In Next Steps I presented the “map” to a more authentic and fulfilling human experience, according to the perennial tradition of wisdom spirituality (Sophia Perennis) which has been active now for several thousand years across numerous cultures and religions.
The spirituality and its map are the shared product and collective property of homo sapiens, and while the religions are true or false depending on how clearly aligned they are with its underground stream of wisdom, the stream itself is essentially without religious identity.
It’s not necessary to join a religion to have access to Sophia Perennis, for it is already there in the collective higher consciousness of our species.
Indeed, religious membership can often make its access more complicated and virtually impossible. The religions frequently argue and fight over “water rights” and whose containers (i.e., myths, images, and doctrines) are superior. Stuck in their convictions and locked in conflict, the liberating vision of Sophia Perennis may be entirely forgotten.
That earlier post dropped a pin at the map’s center as a point for orientation: our ego. In mythology, this is represented by the Hero whose adventure and identity range across the archetypes of seeker, wanderer, captive, fugitive, exile and warrior. Once we can see ourselves in the Hero, the idea of a map as less a set of instructions than the layout and topography of our own human quest for life in its fullness makes intuitive sense.
From that middle position – existentially alone in the middle of Everything – our adventure can proceed in four distinct directions:
- Inside to our unique personality, character, and temperament (“oneself”);
- Outward to the social stage and engagement with “another” (actually many others);
- Within to the grounding mystery (“ground”) of our existence in the here and now;
- And finally, beyond by a transpersonal leap into the higher wholeness of “community.”
If you were to ask why, given such a clearly demarcated map for the human journey, it is so much more complicated in real life than this scheme might lead us to believe, the answer is that each of us gets “lost” in our own way. You might be a hopeful seeker one day, a confused wanderer the next, and a depressed captive by week’s end.
That earlier depiction of the map included an image of a tightening spiral on the path leading into oneself. This represents all the ways that ego insecurity can spin the personality into neurotic attachment, chronic anxiety, churning frustration, nervous exhaustion, and finally debilitating depression. Its centripetal contraction can effectively close the ego off from Reality, pulling it so deep into its own delusion and suffering that nothing else is real.
While it is characteristic of our Western approach to such challenges to isolate the problem and then try to medically relieve or surgically remove it, the approach of Sophia Perennis is instead more holistic, addressing the systems in which the problem is found.
Returning to the map a second time, we find additional terms which together serve to clarify a web of virtues that generate the wellbeing and fulfillment (i.e., life in its fullness) we long for as humans. By restoring alignment and balance among the interdependent elements of the system, overall health and wellbeing can be established. This favorable balance gives ego the freedom it needs to conduct its adventure with creative intention.
Let’s move around the map along its distinct paths to get a better understanding of these virtues and their dynamic balance.
It is by a slow process of differentiation that a small portion of the body’s deeper animate consciousness gets siphoned into an encapsulated center of self-conscious experience – the ego itself. The varying difficulty or success of this formational process registers in the nervous system of the body as an internal state of in/SECURITY.
Because ego formation is largely managed by our tribe, the devotion and competency of our taller powers generate the conditions that prompt an adaptive response and chronic mood in our body. Our sense of Reality as provident is the feeling of security, and to whatever degree our early perceptions are otherwise, anxiety will be our corresponding mood instead.
Later in development with an ego securely centered, we will be able to drop out of our conditioned identity into deep state of inner PEACE. What was in the beginning a calm and trusting composure of the body’s internal state (security) supporting our self-conscious experience from below, so to speak, opens at this later stage to welcome our intentional release into its quiet and boundless presence within.
With a foundational mood of security in place, ego can proceed in the work of regulating, coordinating, and unifying the distinct lines of affect and motivation in the personality – “subpersonalities” as they are sometimes called (Roberto Assagioli). As executive center, ego manages these otherwise divergent subpersonalities and anchors our personal POWER, referring to our capacity for self-control, free will, agency and purpose.
Gradually we learn how to stand in our own center and “be somebody.”
This adventure of consolidating a personality and “putting on” an identity is not carried out in a social vacuum, however. In fact, personal identity is also the product and symptom of a another system in need of balance, between the power in oneself and our LOVE for another. Our personal power is developed and calibrated inside the contextual dynamics of interpersonal relationship.
We need others to recognize and reflect back to us who we are becoming.
The path outward to another invites us into CONNECTION, then, that both tempers and defines our identity. More than that, each connection further awakens and develops our empathy along with other ethical sensibilities. We learn that love is more than mere affection and agreement; it also includes patience, generosity, compassion, service and sacrifice on behalf of another.
The altruistic nature of love seeks to devote our power to commitments which are conducive to the health, happiness, and wellbeing of others.
From the perspective of Sophia Perennis, this longer human journey from the gradual formation of an ego, through its construction of identity in the balance of power and love, has the ultimate aim of creating community. More than a mere aggregate of individual egos, community here refers to a higher wholeness brought about by the transpersonal leap beyond “me and mine” or even “us and ours,” into an experience of “all of us together as One” (com-unitas)
The wisdom teachings inspire an understanding of this higher wholeness as a nested hierarchy (Arthur Koestler’s “holarchy”) with egocentric (self-centered), ethnocentric (group-centered), Homocentric (human-centered), biocentric (life-centered), geocentric (Earth-centered) and cosmocentric (universe-centered) horizons, ultimately including all beings.
In such a vision, our sense of BELONGING is a spontaneous intuition expressed as joie de vivre or a delight in being alive. This is the JOY of the Spirit that some religions anticipate in the future consummation and “superconscious harmony” (Teilhard’s “Omega Point”) of all things.
This comprehensive vision of existence and of the human journey is based on the insight of there being an intention in our nature – as well as in Nature herself – pressing purposefully toward fulfillment. Our experience at any point in the adventure will be, to some significant extent, a function of how awake and attuned we are to its current and calling.
At the very least we should affirm that the Universe itself, here in its human manifestation, is an intentional system.
Tracts of Revolution 