrow dynamic with what in earlier ages was known as Destiny. This is more than just where things are “destined” to end up, which once again is what we typically mean by Fate.

Destiny has always had a more optimistic and hopeful ring to it than Fate.

If Fate is the way things are, Destiny is how things might go if they were to somehow transcend, break away, or be released – like an arrow from its bowstring – from the constraints of Fate.

Humans are the species of Destiny, one among many with the unique capacity of intelligence to look beyond the limitations of temperament and environment and imagine what isn’t here now, maybe never was, but one day might be.

This visionary talent has enabled us to create maps of optional futures, inventing the various genres of earthly utopias and apocalyptic dystopias, heavenly paradises and torture-chamber hells, solar explosions and cosmic winters, or just the winding-down of our own retirement, old age, and inevitable death – which can sound again more like the knell of Fate than the ring of Destiny.

The spiritual wisdom traditions used to be our imaginarium for contemplating these optional futures and a higher purpose of human existence. Their mythologies and guiding metaphors offered lenses into hidden dimensions, not in Reality so much as of our own mind, that placed us in contexts where our life, choices, and actions matter on some larger scale.

By spreading before us possible futures of apotheosis or apocalypse, fulfillment or collapse, salvation or catastrophe, an escape from time by a series of escalating cycles through progressive lifetimes or by a sudden “blink of an eye,” spirituality, through its mediator and mouthpiece of religion, enabled us to take in a bigger picture and longer view of life.

Historically the disciplines of morality, art, and philosophy (the “love of wisdom”) were first conceived in the fertile womb of religion.

Today, despite the fact that many religions have lost their roots to the mythopoetic imagination and are defending their myths as so much supernatural journalism (e.g., the biblical literalism in Christianity), humans are still possessed of this longing to see through the narrow channel of Fate, between their environmental conditions and temperamental dispositions, into a vision of how their beliefs, values, choices, and commitments – in short, their creative authority – are together the determining factor in human Destiny.

Let’s take a closer look at this dynamic axis of human Destiny, represented by the drawn string and poised arrow in the diagram above. A principal role and responsibility of religion, as already mentioned, was historically to cast a vision before its people, optional futures that depended to some extent on human beliefs, values, choices, and commitments.

In the sport of archery, the very notion of getting focused and taking aim assumes at least a fair chance of “missing the mark” entirely – a favored metaphor in religion (Greek hamartia) for falling short or flying wide of our Destiny, represented by the will and character of its mythological god, the imagined exemplar of what humans are meant to be and become.

Remove the target entirely and there is nothing to take aim at: no objective goal, directional path, consistent intention or longer purpose to guide and attract our human aspirations. Without a guiding myth, that is to say, humans are trapped in the narrow channel of Fate with a dead-end future.

This presence or absence of a guiding myth which unfurls a bigger picture and longer view of life where human freedom matters has major consequences for the shaping of character, referring to the enduring habits of belief, attitude, and behavior that develop through repetition over time.

According to this definition, a newborn has no character to start with, but gradually constructs one by repeating and thereby reinforcing a characteristic, self-consistent, and increasingly predictable way of engaging with Reality – what is also called a “way of life.”

Character is a “third force” that many determinists leave out of their diagnoses of the human condition. Are we determined by genetics and nature, or by environment and nurture? The consensus has been both to some degree. But there is this other determinant: the force of character that draws back the string of desire, longing, and aspiration, with an intention of launching us into the future – actualizing its picture into reality.

Obviously, if there is nothing very attractive or compelling up ahead, so far as we can see, our habits of character will get oriented to a rather pointless existence, forming beliefs that nothing ultimately matters, attitudes that are dark and despairing, issuing in behaviors more reactive, desultory, and careless as time goes on.

What’s the remedy to this depressing account of our human condition? A new guiding myth, a bigger picture, and a longer view that draws desire deeper into our human potential, aiming our aspirations in the direction of what we still have in us to become and achieve.

The interesting thing about this co-determinant of human character is its instantaneous and adaptive responsiveness to whatever optional future we entertain in our mind and energize by our choices, in each apparently minor moment of every day.

We tend to become the persons and get the worlds we imagine. Our time is ripe for a New Philosophy of Life.

A New Look at Religion

I’ve said it many times in this blog: Religion is not the problem; bad religion is the problem. Religion that has gotten locked up in itself is the problem. Religion that has lost its roots and lifeline to the Source and Mystery whose discovery had sparked a vision and launched a movement perhaps centuries ago – that’s the problem.

In this post we will trace this lifeline of religion as if it never lost its way.

For obvious reasons, we won’t be taking any of the existing religions for our subject, but religion itself: the response and manifestation of that primordial experience of Mystery.

Every actual religion falls off-center from time to time, and some have faltered far afield from the wellspring of their original discovery, becoming dry, brittle, and lifeless – and then may come a renaissance as the almost hollow and rotten thing finds new roots. Because every existing religion has such a complicated history and some have just died away, we will follow the trajectory of religion according to its design intention.

If the design intention of an apple tree is to flourish and produce apples, then what is the developmental aim of religion as such?

You might protest that I am engaging in fantasy, for a religion that is healthy, flourishing, and productive just doesn’t exist – and never has existed. At some point they all get mired in dogmatic convictions and perfunctory traditions, killing the faith and spiritual intelligence of their people. A few hostages find the courage to get out – by increasing numbers these days.

That’s the inevitable fate of every religion (in your opinion), so it’s a waste of time imagining how things could go differently.

I guess all I can do is ask you to suspend judgment for now and hear me out. Just as you wouldn’t toss aside the methodology of science because of some “bad apples” who play at science but not in a sincere or serious manner, I think we should refrain from dismissing religion itself on the basis of a few (or numerous) pathological examples we can find.

And I agree with you: they are all around us.

What I want to explore is a kind of methodology of religion, a more general theory and practice for proceeding on the road to fulfilling its intrinsic purpose. The aim and purpose of religion – let me just put it out here right up front – is fourfold:

  1. To focus and ground us individually in the Present Mystery of Reality;
  2. To center and connect us to one another in moral community;
  3. To situate and orient our community in the larger context of time and space; and
  4. To inspire and guide our progress toward human fulfillment, awakening each of us to the possibilities of our true nature.

You’ll notice that this methodological framework of religion does not specify what members should believe, how they become members, or the process by which an individual advances through the various stages of faith and membership.

True to the etymology of the Latin term religare, religion serves to link our self-conscious center of identity (the ego) back to its Ground, to our Community, to the Cosmos, and to the human Ideal.

My diagram depicts three distinct religions, each its own color and with its own unique history, customs, and beliefs. The boundary of each religion defines it, separates it from the surrounding field, but is also where that religion engages with the world in attitudes ranging from outreach and welcome, superiority and suspicion, renunciation and exclusion, even – when the religion has completely lost its soul and spiritual compass – to persecution and violence against nonbelievers.

The differences among these religions were not intended in the beginning to separate them from each other, but are rather products and symptoms of special conditions that developed in response to, and in the creative effort to make meaning of, an originary experience at the spiritual wellspring. Each religion’s doctrinal (belief) system and devotional (worship) practices are also relatively unique for this reason.

Even today, the inherited myths, shared rituals, core beliefs, and guiding vision of each religion provide the conditions for a present breakthrough in awareness to that same timeless realization.

Let’s name the field represented by each bounded community and tradition of faith its zone of genetic integrity. Truth in this zone has to do with the authentic witness a religion offers to its originary experience. Not whether its myths are factual accounts or its god is objectively real, but the degree in which the religion provides a clear channel to that experience and links an individual ego to those four dimensions of ultimate concern: Ground, Community, Cosmos, and Ideal.

So far, perhaps, I have begun to reconstitute a respectable definition of religion that even skeptics and atheists might accept.

But now we need to shift our attention from the local zone of genetic integrity, to a vertical axis that leads to the Ground of Being in one direction (within, downward, and deep), and in the other direction (around, upward, and beyond) to the Global Commons where all religions must learn to coexist and cooperate in the one world they inhabit together.

We’ll name the descending line of each religion, illustrated in my diagram as a spiral staircase, its mystical path. The spiral design corresponds to a proven truth, that the deeper insights and experiences in religion are cultivated through such disciplined (repeated, even ritualized) practices as meditation, mindfulness, and contemplative prayer.

In contemplative prayer, a practitioner or devotee might begin (top of the spiral staircase) in what is conceptualized as a “conversation with god.” As they descend deeper into the practice, however, this “I-Thou” polarity dissolves into a Present Mystery below the range of concepts, thoughts, and thinker alike.

This deeper realization is often conceptualized in terms of “communion with God,” where the case change indicates a breakthrough from thinking about god (the literal definition of theology) to an experience of God, beyond name and form.

Every religion must carefully protect and “religiously” perfect its tools and practices of mystical descent to the Ground of Being within, in order to preserve a clear path to the spiritual wellspring of Mystery. As a consequence of getting fixated on secondary and tertiary concerns like ranks, roles, and rules, leaders and devotees can lose sight of the center altogether, and thereby forget their point of entry to the Ground of Being within.

Returning to the zone of genetic integrity and now moving outward from the center to its threshold boundary, also brings us up the central axis and into the Global Commons where religion engages with the larger world. This ascending line is religion’s ethical path, leading through the disciplines of constructive dialogue and creative visioneering, where it participates with other religions and global stakeholders in the Great Work of a “global ethic” (cf. the important initiatives of Hans Küng).

This global ethic is based on the shared values of covenant fidelity, universal compassion, unconditional forgiveness, and absolute devotion in service to human liberation and planetary wellbeing. (See my posts The Progress of Wisdom and Curriculum Spiritus for a deeper exploration of these four principles.)

These days especially, the truth of religion is a measure of how involved and committed it is to this Great Work of an ethically enlightened global community. If the relative isolation of religions, once upon a time, allowed them to focus on concerns internal to the zone of genetic integrity, today such ignórance (willful ignorance) is no longer sustainable.

Despite all its bad examples, a strong argument can be made – I’ve endeavored to put in place the framework of such an argument here – for seeing religion as a key (even the key) to a brighter future for all of us.

We need to be linked back to the ultimate concerns of being human, here and now, if we are to have a future at all.

Human Wellbeing

Some of us are obsessed with our health, others with success, and most are actively chasing happiness. But who among us are intentionally cultivating wellbeing? Or is that term just a synonym for one of the others – maybe the fusion of all three?

Maybe we’re stuck in confusion.

If not confused, then we might actually be fragmented – not mixed up but pulled to pieces, dismembered, in all the different directions that postmodern life demands. Looking around ourselves at the current state of society, it sure seems that division is a driving factor. West against East, Red against Blue, White against Black, rich against poor, “natives” against immigrants.

When these divisions become rigid and walled-off from each other, conflict and calamity are sure to follow. It’s only a matter of time.

Before we get to work building gates in our walls or breaking them down, however, Wisdom would have us first heal the divisions within ourselves as persons.

Healing divisions is not a matter of opening borders or building bridges that might facilitate the blending or smoothing-away of differences. A lasting solution will not involve snipping the tension generated between the opposite poles, or eliminating the poles themselves. Instead, we have to learn how to cultivate harmony by balancing the tension and seeking wholeness.

The set of insights, practices, and disciplines that enable us to find and manage this balance are the secret to human wellbeing. Beyond health, success, and even happiness, wellbeing refers to the condition of being well, or, deeper into the etymology of that word, being whole.

But what does it mean to be whole?

Why don’t we start walking into this question and see where it takes us? The illustration above will serve as a mandala of sorts. At the center of the entire system is the taijitu of Taoism with its swirling balance of Yin and Yang, the archetypal polar principles that push and pull, dance and spin into existence the realm of Ten Thousand Things – the ancient Chinese name for our Universe.

Our interest here will be to understand the internal tensions that must be balanced and brought into harmony for personal and human wellbeing, which in turn is foundational to the health, success, and happiness we seek.

My diagram will function as a map of the distinct centers and strands of consciousness that comprise the essential nature of a human being. The wildcard factor of ego is not explicitly pictured, but sits on the center of Will. The willful ego is what makes each of us unique and has the effect of either amplifying our (self-conscious) sense of wellbeing, or else throwing the whole system into confusion, conflict, and neurotic suffering.

Chasing after, latching on, and gripping down on what we expect to make us happy is, in Buddhism, the tanha (craving) that leads to dukkha (suffering).

Let’s begin, then, with the centers and strands of consciousness that lie closest to the taijitu symbol in the middle. On the vertical axis we see the centers named Body and Will, which co-anchor the strands of urgency and purpose.

The Body is itself a complex system of networks, tissues, organs, glands, cells and molecules which facilitate the countless urgencies that generate and sustain its lifeforce. In this context, urgency does not equate to emergency, but refers rather to the “urges” – needs, appetites, drives, desires, impulses, rhythms and reflexes that ensure healthy function, growth, and repair.

Breathing, for example, is an urgency that brings oxygen into the lungs and bloodstream, as it expels carbon dioxide which would otherwise reach toxic levels and cause cell death.

Opposite to the Body and its urgencies is the center of Will. Both centers are about action, but while the urgencies in the Body are mostly autonomic and unconscious, the Will is devoted to conscious control, personal agency, and intentional behavior. Purpose is our summary term for these types of voluntary action. Elsewhere I have distinguished these two centers and strands as visceral intelligence (Body: VQ1) and volitional intelligence (Will: VQ2).

Doing anything “on purpose,” “with purpose,” or “for a purpose” assumes a certain degree of freedom from the compulsory urgencies of simply staying alive. Whereas the deliberation that precedes a chosen action involves Mind and Heart in conversation (as we’ll see shortly), making choices and taking action is the unique contribution of Will.

It is helpful to think of Will as a horse and ego as the rider. In healthy development they work together, with the rider steering the horse into experiences that are wholesome, productive, and useful.

When the rider is distracted, confused, lost, or asleep in the saddle, however, the horse has no constructive guidance and things can quickly fall out of balance, veering farther off course.

Shifting to the horizontal axis now brings our focus to the centers of consciousness named Mind and Heart, which correspond respectively to the strands of knowledge and communion.

In this context, knowledge is “about” something and based in an objectivity that draws a strong distinction between Mind and its object. This objective distance between the Mind and what it knows – or more accurately, what it thinks it knows – is the salient feature and “secret power” in Western science. The knowledge catalog about Reality it has recorded through the centuries is truly astonishing.

Offering a counterbalancing effect across the larger system of consciousness is the Heart center and its intelligence for communion. If knowledge builds on the distance afforded by objectivity, communion is the experience of connection where objectivity dissolves, feeling overrules logic, and a deeper bond is formed.

Not objectivity but intimacy: knowledge about is counterbalanced by communion with the other. The union (being one) in “communion” draws the com- (with) into stronger ties of partnership and mutual identity.

All together, these four centers and strands of consciousness – Body/urgency, Will/purpose, Mind/knowledge, and Heart/communion – enable us to construct the world in which we live and navigate a life of meaning.

To complete the picture, however, we need to add two more centers on the strand associated with spiritual intelligence (SQ), which are named Soul (SQ1) and Spirit (SQ2). Only recently has spiritual intelligence been the subject of serious research, resulting in its finally being added to the “braid” of human quadratic intelligence: VQ1/VQ2, EQ (emotional), RQ (rational), and SQ1/SQ2.

Spiritual intelligence has nothing to do with being religious, going to church, or subscribing to some denominational orthodoxy.

While we should hope that every religion is a product of spiritual intelligence, many of them actively work to limit or even disable it in their members.

Soul is the center that keeps you rooted in the present, grounded in Reality, far below all of that world construction and role-play business going on at the surface of society. Your Soul provides grounding for deep solitude and inner peace, drawing the Heart’s communion more inward to an ineffable oneness in Being. In return, Soul supplies to the Heart an integrity and freedom that prevent it from slipping off-center and collapsing into unhealthy attachment.

At the center of Soul, according to Eastern philosophy, Reality as Ground is “nondual”: neither one thing or another, but Nothing (sunya, no thing), within and prior to the differentiation of things. Neither here nor there, but NowHere.

Meditation techniques enable the practitioner to descend through the Body’s urgencies to this quiet place of inner peace: Here and Now.

At the far upper pole on this strand of spiritual intelligence is the center of Spirit, where we have a similar counterbalancing effect with Soul as that between Body and Will, Mind and Heart. Whereas the Soul dwells in the grounding mystery of Being, Spirit soars like a bird or butterfly (favorite metaphors from the spiritual wisdom traditions) through the open air above the field where our personal identities and quality worlds crowd into each other.

Transcendence refers to the act of “going beyond” me here and you there, to the higher wholeness of both (and all) of us together, where the diversity of our unique identities is celebrated and adds strength to the Whole.

At this center of consciousness, according to Western psychology, Reality is “transpersonal”: elevating awareness beyond the boundaries of personal identity and categories of knowledge by which the Mind constructs meaning, creating new synergies of inclusive community. Methods of dialogue enable partners to ascend through their separate frameworks of meaning and belief, in a mutual quest for the higher perspective of Truth and a shared understanding.

All of these distinct centers and strands of consciousness are in you, naturally coordinated by the evolutionary aim of human wellbeing.

Start noticing their power in you. Cultivate a sensitivity to their creative tension and balance. When you get knocked off the path or lose your way, let them bring you back into alignment and refresh your commitment to being whole, seeking harmony, and living the liberated life.

Relax, You Are Probably a Post-Theist

The transition from theism to post-theism is typically stressful and traumatic for someone who believes that god actually exists. Even though they have never observed or encountered a deity like the one represented in the sacred stories – and neither, by the way, has anyone else – the very idea that God is not what they believe can be profoundly disturbing.

Aseity refers to something that has no cause or origin outside itself; it is self-caused. A new use of this term applies it to the god found in the stories of mythology.

A believer doesn’t ask where god came from, and certainly not who made it up – the first mythmakers. Pressing such questions too hard is criticized as sacrilegious, until it is condemned as atheism and prosecuted as apostasy. One must simply believe, accepting that the deity in the stories and the stories themselves have always been and have no origin.

Young children do not scrutinize a Bible story as to whether or not it actually happened or if the characters are real. They simply take the story as told and it takes them inside an imaginarium of distant places and fantastic events. The character or literary persona of the mythological deity (i.e., the god of myth) becomes more clear and distinct as the narrative plot (Greek mythos) progresses. There is no thought or need to check objective reality for validation of an actual deity like the one inside the story.

The importance of theism to the work of establishing faith, nurturing connections, forming identity, and orienting the individual inside a world of shared meaning is widely underappreciated in the research.

If we simply define it as a social system of taller powers (parents and other adults) and/or higher powers (gods and other immortals) who supervise and provide for the needs of their children (believers commonly refer to themselves as children of god), theism can be acknowledged as a human universal – an inescapable paradigm of every individual’s experience, at least through adolescence.

In theistic mythology, iconography, and theology (conceptual god-talk), the analogy of god as father or mother serves to project the parent-child dynamic of dependency, obedience, providence, and authority beyond the sphere of the local human family and into the tribal-historical, local-geographical, or even cosmic-universal environment.

The higher power serves in roles directly aligned with those of parents in the family: protecting, providing, nurturing, training, instructing, and modeling the virtues of moral character for their children to emulate.

The difference in moral character between a child’s real parent and a devotee’s imagined god is a difference in degree rather than kind. A parent’s love is normally preferential, episodic, inconsistent, and conditional, whereas god’s love is praised for being perfect – unfailing, unconditional, and all-inclusive.

To the extent that the moral character and actual performance of a human parent are not perfect, the divine character and behavior of god as depicted in the sacred stories provides a bridge and inclined ramp for the devotee’s higher aspirations.

Just as every human child grows up to observe and to some extent suffer the imperfections of their parents, however, a time comes when the believer must account for the obvious fact that god does not always protect, provide, or come through on his promises for the victory and prosperity of those who worship and obey him.

Similar rationalizations may be employed in the interest of letting the taller/higher power off the hook. An inscrutable will, an unknowable plan, or a tricky reversal of normal logic where loss, misfortune, and calamity are administered or allowed by god for a deeper or deferred benefit to the one who remains steadfast: a stronger faith, fewer worldly cares or attachments, or the promise of everlasting glory in heaven after death.

That last hook particularly has been an effective “lock on the door” of theism for those insiders (devotees, believers, children of god) who are beginning to realize that the sacred stories of religion are not factual accounts, and that their central character actually does have a cause and origin.

Deep down and for some time already, they had to come to terms with the fact that nowhere in Reality have they observed or encountered the deity they were taught to worship and obey.

These closet doubters may be told that god is not found by those who lack faith, that god rewards those who persist in their belief despite a lack of evidence, or in the face of evidence that directly contradicts what they believe. What had been a lively and intriguing literary figure in their early childhood must now be newly confessed as a literal being who lives outside the stories and above the world, watching and keeping accounts for the Day of Reckoning.

*Click* goes the deadbolt.

You may be one of these who suspected at a formative stage in your intellectual and spiritual development (on average between the ages of 11 and 25) that the personal god in Bible stories and Sunday sermons was not without cause or origin – or at least that he didn’t exist in the real world of causes and origins. That god’s aseity was a naïve assumption which got planted in the fertile soil of your uncritical imagination in early childhood.

Hopefully it did its job in helping you feel safe, loved, capable and worthy, pulling you up by your aspirations not to be god but to be like god in the way you lived and managed your own little world.

But now, at the critical age when external reality, objective facts, and the responsibilities of ordinary life are redirecting your attention and preparing you for adulthood, it is becoming apparent that either god exists as he is depicted in the Bible and Church orthodoxy, or he doesn’t and must be left behind in the stories.

This has come to be the crisis of theism, which leads either to an atheistic rejection and escape from theism and its god, or to a fundamentalist regression that pulls the waking butterfly back into a cocoon of convictions and dogmatic mind control.

What is really needed at this critical threshold of intellectual and spiritual transformation, however, is neither a rejection of god’s literal existence nor the doubling-down of belief in it.

Instead, a post-theistic reflection on the meaning of god can simultaneously affirm its origin in the human mythopoetic imagination, and, by breaking the spell of aseity, open up something hitherto hidden in plain sight under the disguise of the personal deity.

The diagram above illustrates these other dimensions of insight and experience that become available once a believer has grown through the literary god and beyond the literal god, into the realization of what that god represents. On “the other side of” (post-) theism and its god is an expansive range of experiences that can quite abruptly break into consciousness.

A quick explanation is that god is now recognized as a symbol and metaphor of God, where the case change indicates a shift from the mythopoetic construct (god) to the Present Mystery of Reality (God) it was all along intended to represent.

What can we say now?

  • That the Present Mystery of Reality is the Ground of Being accessed by an interior path of contemplation and release. This is the deep provident support that the god of theism personifies to us, the existential basis for faith-as-trust, deep security, and inner peace. Because this Presence is Mystery, our experience of it is mystical – ineffable, below the reach of words, thoughts, and thinker alike.
  • That the Present Mystery of Reality confronts us as Other, an alterity (otherness) with a transcendent center utterly apart from our concepts, beliefs, expectations, and attachments. In this sense the Mystery is absolute – pure, free, and wholly Other – drawing us farther out of ourselves and into relational encounters with “the other.”
  • That the Present Mystery of Reality pervades, encompasses, and includes us, as well as All of existence. This virtue is represented in the god of theism who welcomes, forgives, accepts, and embraces everyone, inspiring new bonds of love and understanding that co-generate a communal spirit of unity.

If any of this resonates for you, then you can relax because you’re probably a post-theist. If it’s all somewhat disturbing, then you might be on the very threshold of the transformation described here.

Have faith and take courage. Join the movement. There’s a lot of life out here.

No Such Thing as “Christian” Nationalism

Ever since the emperor Constantine (306-367 CE) declared Christianity the Roman State religion, and especially after his successor to the throne, Theodosius I (379-395 CE), made Christianity the only true religion of the empire, Christians themselves have been enthusiastically taking on the role of Antichrist.

Of course, most of them accuse other elements of society of being enemies of Christ and his religion. In America it’s been immigrants, liberals, secular (this-worldly) humanists, LGBTQ and people of color that have been opposed and condemned by the Christians. From the time the first Puritans landed in the New World (as immigrants!), their delusion of being a Christian nation has persisted.

Just recently it has metastasized throughout the American body politic.

The “Christian” identity of these nationalists is based on a profound contradiction, however, representing a complete and total rejection of just about everything Jesus taught and stood for.

This contrast is only stark to the degree that our portrait and understanding of Jesus and his gospel (his message of “good news”) can be saved from the orthodoxy of Christendom. What he eventually became in the doctrinal system of official Christianity was something diametrically opposite to who he was in real life.

Ironically, in real life Jesus was a harsh and unrelenting critic of religious nationalism – of the idea popular among contemporary Jews that God, truth, and salvation belonged to them as a nation, and to them alone. All others would need to either convert and join the fold, or stay outside and stand condemned.

This same exclusionary politico-religious ideology would later under the theocracy of Constantine’s empire, the Romano-Euro-American evolutionary line of Christian nationalism, forge its condemnation into active persecution, organized crusades (ostensibly “for Christ”), and political legislation against The Other.

Any identification of God with a temple or throne – or with even our mental constructs (or gods) of the Mystery that is within, among, throughout and encompassing all things – was held in suspicion by Jesus.

The danger is ever-present that such institutional placeholders and representations might become idols, mechanisms of control and oppression. A caste system inevitably forms, granting privilege for those at the center and top to impose their agendas on everyone else at the bottom and farther out.

Just that quickly a genuine spiritual insight can become a belief presuming to contain it, then a conviction that locks it in, and finally a deadly delusion that kills the curiosity which had discovered it in the first place. The very articulation of experience in dogmatic formulations takes us out and away from the present Mystery of reality, into the embroidery of meanings we drape over it.

If God is that present Mystery – and Jesus said as much – then all our beliefs, doctrines, and ideologies are at best only veils that obscure, but which often turn into walls that keep God (the Mystery) out in defense of our “truth” (i.e., our gods).

Because God is the Mystery within, among, throughout and encompassing all things, no single individual, sacred tradition, or holy nation can ever lay claim to it. It doesn’t belong to anyone. We can live closer or farther in awareness from this Mystery, a proximity that can be measured in terms of how authentic, inclusive, and unconditional our love for others happens to be.

Jesus was committed to living in the presence of Mystery and inviting all others to join him, and it was this very audacious spirit of love that convinced his opponents that their god wanted him dead.

With a refreshed portrait of Jesus now before us, it should be obvious how contrary his self-transcending and inclusive ethic of love is to the dark spirit of so-called Christian Nationalism. Those today trying to advance its program of ethnic cleansing, moral repression, the legal disenfranchisement of minorities, and a one-party democracy (i.e., an autocratic dictatorship) are decidedly not Christian, if that title refers to one who is committed to the same principles, values, and aims that inspired Jesus and informed his gospel.

Christian Nationalism of some sort has been the going game since the late Roman Empire, so we will be wise not to treat it as some kind of superficial rash on the surface of American society. It is in fact deep in the cultural DNA of Christendom, a code implanted nearly two thousand years ago when kings, bishops, and politicians saw the strategic utility in fusing religious conviction and political ambition to an orthodoxy-induced amnesia regarding Jesus and his erstwhile Way of Love.

The Great Reversal in the history of Christian orthodoxy was in how it took an itinerant preacher-activist of the all-inclusive and liberating power of love in human affairs, and made him into a liege lord of divine vengeance against outsiders and enemies of the Church.

The only effective treatment for the pathology of Christian Nationalism involves showing its proponents how different, how opposite, they are to the life, teachings, and spirit of Jesus the Christ. If the denomination they use in identifying themselves – Christian means “a disciple of Christ” and his Way of Love – they need to either reject the anti-Christian values of Nationalism, or continue as nationalists and admit they are not Christian, that they don’t know much about Jesus or even really care.

Frankly, the Way of Love that Jesus proclaimed evokes fear and trembling in those who cling with increasing desperation to shrinking identities. As the world’s diversity of colors, cultures, customs, and creeds grows to the doorstep of their convictions, any call to open the door and embrace the reality of it all is just too much to ask.

Most -isms are reactions of withdrawal and defense against some encroaching reality that threatens to mix things up and change the rules.

If the rules are rigged in your favor, then you don’t want things to change. If the demographic and moral real estate of your nation is shifting away from the tidy categories you’re used to and have staked your identity on, you want things back the way they were.

American nationalism can fight Jesus’ ethic of inclusion, or paste his name and hang his cross on their own brand of realpolitik. Either way, there really is no such thing as Christian Nationalism.

Life on the Ladder … and Beyond

Spiritual wisdom traditions of East and West have distinct accents in their respective characterizations of what awaits the individual who is finally ready to break past the constraints of personal identity and a conventional life. Conventional refers to the system of assumptions, habits, values, and agreements that define the worldview and way of life for members of a society.

Invariably, conventional systems are theistic by design. Taller powers (parents and other adults) supervise, manage, and direct the experience of children, as higher powers (deities and other imaginary immortals) govern the grownups. The whole thing is designed around the central project of constructing personal identity and ensuring its compliance with convention.

Personal identities and their resident egos are not products of natural evolution but rather constructs of social engineering.

An individual must be domesticated and shaped to the conventional worldview and way of life. Their animal nature has to be trained, disciplined, and instructed away from its primal instincts and redirected along new (conventional) channels of moral obedience.

Gradually, if all goes according to plan these goads and brakes of morality will be internalized as the individual’s conscience (i.e., the inner parent and voice of god). Its promptings and judgments will henceforth serve to keep the individual in line with what society deems right behavior of a good person. For the righteous – defined as a right-behaving good person – await the rewards of social approval and honor in this life, everlasting beatitude and glory in the next.

And this is where they can stay, safe in the fold and looking forward to their time in greener pastures.

Conventional society works as long as everything goes according to plan. Raise up the children, facilitate their adoption (formal confession) as children of god, assign the roles and enforce the rules of god’s will as they work and raise up children of their own to add to the righteous fold.

Sure, you’ll have deviants and apostates along the way, but they can be dealt with by such moral mechanisms as shame, chastisement, excommunication, punishment and damnation.

For thousands of years it worked like this, until a certain kind of deviant started showing up more frequently across noncontiguous conventional societies. In both East and West of the early first millennium BCE these outliers began thinking and talking differently about personal identity, conventional life, human potential, and the nature of ultimate reality.

Personal identity consists basically of an actor (ego: “I”) wearing a mask (persona: “I am   “) that identifies them to an audience of other actors (society). It’s important to underscore the point that this ego-and-mask (or suit) ensemble is not something an individual is born with. Indeed, its construction requires that a center be established apart from the body, upon which a self-conscious vantage can be gained.

Such a developmental achievement requires social scaffolding to motivate and support the individual’s ascending progress in personal power: beginning with impulse control and advancing through emotional stability, cognitive flexibility, performance integrity (staying true to character), and moral commitment to social values and expectations.

The goal for the individual, now having become somebody, is to fit in and do their part for the good of all – “all” referring more or less exclusively to the in-group of fellow actors.

To capture this idea of identity as social construction, the illustration above depicts a ladder upon which the ego is making its climb – or perhaps it has gotten stuck on one of the rungs mentioned in the previous paragraph. In that case, the individual may be hung up in the complications of dysfunctional power: low self-control, imbalanced affect, closed-minded conviction, role confusion, or a weak conscience.

Getting stuck on the ladder of personal identity is a main reason why societies collapse, divide, and disintegrate.

Individuals who lack ego strength combine their neurotic insecurities for an exponential effect that can amplify across society and cause its destruction. Before the city gates close and its streets go silent, however, individuals will fall into chronic episodes of anxiety and depression, meaninglessness and despair, until all hope is lost and the human spirit within them goes dark.

Let’s be clear: it is not inevitable that the construction of personal identity should get tangled up in the complications of dysfunctional power. It’s also possible – especially in conventional societies with theistic structures that are more enlightened, provident, liberal and nurturing – that this whole enterprise of becoming somebody in conventional society serves to prepare the individual for a breakthrough to the liberated life.

This is where those distinct accents of East and West come into the picture. From ego’s centered position on the ladder of personal identity, the individual can release and descend into the deeper registers of consciousness: down through the attachments of identity, past the mirrors of self-conscious reflection, dropping along the vital rhythms of the body and into the quiet clearing of mystical presence and inner peace we call soul.

This deeper oneness is nondual, as the Eastern traditions maintain, far below ego in the grounding mystery of Being where there is no this-and-that, but only This: the nameless, formless, boundless, ineffable Mystery.

From that same position on the ladder of identity an individual might otherwise choose to connect and ascend into the higher registers of consciousness: up through the attachments of identity, past the oppositional categories of self and other, insider and outsider, rising along the unifying currents of love and into the inclusive fellowship of communal life we call spirit.

This higher wholeness is transpersonal, as the Western traditions maintain, high above ego but also including our individual differences in mutual respect, open dialogue, and unconditional acceptance.

These nondual-mystical and transpersonal-communal pathways are the Yin and Yang of a post-theistic spirituality. It is our hope for becoming fully human and finally free.

The Crux

All lifeforms on Earth are limited to lifetimes, some longer than others and some shorter. A few last only days, while a few others stretch into centuries. You’re about average, with a life expectancy of 80 years or so. Does that upset you?

Nature has equipped all forms of life with a developmental aim and “maturity clocks” that mark thresholds when it’s time to grow and stop growing, to reproduce and quit bearing young, to strive for existence and eventually succumb to extinction.

It seems that for all species but our own, these maturity clocks work instinctually to ensure that individuals actualize their natural potential and bring new generations to life in time.

An evolutionary breakthrough occurred millions of years ago when microorganisms called mitochondria were enveloped by other cells. Rather than assimilating these captives, however, the mitochondria were incorporated into cell biology as energy factories, thus catapulting the evolution of life to a whole new level of symbiotic complexity.

Several thousand years ago came another breakthrough, this time in our human lineage. With advances in social differentiation and cooperation, humans began to adopt identities that would allow them to participate in rather complex social role-plays.

By putting on these roles and masks (the Latin word is persona, from which our word person is derived), humans created conditions for the rise of self-conscious awareness.

Their careful attention to social cues in others, confirming varying degrees of recognition, deference, and respect, individuals became acutely aware of themselves as actors. This acting center of social identity is what we call the ego (Latin for “I”), and it wasn’t long before this separate center of self-conscious personal identity had insinuated itself in every human society across the planet.

Given ego’s place in the continuing evolution of humans toward ever more complex systems of social organization, we can appreciate this new arrangement of the social actor in a human body as the cultural equivalent of the much earlier mitochondrion revolution in cell biology and the evolution of Life on Earth.

Along with this remarkable and unprecedented advance into a separate center of self-conscious personal identity, however, came the awareness of the body’s mortality. Despite the intensely engaging carnival atmosphere of the social stage, in putting on and taking off the roles and masks of identity, a self-conscious individual was inescapably tethered to a biological lifeform that would one day die.

And this was terrifying.

One way of dealing with this new death anxiety was to get so completely distracted into the social role-play and identity management that it could be sufficiently ignored. At any rate, death could be imagined as a still long-distant future event, not requiring any further thought – for now.

But it wouldn’t entirely go away.

It was the innovation of a few storytellers, likely at midlife, who conceived the meme – referring to a self-replicating idea that quickly spreads through a society’s collective consciousness – of personal immortality. Capitalizing on the obvious fact of ego’s transcendent position with respect to the body, they first imagined and then believed that an individual’s center of personality might – no, must! – survive death.

Soon enough, elaborate departure narratives were devised to assure individuals of their postmortem continuation in life on the other side of death.

In the following centuries, these departure narratives would grow increasingly sophisticated and fanciful, depicting alternative destinations of heaven and hell, to be assigned according to the individual’s obedience to religious authority in this life, each with its own rings and levels of reward or punishment.

The great irony here is in how the emergence of a self-conscious center of personal identity, which signaled an advance in human social evolution, ended up generating profound anxiety and making individuals vulnerable to the schemes of one immortality project or another.

If these schemes provided a kind of shelter of distractions, they also had the effect of closing the human spirit inside and sedating its evolutionary impetus.

In the diagram above, a body’s mortal timeline is overarched by the adventure of ego. A separate center of self-conscious personal identity takes its rise sometime in early childhood, and returns to the body in late adulthood, just as the lures of social recognition start to lose their luster. Contrary to the promise of religion’s departure narratives, however, the personality goes with the body.

That is to say, it will go out like a candle.

If this sounds sacrilegious and depressing, it is only because the meme of personal immortality has insinuated itself so deep into our collective unconscious that anything less than everlasting life for the ego just feels offensive and wrong. When the body dies our light goes out? Anyone suggesting as much must be a heretic and a sinner – at the very least misguided, and perilously so.

This is where we have to reframe the whole point and trajectory of ego consciousness.

Our challenge is not to save ego from the body’s inevitable end, but rather to clarify its evolutionary aim in the larger picture of human destiny. This evolutionary aim according to the spiritual wisdom tradition of Sophia Perennis, which has been contemplating the matter for as long as humans have been wrestling with the question of what we are and where we are going, is only penultimately about social role-plays and managing an identity.

Ultimately – that is to say, in the final analysis and at the highest level of consideration – humans are destined for the liberated life in a planetary community of compassion, goodwill, justice and inclusion.

To his theistic audience, Jesus envisioned this ethically enlightened human destiny and called it the “kingdom of God.” It wasn’t up in heaven or in some post-apocalyptic future, but right here and now, coming up from within us and taking root among us, uniting us all in a Spirit of freedom and love.

As illustrated in my diagram, the elevated position of ego, transcendent of the body but not independent from it, provides a location from which consciousness can release and descend into the grounding mystery of Being itself. The dashes and subtraction sign (-) in and near the vertical arrow dropping from ego are making the point that this descending path involves a surrender of all the ideologies, memberships, ambitions, attachments, roles, and masks that define identity.

From the same location of ego’s position, consciousness can also connect with other persons and ascend together with them into the higher wholeness of transpersonal community. A solid upward arrow and addition sign (+) indicate that this higher realm of community takes up and includes each person’s uniqueness and the diversity represented in their differences.

Here we are not locked to our roles but can use them to contribute, add value, and participate with each other in the creative ways of a higher purpose.

So we can see that ego consciousness did not evolve just to be rescued to another world and a life everlasting, but instead to open pathways to the depths of Mystery within us and the conspiracy of love lifting us together as One.

It’s here that we become fully human.