Get Over Yourself

While all the other creatures on this planet, so far as we know, develop their full potential and achieve ‘self-actualization’ in a single lifetime (given the opportunity and provident conditions), only we human beings have managed to undermine our own evolutionary progress. Why and how we do this has been a fascination of mine for some time, and over the years a theory has come together that offers an explanation. While many of the elements aren’t necessarily original with me, the unifying system is something that brings together and breaks through the limitations of other approaches.

Not surprisingly I have come with another diagram, and my returning reader will recognize all the component features from previous posts. What’s new here is not so much in the details as in the gestalt, in the whole picture of things apprehended all at once. You’ll find the familiar color codes associated with our four strands of quadratic intelligence – black for our visceral intelligence (VQ), red for emotional intelligence (EQ), blue for our rational intelligence (RQ), and purple for spiritual intelligence (SQ) – along with orange which signifies the dynamics of personal identity, or ego.

The four types of intelligence are arranged in a manner that reflects the developmental sequence in which they come online and start making significant contributions to our sense of self and reality. We begin at the bottom with the autonomic functions of visceral intelligence; open up very early to emotional engagement with our taller powers (caregivers, guardians, and teachers), siblings and playmates; and around age ten come into our rational faculty with its skills in logic, critical thinking, and conceptualization.

Even though it’s frequently in adulthood that individuals awaken to their spiritual intelligence, you’ll notice that I’ve positioned it in a way that transects the other three (instead of stacking on top). This is meant to suggest that while it certainly has (or can have) a profound influence on our sense of self and reality from very early on, the most important work of spiritual intelligence must await that crucial stage when our separate center of personal identity (ego) is strong enough to be transcended – not renounced, dismissed, or canceled out, but surpassed. Without sufficient ego strength, consciousness is unable to break past the neurotic self-preoccupation that compels us to grip down on ‘me and mine’.

Now that we’re on the ego, let’s take a moment to work out some of those details. I take the view which regards personal identity – this ego who is the center of self-esteem, world perspective, and moral agency – as a social construct and not an entity in the proper sense. Through discipline and instruction the tribe shapes our identity to be compatible (and compliant) with its shared beliefs and way of life. The nature of this shaping process anticipates and responds to the activation sequence of our quadratic intelligence.

Referring back to my diagram, you’ll see that I’ve placed key themes and concerns at each level corresponding to the developmental phases when they are dominant. Thus, in the earliest phase our visceral intelligence is dominant, making security, power, and control primary concerns that shape our deepest (preverbal) impressions of self and reality. Because even the most perfect family system cannot deliver instantaneously on our every need, we all carry some insecurity within ourselves, which we mitigate by attaching to whomever or whatever can calm us down. Attachment, love, and belonging come to overlay (and compensate for) those deeper concerns, continuing the process of our personification (or becoming a person).

By the time rational intelligence is ready to come online a lot has happened down below, in the calibration of our nervous system (VQ) and the adaptation of a relational style (EQ). We become better able to articulate the world that’s been forming around us and the perspective opening up from where we stand. Meaning, truth, and knowledge matter now to us as never before. It’s important to remember that the self-world construct – ‘who I am and what’s around me’ – is part of a social role-play, a cultural pretense of the highest magnitude that has been (not wrongfully) labeled by some, like the Buddha, as a delusion that holds our true nature under a spell, the so-called consensus trance.

Trances are all the more seductive according to the depth of our insecurity and the magnetism of attachment that we hope will compensate for it. In fact, the rational requirement for a coherent and reality-oriented philosophy of existence is all too quickly relinquished for the sake of maintaining membership in a club, class, or cult that promises to keep us safe inside the fold. This is when beliefs once held by the mind come to hold the mind captive (as a convict) to convictions that are placed beyond doubt, beyond question – beyond the probe of reasonable inquiry.

And there we have a picture of where most of us daily live: professing and defending a worldview (meaning) that protects the codependent relationships (attachment) which help us manage the profound (deep and ineffable) insecurity registered in our nervous system. With respect to that, spiritual intelligence stands little chance of awakening. If anything, its mystical intimations and transpersonal longings will be translated into doctrines of supernatural realities and afterlife destinies. Tragically many individuals today are trapped inside long-outdated (irrelevant) orthodoxies, for the sake of which they will sacrifice everything – rationality, property, fulfillment, and life itself – their own and that of ‘the enemy’.

But I can’t leave it there, with the majority caught in their convictions and the planet teetering on the brink of mass extinction. A few of us are fortunate enough, thanks to supportive families, open-minded and generous communities, our own dogged persistence toward an authentic life, and to the sheer grace of resources and opportunities made available in the moment, to arrive with sufficient ego strength that enables us to break through the self-world construct of personal identity. We don’t beat ourselves down as damned, helpless rejects, but simply let go of who we think we are, relaxing into the grounding mystery of being itself and rising into our creative authority among the countless beings that share (and manifest) this universe together with us.

When this happens – and I’m not one who believes it happens once and forever, but is rather a mode of experience that awaits our readiness to let go and our willingness to make the leap – an alignment of power, love, and truth opens us to the reality beyond ourselves. This is when ‘flow’ happens, when what we call the human spirit pulls deep on its faith in existence and reaches out to the wisdom of a universal order, where All is One.

Each of us is rooted in an unfathomable mystery and participates, whether aware or ignorant, in the turning unity of all things.