Thresholds

In Higher Nature I explored the major stages of human development as they correlate to our experience of wellbeing and fulfillment over a lifetime.

Wellbeing is a more stage-specific value of how aligned our development is to where we ought to be at that point, while fulfillment measures our degree of self-actualization with respect to the Human Ideal, referring to the higher aim of our nature.

By way of a quick review, the major stages and developmental standards are as follows:

• Infancy, early childhood, and the standard of animal faith
• Late childhood, adolescence, and the standard of ego strength
• Maturity, adulthood, and the standard of creative authority

Human fulfillment is a cumulative effect of these three stage-specific developmental standards building on each other over the course of a lifetime.

In tracking this upward growth in wellbeing toward fulfillment, I identified a deeper dimension called the ground, where animal faith is first established. At the upper end is a higher dimension called a world, the “house of meaning” suspended in a mythology of stories that we compose in exercising our creative authority.

Ground (or the grounding mystery) and world (or the quality world) are thus the deeper and higher dimensions that set the range for our developing personality. At its center is the ego, an executive faculty that serves the critical functions of managing self-control, personal freedom, and social responsibility. With the achievement of ego strength we are able to cooperate in and contribute to the conventional life of our tribe.

It’s important to understand that our ego is in large part a cultural construct, along with our personality and the various identities we are assigned to play on the performance stages of society. (Person and personality derive from the Latin persona, referring to the character mask of a theater actor – the identity that he or she inhabits and personifies on stage.)

Human wellbeing and fulfillment develop and evolve inside this uniquely human realm of experience: supported from within by the body’s animal faith, and sheltered inside a house of meaning made of stories – a world spun by our own creative authority.

Whereas we have appreciated the significance of faith for thousands of years, as evidenced by its central value in all religions, the discovery that humans make meaning by telling stories and creating worlds came much later, with the dawn of science.

Obviously we had been exercising our creative authority long before that, but only as a few skeptics (so called for their stubborn commitment to sense-based knowledge) started to realize that there is something outside and beyond our worlds, naming it the “real world” or Reality, did things really begin to shift.

Around the same time in history another class of explorers, called mystics for their introspective fascination with the inner mystery of consciousness and its ground, discovered a still deeper mystery below its threshold.

As these contemplative psychonauts descended the interior depths of consciousness – starting by detaching from the self-conscious center of identity (i.e., the ego) up on the stage and unwinding through the visceral rhythms of the body – they came to a dark edge beyond which awareness cannot “see.”

Some named it emptiness, nothingness, the Abyss: that which takes back what is given from the ground.

What we might call the curriculum of mystical spirituality cultivated the contemplative skills of letting go, dropping out, falling away, and coming to Nothing. The benefits of this regular practice for life back on the stage include a profound humility (from humus, ground), a more lighthearted engagement with life, greater resilience through hardship and loss, and a spirit of unconditional forgiveness for oneself and others.

The revolutionary discoveries of skeptics and mystics, subsequently developed into the complementary enterprises of science and spirituality, would come to present major challenges to conventional life in the “house” on its “ground.” And because religion, at least for most of its history, was the cultural institution that had stewardship of the house on its ground, these challenges came against it the hardest.

Many of the dysfunctions and deformations of contemporary religion have their origin in its resistance and aggressive refusal to validate the breakthroughs of science and spirituality.

Today’s religions still have little room or patience for skeptics and mystics.

Once Reality is exposed beyond our world – or in another way of saying it, as our world is parted like a veil on a “real world” devoid of meaning – the personal and social responsibility in our creative authority as storytellers is magnified a hundredfold.

At the very least it reminds us that the “truth” of our world, in the stories we tell and believe, can no longer be merely a matter of how much they mean to us and how they make us feel. With this newly discovered relativity of meaning – different worlds carry different meanings – truth now becomes a matter of how transparent or reality-oriented our words, stories, and worlds happen to be.

Beyond this postmodern and newfound commitment to truth-telling, our responsibility as world creators also challenges us to create worlds that are more hospitable, humane, and inclusive.

Instead of competing with each other over whose world is god’s word – or whose god is the true or only god – we can devote our creative authority to the communal work of making our world a place where those coming up and others coming in can know they are safe, loved, and belong.