If we don’t really understand ourselves, how can we know what we need to be healthy, happy, and whole? In our ignorance we are left groping for what feels good, for what might help us get ahead of the game, or at least distract us from the anxiety of not knowing what “the game” is all about. Is it about material security, sensual pleasures, personal prosperity, out-Jonesing the Joneses?
Actually, we do know what human beings need to be healthy, happy, and whole.
The answer has been stored in the transcultural superconscious “cloud drive” of our species for thousands of years. Known as the Perennial Philosophy or Sophia Perennis, this deep tradition of wisdom spirituality has been cultivating, “uploading,” and safeguarding the answers to our ultimate questions as human beings.
The problem is that fewer of us today are “downloading” its wisdom into the concrete situations of life. Percentage-wise, a much smaller portion of the living human population on Earth even knows that such a repository of spiritual wisdom exists, compared to earlier centuries when the great mythologies and philosophies of life informed the world cultures.
We are left with social media and the news of the day to find our bearings.
Sophia Perennis is not merely the work product of some ancient authors who had the good fortune of living during times and under empires that afforded them leisure to ponder the ultimate concerns of human existence. In fact, its cloud drive of spiritual wisdom is more than an anthology of sage writings collected from around the world.
Locating Sophia Perennis in the Superconscious of our species – at the opposite end of a continuum of consciousness with roots in the collective Unconscious of Jungian psychology – acknowledges its primary form in living insights, images, concepts and ideals rather than as academic treatises on parchment in clay jars.
Each time some individual – anywhere – discovers a timeless truth or finds her way to a deeper understanding of the path to human health, happiness, and wholeness (in a word, to wellbeing), the insight of that discovery is instantly uploaded to the superconscious cloud drive of spiritual wisdom.
From that moment, it is available for download by anyone else – anywhere – in the world. Its mere presence in the superconscious cloud drive of spiritual wisdom makes access that much more likely for many others.
The addition of insights, maxims, skills, and techniques strengthens this “morphogenetic field” (R. Sheldrake), reducing the time, effort, and suffering it might take for others elsewhere and later on to attain a similar enlightenment or spiritual breakthrough.
So then, what answers can we find in the perennial tradition of spiritual wisdom to our questions about what humans need to be healthy, happy, and whole?
In brief, there are just three things we need: Peace, Power, and Love.
These “first things” (or principles) are correlated to the three dimensions of human consciousness: the Soul (esoteric/contemplative: Peace), the Ego (intra/interpersonal: Power), and the Spirit (communal/transpersonal: Love).
My illustration diagrams these three dimensions of human consciousness in a way that indicates their dynamic interactions. The critical pathway in human development and evolution is rooted in the Soul’s deep interior (Greek esoteros) and our need for Peace. From there it flows to the Ego and our need for Power. Finally, fulfillment is reached in the Spirit’s breakthrough to the higher wholeness of community and our need for Love.
Fulfilling a given need ensures a healthy support for the need next in line, so to speak. Thus a sufficient base of inner Peace provides the support that a healthy center of personal Power requires. This in turn establishes the stable point from which the transpersonal leap into communal Love is taken.
A complete picture of human health, happiness, and wholeness, then, is grounded in Peace, centered and connected in Power, and included in the unifying energy of Love.
Of course, we might also track this dynamic flow across the dimensions of human consciousness through the more common traps and obstacles along the way. Rather than focus on the many variations of more or less “normal” psychopathology, however, let’s review the positive steps and gains on that upward trajectory to human fulfillment.
The developing center of self-conscious identity in the ego is the “mythic hero” we will be tracking, with the positive steps and gains labeled in orange-colored text. (Throughout this blog, orange is my color code for all things ego-related.) In agreement with most Western schools of psychology, ego is here regarded as a critically important and positive achievement in personality development.
Without “ego strength” the personality lacks stability, balance, and integrity. Most so-called mental disorders are the symptom and consequence of a deficiency in ego strength.
When a newborn is received into the embrace and nurturing environment of responsive caregivers, its infantile nervous system calibrates to a frequency (state or mood) that is fully grounded in a Reality experienced as provident.
Inwardly, the body releases or relaxes into a state of calm as attention opens gently to the Here and Now.
This is what Sophia Perennis names faith, which is fundamentally – that is, energetically – different from how it is typically understood in the religions. Neither a belief nor even a willingness to believe, faith in the spiritual wisdom tradition refers to the release and surrender of basic trust in the Present Mystery of Reality. The corresponding experience is Peace: an ineffable assurance that all is well.
Absent this grounding of faith, anxiety possesses the nervous system instead – and every subsequent step and stage in development will be complicated by its disturbing effect.
Upon this stable foundation of basic, or existential, trust in Reality, other developmental strengths naturally emerge. The well-centered ego brings the nascent personality into integrity and forms sympathetic bonds of affinity with others. In this balance of (introverted) integrity and (extraverted) affinity – or what is effectively the healthy balance of personal Power, an adolescent ego enjoys a measure of freedom from urgency and reaction, which it redirects into the agency of deliberation, choice, creative purpose, and personal responsibility.
While Sophia Perennis safeguards the wisdom principles and practices that have helped seekers through the centuries cultivate inner Peace and personal Power, its teachings on the human need for Love make it clear that our fulfillment as individuals and a species lies in our devoted service to community.
Literally “together as one,” community certainly includes the transpersonal fellowship of ego-centered human beings, but also the extra-human realm of the planet, its web of life, and the cosmos as a whole. Our little-appreciated name for the cosmic environment, universe, carries this insight regarding the higher wholeness of all beings: “turning as one.”
In the spiritual sense, Love is much more than an urge, a desire, or a feeling, but refers to the force that fills, lifts, and includes us in the higher wholeness of all things. In serving wholeness we become whole.
Tracts of Revolution 