Living From the Center

One of the more serious consequences of stress – by which I mean not our response of “stressing out,” but the sheer pressure, commotion, demands and distractions of everyday life – is in the way it causes our attention to close down on what we think we can manage. Problems come as this collapsed perspective and diminishing mental bandwidth limit our capacity for making life truly meaningful.

At times like these, we can start to feel that life itself isn’t meaningful, and even that it’s not worth living. It’s as if we’ve been given the task of building a house, but all we have to work with is a single board and one nail. If our “house” is a meaningful life, then constructing one of our own seems out of the question.

What we need are four essential things: (1) sufficient materials and tools for the project, along with (2) some basic construction skills, as well as (3) a blueprint or building plan for the house we want, and (4) a self-responsible authority for the work needing to be done.

When our focus gets riveted by the urgency of our problems and we’re standing here with our one board and nail, we’re more than willing to abandon our creative role and give the job to someone else.

There’s lots of people standing ready to tell us what our life means: Advertisers, politicians, clergy, our own friends and family members. But typically there’s an ulterior motive laced into the advice they give.

Once again, this is where our perennial philosophy of spiritual wisdom can help us out. I’m not talking about the scrolls of pithy proverbs and sage counsel we will find in its library, at any number of cultural locations around the earth. These wisdom sayings are themselves generated on a four-dimensional matrix organized around the sacred center of intentional awareness – where you are and I am, here and now.

From this center of intentional awareness we are invited to look – to direct our attention – into four dimensions: behind us and ahead of us (in time), as well as around us (in space) and within ourselves to the grounding mystery of being. I will call these, respectively, hindsight, foresight, outsight, and insight.

While the answers we come to in considering these four orientations of consciousness are expected to be fairly individualized, as each of us is traversing a unique path across a particular set of life circumstances, the questions themselves are the same no matter where or when we happen to live.

The first-order achievement in any case is to locate our center of intentional awareness – not what we’re focusing on or thinking about, nor even the mental act of attending, but that which attends, considers, and actively creates the meaning of life. It’s not who we are pretending to be in our various roles in life, nor the one (called ego) who is carrying on the charade.

We can name this center of intentional awareness our authentic self.

From this timeless location in the here-and-now we are invited to remember, to “bring back to mind,” the path that brought us here. The quest for wisdom through hindsight involves more than merely rambling through the debri field of our past, looking for a memory thread or storyline that might help us make sense of what’s going on.

Hindsight is not about recalling specific things that happened in the past, but is rather the capacity for seeing our life as an unbroken heritage of experiences that have shaped and delivered us to this present moment. Although we don’t ordinarily appreciate it as such, this heritage of experiences holds signals and reminders, persistent patterns and recurrences that reveal how we got here. Inside that tapestry design are essential clues to our life’s meaning.

Directing attention ahead of ourselves to the future, the dimension of foresight invites us to trace out the trajectory of those more persistent patterns and recurrences, but not simply in the interest of predicting what is still to come. In reality, the future (i.e., what’s ahead) doesn’t come to us already predetermined, but instead emerges out of the present, from the rich mixture of persistent patterns, current conditions, creative opportunities, and our intentional awareness.

Recurring events in our past, particularly the painful ones, can be seen from the perspective of wisdom as opportunities to pay attention and learn something, and then to apply this new understanding in a more adaptive and successful response to life. Many of us keep falling into the same opportunity to learn a crucial life lesson, but our lack of hindsight pushes it away and in a sense predestines us to have to go through the same pain, again and again.

Alternatively, as our length of hindsight increases through the discipline of contemplative remembrance, the clarity and reach of foresight increases as well.

As I mentioned earlier, one serious consequence of stress is to close down our attention to what we think we can manage and control. This lets us screen out everything except for what we are convinced is “making” us anxious, frustrated, vexed, and exhausted. Wisdom tells us, quite otherwise, that our liberation will come as we open attention with outsight to the larger context – not in riveting our focus down, but expanding outward our horizon of awareness.

Most of our neurotic disorders are actually caused by the contraction of consciousness into the insecurities, obsessions, defenses, and convictions of an isolated ego. Outsight helps us see and understand that we are not alone in our experience, that everything is connected, and All is One. Nothing, anywhere, is really separate from the whole. We come to appreciate our life as participation in this higher wholeness, but also as having creative agency in its communal wellbeing.

Perhaps the strongest association with the cultivation of wisdom in popular culture – to whatever extent anyone really thinks of it these days – is in the meditative introspection of monks, mystics, and spiritual masters across the world cultures. What they all have in common, beyond the esoteric and labyrinthine metaphysics they frequently espouse, is a quest for insight – literally to “see into” the depths of experience, the inner life of the soul, and the ground of our very being.

Getting there, however, can be an almost impossible task for those of us who are entangled in attachments and desperately trying to hold ourselves together.

In this condition, we are convinced that below this neurotic highwire act is an oblivion we are saving ourselves from by all our worry and hard work. The wisdom of insight encourages our release and surrender nonetheless, with the assurance that underneath us is not a terrifying abyss but a provident ground; and further, that the terrible depth of our so-called fall is only a delusion of ego consciousness. Ego itself doesn’t “fall,” but our contemplative awareness descends away from ego, leaving it “up there” in the tangle of self-concerns.

At the start of a New Year, this is the perfect time for us to get centered and begin (again) the creative work of making a more meaningful life. With hindsight, foresight, outsight and insight, we can build a house that is beautiful, spacious, uniquely our own, and welcoming to every guest.

Your Triune Nature

Given that truth in mythology is not a matter of factual or historical accuracy but rather the degree in which its stories express and reveal to us the reality of what we are, I’ve been reflecting lately on a persistent fascination of Christian mythology: the triune nature of God. (I’m using the uppercase ‘G’ here to acknowledge that this particular doctrine of Christian orthodoxy is more an article of theology than mythology proper.)

We don’t find the three-in-One god in the Bible, but only in the conceptual and logical meditations of scholars who are making a case for identifying that literary character with ultimate reality.

I’m wondering: If the attractor for all this trinitarian theology is not really in the Bible, then perhaps it lies within us, in the nature of those who find such reflection so deeply interesting – as if we are pondering the mystery of our own existence in a mirror. Not that we are gods – that’s not what I’m suggesting – but that our theological constructs of God are, at least in part, projections and intimations of ourselves, the deeper truth of what we are.

We’ll see if this works, but I’m going to arrange a number of ideas in a single graphic, intended to serve as the “mirror” in our contemplation of your three-in-One nature as a human being. If you can be patient, I’ll do my best to guide you through the picture in a way that minimizes your risk of getting lost in the details. As we move along, I’ll put key terms in bold text.

Starting left of the midline, your triune nature is depicted as consisting of “animal,” “personal,” and “spiritual” dimensions; what we’ll call your first nature, your second nature, and your higher nature respectively; or, by way of a shorthand summary, body, ego, and soul. I’ve arranged them in this vertical fashion to represent the developmental sequence by which they awaken and come “online,” starting at the bottom and going upwards.

Thus, your body or first nature is where your journey begins. Looking just to the right of the midline, I am tagging it as possessing basic survival drives that conspire to keep you alive and move you toward what you need to be healthy. Your first nature as a human being operates mostly below the threshold of conscious awareness, and its drives are compulsions rooted in animal instincts that are not only primal but also very ancient, reaching back many millions of years and across numerous lines of prehuman species.

Your ego or second nature comes next, as the social construction of a personal identity – of a member in good standing who performs your assigned roles in general agreement with your group’s standards of “right action” and a “good person” – in a shared understanding known as conscience. As a mechanism of social conformity, conscience serves to restrain certain impulses of your first nature and redirect their energy into behavior more aligned with group values and aims. We can also think of conscience as the cultivation of desire, in a manner that serves – or at least doesn’t undermine – the common good.

The path of your constructed identity entailed the formation of a stable center, which in turn provided your developing personality with ego integrity – a unified sense of self. Establishing an internal locus of control and agency gradually made it possible for you to depend less on others and enjoy creative freedom.

Complications early on, in the form of abuse, neglect, trauma or chronic stress, tend to make this journey to a centered identity more problematic, resulting in a personality whose center is outside of itself in neurotic attachment.

Under provident conditions the construction of a stable identity continued by the guidance and inspiration of your tribe, preparing for the awakening of your spiritual (or higher) nature. Whereas in premodern society this coordination of spiritual education by a deeper reflection on the symbols and sacred stories of faith was the province of religion, today an individual might well be on his or her own to figure things out. Carl Jung observed that “modern man” is “in search of a soul.”

The real work in any case is surrendering your ego to the higher power of transcendent virtues and ideals (exemplified in the deity) and sacrificing (literally making sacred) your time, energy, and resources in service to the will of god – i.e., to the realization of those divine virtues and ideals in your life with others. Together, these three “moves” in the traditional worship of god are the essence of devotion, making theistic religion essentially devotional in focus.

Healthy religion – and your own spiritual practice – will stir the waking of your higher nature, even to the point of encouraging you to “let go of god.”

Second-nature religion (aka theism) can forge such a strong bond between you and your deity, that breaking through to a soul-centered spirituality is frought with anxiety, guilt, and shame. To let go of god can be easily misconstrued as a rejection of god or rebellion against god, which is frequently how authoritarian theism will play it against you. Insiders will accuse you of abandoning the faith, of turning your back on god and them, and try to persuade you back into the fold.

For you, however, the surrender of devotion has deepened into a full release of ego consciousness for a profound and ineffable experience of inner peace. Descending away from your center of identity, which also entails letting go of your god, you lose yourself – some spiritual teachings refer to this as dying to the conditioned self – in an unbroken communion waiting quietly in the grounding mystery of your being.

Simultaneously another passage opens, this one inviting you to give yourself in service to the higher virtues of genuine community: chief among them compassion, goodwill, lovingkindness and generosity. Whereas the descent of a post-theistic spirituality to inner peace is possible only by the subtraction of ego consciousness, this ascent of higher purpose is only possible insofar as your separate center of identity is affirmed, transcended, and included (distilled in the term transpersonal) – not by subtraction but addition.

This in turn introduces an exponential factor, multiplying with others to produce the transformative effects of a liberated life in community.

The descending path, then, involves letting go of god and leaving god behind (i.e., “up there” at the surface of ego consciousness), while the asending path involves letting go of god in order that the divine virtues, which had earlier been attributed to god and glorified in the worship of god, can be internalized, assimilated, and embodied (from Christianity, incarnated) in your life with others.

From Wonder to Conviction

In the title of this post I have summarized the path of humanity to our final extinction as a species on planet Earth. It won’t be for a lack of convictions that our self-destruction comes, but rather due to an incapacity for wonder.

I might also have titled this post “An Apology for Wonder,” where apology is not a confession of guilt with an implied petition for forgiveness, but a reasoned argument in defense of something. But then again, what I would be attempting to defend is my belief in the important place of wonder in the mind’s engagement with reality – which in a sense commits the fatal mistake I’m hoping to expose here.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand what I’m getting at is to look at your own life and take it as recapitulating the longer course of human history, in the progress and setbacks you’ve had along the way.

The embodied mind of human intelligence evolved for the purpose of facilitating your engagement with reality – with what’s really there and really real, translated as quickly as necessary into behavior that is relevant to what’s going on and adaptive in helping you manage the situations of life. This engagement is processed through a series of steps, or modes, from initial sense perceptions, through a web of mental associations, and finally to the conclusion that motivates (and to you as actor, justifies) a behavioral – or at least a physiological – response.

Considered as a process, even as an algorithm or linear sequence of steps, your mind’s engagement with reality can be understood as open to reality at the beginning and gradually closing upon its constructed beliefs about what’s going on, what it means, and what’s coming next.

When you think about it, a belief about anything is really a conclusion held by your mind, on its own or in agreement with other minds.

It’s important to know that you didn’t begin your life with beliefs about reality already fully formed in your mind. They would come with time and experience, under the tutelage of your tribe, but also only as you acquired the codes, symbols, and logical operations of language. As a construct of language, a belief is a propositional conclusion whose articulation in thought requires and depends on the tools of language.

Before language, then, your mind’s primary engagement with reality was that of wonder – an “open-minded” orientation to what is really there and really real. Such openness to reality has been vitally important to our survival and adaptation as a species, ensuring that our responses in behavior and physiology were “successful” in meeting the challenges, threats, and opportunities life brought our way.

Your mind’s attitude of wonder should not be dismissed as a gaze of baffled enchantment at things whose meaning is beyond you or “over your head.” As the Jewish mystical philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel insisted, wonder is a legitimate category of epistemology. It is your mind’s primary mode of engagement with reality, both in the sense of coming first chronologically and in the way it continues to play a key role in your construction of meaning.

The Greek philosopher Plato also claimed that wisdom begins in wonder – and must never abandon it.

But here’s the problem: We do abandon wonder and its open-minded engagement with reality. The reasons for this are legion, but the main thread can be traced in the mind’s gradual – and we must acknowledge, culturally instructed – withdrawal from a spontaneous and imaginative fascination with what’s going on, into an ever-stronger emotional commitment to our conclusions.

In one sense, this progression (or recession from the position of wonder) toward a set of beliefs that serves to orient us in society, secure our membership, identify us to one another, and make our lives meaningful is a sign of intellectual maturity. When it entails (or requires) an abandonment of wonder, however, the consequence is that our beliefs degenerate into convictions – by which I don’t merely mean stronger beliefs, but beliefs so strong, so fixed and rigid, so absolute in their certainty, that contact with reality is not only no longer necessary but passionately resisted.

Removing your mind from reality and enclosing it inside essentially windowless boxes of belief, where simply confessing them over and over again makes them feel more certain and true, does indeed convey some therapeutic relief from having to engage with what’s really going on around you.

As you were growing up, the world became increasingly complicated and confusing in its diversity. To help you manage, your family and society – with your full if not fully conscious agreement, it must be said – got to work contructing these boxes of belief. Whatever didn’t fit into a box was left out as not important, or else modified and resized so it would fit. And anything in reality that didn’t have a corresponding box was simply ignored and eventually forgotten.

If the anxiety over what you couldn’t control, contain, comprehend, or keep at a distance was severe enough, you hid inside your box and pulled down the lid. Beliefs that would normally provide a perspective on reality ended up as convictions separating you from it. And just like a convict in his cell, your mind became a prisoner of its convictions.

From then on, your attitudes and behavior would be determined by conclusions that lacked a reality orientation, which is to say they were neither very realistic nor relevant. And depending on how early in your emotional development they got set, your present convictions are neither rational, reasonable, nor responsible – by way of taking responsibility – for the behavior they produce.

Just look at all the damage and death that convicted believers in one thing or another have caused throughout human history and around the world. It’s still going on, as the population grows and our perceived (better, imagined) threats multiply around us.

Now, I need to say that in using you as a scale model for diagnosing our current predicament as a species, I do not assume that you are in fact a hostage of your convictions. Nevertheless, you do have some convictions, and so do I. Some of our beliefs – about ourselves, about others, about the world around us, about god and government – keep us out of touch with reality. More to the point, they were fashioned precisely for this purpose.

And to that extent, our convictions are a dangerous force – I would argue the most dangerous force on planet Earth, in the way they shut down wonder, separate us from what’s really real, estrange us from one another, and asphyxiate our souls.

What’s Really Going On

Each of us is rather caught up and fixated on our own personal life – making it through today, cleaning up from yesterday, and getting ready for tomorrow. There’s barely enough mental bandwidth to pay attention to all the details and passing concerns. Catching up on global events is out of the question, and thinking about what’s going on around our planet and across the universe – well, don’t get me started. But now that we’re on the topic, let’s take just a few minutes to ponder what really is going on – not just for me or you or even just on our planet, but what’s going on everywhere, for everyone, and for everything in existence.
Such deep and far-reaching questions have been a significant preoccupation of our species for many thousands of years, and our answers have been offered up in the form of great narratives.
For the longest time, these narratives were metaphorical in nature and organized around dramatic storylines, known in Greek as myths or “plots.” More recently, which is to say during the last 2,500 years or so, our narratives have been in the form of mathematical (or rational) explanations called theories, also from the Greek referring to a way of “looking at” something – from a distance as it were. Poets and scientists have been understandably critical of each other’s narratives, with poets accusing the scientists of disenchanting the universe, and scientists accusing the poets of enchanting the mind. It has occurred only to a relative few on both sides, that maybe each approach has a legitimate place in our human quest for understanding. In other posts I have tried to make this very point, suggesting that while scientific theories seek to explain – literally to “lay things out” logically before the mind, religious myths have sought to reveal – or “pull back the veil” on a hidden reality which our mind cannot grasp.
In what follows we will take a step back, and down, into the creative imagination where this quest is rooted and energized. My diagram is intended to provide some orientation as we go along.
I’ll ask you to imagine yourself, perhaps in silhouette, standing at the very center, with that black vertical line serving as your axis. Integrity refers to the force or principle that enables something – you, in this case – to “hold together as one.” Each existing form is governed to some degree by this principle of integrity, centered in itself and also, by virtue of standing in its own center, separate from all others roundabout. Your centered existence and existential center is where you are grounded in being. Ontology is the study of being, of the power-to-be (or be-ing) that sustains your existence from within. You are a physical, living, sentient, and self-conscious person: each step upwards into yourself corresponds to an evolutionary stage in the formation, and transformations, of the universe.
Scientific theories offer objective explanations of this grounding mystery as examined from outside, while religious myths serve as subjective revelations of the Mystery experienced and expressed from within.
Coming back to you at the center, we need to acknowledge a second force or principle which is acting in creative tension with that of integrity. Synergy refers to a fusion of two or more things coming together, getting engaged, “hooking up,” and combining their energies in a higher wholeness. As a force, synergy is constantly moving things into relationships where a more complex order of existence, as well as an expanded horizon of awareness and life, is possible. The Greek term cosmology literally means the study of order, of the larger patterns that lure individuals beyond themselves into engagements and organizations of increasing complexity. Once again, scientific theory formulates an objective explanation of the cosmos, leaving out as far as possible the perspective of any human mind (i.e., the observer), while religious myth contemplates the higher wholeness from this very self-conscious perspective: what it is to be in and belong to the whole.
Because you are self-conscious and the cosmos includes you, it is perfectly logical – but more importantly, deeply insightful – to say that the universe is conscious of itself in you.
The story of your life, then, is a narrative account of your origins (where you came from and how you came to be who you are) – what is known as etiology or the study of causality. Single sperm and egg cells, each centered in its own integrity, came together and merged into a synergetic whole. This microcosm of a fertilized egg proceeded to divide, converge, differentiate and unify at ever-higher degrees of complexity, specializing according to a genetic code into the physical, living, sentient, and self-conscious human being that you are. This story of causal unfolding flows very naturally into a complementary story of directional aims and evolutionary purposes, or teleology in Greek. Coming together, participating in, and contributing to higher orders of complexity and wholeness might lead us to expect that the ultimate aim of your existence is to endure forever inside the grand harmony of the universe.
But there is a spoiler principle yet to be accounted for, and its work is to break things down into more stable arrangements and energy states.
This is the principle of entropy, literally the tendency of all things to “turn in” on themselves and disintegrate into their more elementary components. If you’re still paying attention, then you will recognize the force of entropy – this breakdown of complex arrangements to simpler and more stable ones – as the gradual arc of your mortality. Higher-order participation is slowly released, engagement with the world relaxes, and the integrity of your own existence as a self-conscious, sentient, living, and physical being starts to loosen and degrade, one level at a time, until your time is up. At that point, who you are will go out like a candle flame, leaving what you were to further dissolve into its elements, eventually to be taken up once again into the grounding mystery of something, or someone, else. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” as we read in the Book of Common Prayer. The interval between is the miracle of your life, and here you are at the center.

Spirituality for Everyone

One of my objectives in this blog, to be perfectly honest, is to help others understand spirituality as essentially distinct from orthodox religion and esoteric spiritualism. It is not, as religions commonly are, an establishment of conservative morality and an echo chamber of archaic superstitions. But neither is it a secret tradition of metaphysical revelations and paranormal powers, protected and passed on to new generations of illuminati by obscure rituals.

As I see it, spirituality is intentional living by the activation of your spiritual intelligence (SQ). Unique to this strand within the quadratic intelligence of our species is a capacity for grounded awareness and unity consciousness, to plumb the depths of your being and participate in the higher wholeness of all things. Such intentional living is very naturally productive of health, happiness, and harmony – what we all desire as human beings.

It’s understandable if theologians and mystagogues might regard my efforts with suspicion, since the goal here is to show everyone – not just true believers and illuminati but each and every one of us – that spirituality is fundamentally a way of life, and one that is open to all.

If orthodox religion and esoteric spiritualism are concerned about membership – belonging to the right tradition, believing the right things, and behaving in the right ways – proper spirituality is interested in primarily one thing: breaking through to the liberated life.

An important feature of this particular type of spirituality, which is best labeled “post-theistic,”* has to do with its emphasis on the developed personality and its executive center of identity, called ego (from Latin for “I”). Instead of regarding the ego as “against god,” in need of rescue to heaven, or as the immortal divinity of your true self, post-theistic spirituality treats it as a healthy symptom and leading indicator in the process of your becoming a unique individual person.

An axiom of spiritual wisdom acknowledges that All is One. In its own way, Western science has confirmed this truth, registered somewhat covertly in its name for the cosmic totality of all things: Universe, literally “turning as one.”

This includes, of course, each of us and all of us together – human and nonhuman, living and nonliving, you and me, the clouds and the stars beyond.

We might call this the Fact of facts, the one sure thing, regardless of whether you contemplate it in rapturous wonder or bumble along in complete ignorance of its truth. And this is where spirituality – or at least your spiritual intelligence – comes into the picture. By virtue of its evolved capacity for grounded awareness and unity consciousness, your spiritual intelligence makes it possible for you to experience your life as both a manifestation of the oneness and as participation in the allness – in the All that is One.

So, while we can agree conceptually that “All is One,” it’s also necessary to understand that you can live your entire life without verifying this Fact of facts in your own experience. Your spiritual intelligence might remain dormant, undeveloped, or suppressed, leaving the depth and unity of existence screened outside your awareness.

Merely subscribing intellectually to these ideas, holding them religiously as doctrines, or confessing them in unison with a standing congregation of fellow believers isn’t a substitute for an awakened spirituality.

A central tenet of post-theistic spirituality affirms the ego – your separate center of self-conscious personal identity – as serving a critical function in the activation of your spiritual intelligence. The drop into a contemplative experience of oneness (what I call the grounding mystery) and the leap into a transpersonal experience of allness (or higher unity) presuppose a set location in consciousness from which the drop or leap is taken.

This location is your ego.

For a proper reading of my diagram, keep your eye on the center axis. The formation of your ego and contruction of a personal identity entail a gradual contraction of consciousness, out of the undifferentiated (and relatively speaking, unconscious) oneness, or communion, in which you are immersed, like a fish in water. With your self-center established, you are able to participate in the shared consciousness (or “togetherness”) of relationships, or what is properly named community – literally “together as one.”

The difference between community and communion is an experiential one: in community your ego is included and transcended in a higher wholeness, while in communion your separate center of identity is released for a deeper oneness where differences and distinctions begin to dissolve away.

I like to think of this duality of higher wholeness (community) and deeper oneness (communion) as the Yang and Yin of the All-as-One, the ultimate reality of Tao.

If everything went reasonably well in your early years of ego formation – with good-enough parents and a provident home environment – your emerging personality, with the executive ego at its center, achieved a sufficient degree of integrity. In this context, integrity is a measure of how stable and unified your personality is by virtue of possessing a secure center of identity. It is from this center that a contemplative release into communion is possible, leading to deeper experiences of solitude.

Ego integrity also affords your personality a necessary freedom from other people and the world around you. You no longer need to emotionally cling to or lean on something outside yourself for security, which sets you free to engage others and the world around you with intention rather than in reaction or by compulsion. Relating to others on such a non-attachment basis allows for attentive and compassionate engagement, where genuine dialogue between partners can take place.

In other posts I refer to dialogue – literally the mutual construction of meaning by partners in relationship – as the high calling of genuine community. Together-as-one, partners create a shared world based on respect, compassion, service, inclusion, and goodwill.

That’s spirituality for everyone.

*Interpreting spirituality against the backdrop of religion and its three main types (animism, theism, and post-theism) provides important context for a constructive approach to religion itself.

What Do You Want? (The Pyramid of Human Desires)

Let me start with a bold declaration. Each of us – every human being – wants to be healthy, happy, and in harmonious relationships with others and the world around us. Of course, we pursue many other things, like sex, wealth, power, status, and immortality, but these are only derivative and secondary as compared to our desire for health, happiness, and harmony.

Our desire for health is probably beyond argument. No one wants to be sick or injured, to live with chronic pain or terminal illness. True enough, we don’t always (or even very often, consistently) do those things that support and promote our health – and by this I primarily mean our physical health. We may have grown up in a household where junk food was a staple and portions were not controlled.

So even if we don’t do, or even know what and how to do what would make us healthy, we still want to be healthy.

When it comes to our desire for happiness, this too might be indisputable except for the fact that we all seem to hold different definitions and pursue it in ways that are in many instances radically divergent. And if a certain percentage of humans are unhealthy, it would seem that an even higher percentage are unhappy – by which I don’t mean just momentarily anxious, frustrated, disappointed, or grieved, but chronically (even in some cases clinically) so.

All around us is news of tension, conflicts, violence, and suffering, generating unhappiness on large scales: Bad people doing evil things to hurt other people who don’t deserve it. We have only to look into our own lives, however, to understand that this kind of consequential unhappiness – unhappiness that follows as a consequence of other things – is not the full picture. In fact, these very things are themselves clear symptoms of an underlying and antecedent unhappiness.

People hurt other people and cause unhappiness because they are already unhappy themselves, and are either trying to make themselves happy by taking control and manipulating others, or else by spreading their unhappiness to others in hopes of feeling less lonely in their own misery.

In the list of things every human being wants – health, happiness, and harmony with others and the world around us – is an implied hierarchy of value: the Pyramid of Human Desires.

Health is most basic and provides a foundation for the others. When we are healthy, our energy and attention can be turned toward things that interest and inspire us, things that excite us to learn and challenge us to grow, things that motivate us to live generously and take personal responsibility.

These are things that support and promote our happiness in life. To be clear, we don’t (and can’t) find happiness in these things. In other words, our unhappy craving will not find satisfaction in them if we pick them up and gobble them down with the expectation that they will make us happy at last, or lastingly happy.

Similarly, when we are happy, the way we engage with others and the world around us is more harmonious than when we are not happy. If instead of coming to others and the world around us with a preexisting cultivated sense of happiness, we try to find our happiness in others and in the world around us – because we don’t have it yet or know what it really is – we will cause damage and harm to others as well as to ourselves.

The harmony we seek, in other words, is dependent in many ways on our ability to cultivate happiness and share it with others.

This would suggest that large-scale and chronic conflicts among humans and human groups (races, tribes, sects, nations, and parties), along with the widespread suffering they cause, can be traced in their causality to a failure in managing our own individual happiness. We mistakenly believe that something or someone outside us will make us happy – or perhaps merely less anxious, frustrated, disappointed, or depressed – and acting on this mistaken belief is what generates (or at least perpetuates) our tensions and conflicts with others and the world around us.

Which brings us back down the Pyramid, to the desire for and commitment to our health. Each step downward confirms a second principle in play, to the one just reviewed in going up.

Just as harmony with others and the world around us provides a salutary context for happiness in life, so does the cultivation of happiness sustain in each of us a chronic mood of inner calm and centered awareness. The science of psychosomatic health verifies just how essential is our chronic mood – and by that is meant the baseline internal state and emotional energy of our nervous system – to our general physical health. Many dysfunctions and diseases of the body can be understood and best treated as signs of an underlying systemic (i.e., psychosomatic or “mind-body”) imbalance.

Before we can effectively address and resolve the conflicts among us, we need to bring to this work the gift of our own happiness and a deep commitment to the cultivation of inner peace. The wisdom traditions of the world have taught this for millenniums. If you take a second look at this shared depository of spiritual wisdom, you’ll soon begin to see the Pyramid of Human Desires (health, happiness, and harmony with others and the world around us) bringing it all into focus.

The Wisdom Code

I agree: It’s hard being you.

Your whole life you’ve been trying to figure this thing out, but still you’re left with unanswered questions and pressing concerns. It’s not clear that you’ll be able to “crack the code” before your time is up.

It sure seems that humans would have reached a deeper understanding by now, after thousands of years of suffering and searching for the answer.

Well, we have.

After taking a few minutes to review what’s been discovered and preserved in the perennial wisdom traditions of our species, we’ll need to come back for an explanation as to why, with such clear insight harbored in our collective consciousness for so long, we nevertheless persist in our pretense of ignorance.

Here’s what we know. You – or your “I” (ego) who is searching for truth – are an agent of your tribe, of the society that holds your membership. Your daily life in the world amounts to a carousel of roles that you play, as you step in and out of various role-plays.

Every one of the roles you play is a social construct.

You weren’t born a manager, a nurse, a student, a party member, or religious believer. Even among your casual acquaintances, you step into relationships by first assuming a role, however informal, which identifies you to others in the role-play and conveys your status, credibility, and reputation.

Once again, it’s important to see that you weren’t born with these roles. They are not products of nature, but constructs of culture. They were constructed for the purpose of securing your membership in society and making you an agent of its “system,” by which is meant its network, worldview, ideology, and way of life.

What’s more, you didn’t just “put on” or “step into” these various roles without first getting certain things under control. What things? Let’s summarize them as the drives and desires of your animal nature. The instinctual intelligence of your body has been evolving over generations of prehuman and hominid species, and its primary concern is with your survival, need satisfaction, and successful reproduction.

It should be no surprise that your natural drives and desires care not one bit about all those cultural conventions of identity.

But your society does care, since all those cultural conventions of identity are essential to its efficient operation. The drives and desires of your animal nature couldn’t simply be allowed instant gratification in the polite and civil company of others. Hold it, and quickly find a bathroom. Hang on and take care of it on your own time. And as for that, you better keep it to yourself and off-stage, because that will get you in trouble around here.

All these control measures were put in place in order to domesticate your animal nature, to condition you into a well-behaved member of society. Some of that primal energy was thereby redirected and refined into the roles of social identity mentioned earlier. Even though you are basically a human animal, this process of domestication slowly shaped you into a person with deep emotional investment in the role-plays of your tribe.

We should also note that your society is somewhat unique among all other societies of the world. Belonging to American society is a very different experience from belonging to, say, Bengalese or Samoan society. This is not only explained by the conditions of geography, climate, and race, but also by the fact that each society is organized around and oriented on a rather unique set of ideals.

Devotion literally means to make a vow and dedicate oneself by a sacrifice of time, effort, or some other more tangible value symbol (like a lamb or bull in archaic societies) to something regarded as having superior value and power – what we are calling an “ideal.”

These ideals exemplify and inspire what a society regards as ultimately good, true, beautiful, and eternal. Somewhere in your early education you were introduced to the ideals of your society – in the form of moral injunctions (thou shalt and thou shalt not), nursery fables, and all the stories of heroes, saints, saviors, and celebrities in your cultural mythology.

The preservation of this mythology, as well as the disciplined reflection on its meaning and personal devotion to its transcendent ideals, has been one of the primary functions of religion throughout human cultural history.

It seems inevitable, however, that every society will tend eventually to confuse its depictions of ultimate reality with the ideals that those depictions were originally intended to represent.

This is when an ideal becomes an idol. The corruption of devotion into idolatry occurs when a representation of utimate reality, which had once served as a mediating metaphor or image of what cannot be imagined, comes to obscure and then replace its transcendent referent as an object to be glorified and worshipped.

In the middle of all of this, there remains the question that individuals just like you have been struggling to answer for thousands of years: “Who am I?”

By a quick review: Your society imposed controls on the drives and desires of your animal nature, controls which you eventually internalized and took over in your ego. Besides putting restraints on your instincts, society also trained your devotion on certain idols and ideals that represent ultimate reality.

And then, in the provision of roles for your life in society, you proceeded to take on a variety of personas – performing, playing-at, and pretending to be what others expected of you.

But who are you, really?

In other words, who (or maybe better, what) is so busy playing at being somebody special on this stage or that? If you are nothing more (or other) than the personas you are playing on stage, you are – or predictably will soon become – anxious, frustrated, exhausted, and depressed. According to the perennial wisdom traditions, we all get caught in this sticky web of forgetting our true self.

It is our socially conditioned trance state, the illusion we mistake as reality. Magnified to the extent that we all submit to its spell, this condition is what Wisdom names “the human condition.”

In his important work, Parker Palmer clarifies the dynamic tension between “role” and “soul” – soul referring to your inner life and true self. When you forget and neglect the grounding mystery of your true self, in chasing after the acceptance, approval, and recognition of others, you are forsaking the deeper reality of who and what you are.

Across the many branching streams of the one River of Wisdom, this is the essential message: at once an expression of sincere empathy, a strong word of urgent warning, and some really good news about the liberated life – which is always closer than you think.

A Republican Reckoning

The profound disruption and near destruction of American democracy under the presidency of Donald Trump is something we will probably need a decade or more to fully assess. Electing what many thought was a successful businessman with a deep understanding of investment and negotiation strategies turned out to be a serious misjudgment of his business acumen, true intelligence and moral character.

A majority of Americans watched in disbelief as Trump systematically dismantled US institutions, political alliances, trade agreements, civil rights, and environmental regulations. Looking behind us now as we transition to a new administration, the wreckage is strewn across our nation, from sea to shining sea.

One of the most perplexing things about these past four years – at least to me – has to do with how many in the Republican party seemed to throw themselves at the feet of Donald Trump.

They didn’t just look away when he demeaned women, disrespected minorities, attacked congressional Democrats, bullied other global leaders, and promoted the values of white supremacy. Many Republicans cheered him on, adding their insults to the injuries. They stood by as he conspired to undermine our election and its result.

My intention here is not to accuse Republicans of being Republican – that is, of standing firm on the ideals of Republican political philosophy. Instead, I want to explore the question of why so many Republicans were willing to abandon those very ideals for the sake of something that is in fundamental contradiction to what being Republican has long been about.

For reasons I will try to make clear, Democrats seemed to enjoy immunity from Trump’s viral influence, which is why I will name the Republicans who went over to him “Trumplicans.”

My diagram illustrates four continuums of democratic ideals which have been central in the historical dialogue of Democrats and Republicans. The utility of a continuum as a heuristic device is in the way it allows us to appreciate differences as positional values along a spectrum of virtues mutually shared.

It’s not that Democrats advocate for “equality” (treating everyone the same) and dismiss the importance of “merit” (rewarding individual excellence), or that Republicans champion merit and argue against the importance of equality. For both parties historically, equality and merit have been recognized as strategic priorities of a healthy democracy, but each party ranks them differently.

In similar ways, “charity” (service to others) and “liberty” (individual freedom) form a continuum whereon a variety of positions might be taken – not either/or but more-or-less. “Affiliation” (forming bonds with others) and “Autonomy” (standing on one’s own) are likewise polar ideals that generate a spectrum of ratios in-between. Finally, “cooperation” (working together) and “competition” (seeking to win) are not really mutually exclusive opposites (think of sports), but rather complementary or paradoxical opposites, with their various admixtures making for healthy human interactions.

For my purpose here, which is to understand why so many Republicans gave up their political identity and became (willingly or unwittingly) Trumplicans, I want to focus on the side of each value continuum that Republicans have promoted more actively – although I must stress again that both parties have had a shared commitment (with different priorities) to all eight ideals.

As a priority value of Republican political philosophy, merit emphasizes the special talents, exceptional achievements, and unique contributions of individuals. Such things set these individuals apart from the average, “meriting” the recognition of society in the form of accolades, celebrity, and financial reward. Because they are so closely associated in the reward system of a meritocracy, wealth has frequently been mistaken as a symptom of merit.

Many societies besides our own have fallen to the assumption that wealth is a sign of an individual’s native talent, honest work, moral virtue, and even divine election.

Once the mistake is made and wealth replaces merit, a relentless pursuit of profit over all else quickly takes over. “What’s in it for me?” drives every negotiation, every investment, every relationship, and every choice. The relentless pursuit of profit will make one willing to compromise on long-standing ideals, violate once-sacred values, and attack anyone who gets in the way. Trumplicans believe, with Donald Trump, that profit should have the first seat and the last word, in all of life.

Another historical priority of the Republican party, liberty, elevates individual rights to keep and defend our property, say what’s on our minds, believe in and worship what we want, and live our lives relatively free from restraints, regulations, and the control of government. The Revolution that officially started the American Experiment was a revolt against a monarchy that sought to mandate our religion, tax our wealth, and make us subservient to the Crown.

The banner of Liberty! was our inspiration, and our nation’s leaders committed the work of democracy to its cause and protection.

But in this case, too, the worthy ideal of liberty and its associated vigilance over oppressive regimes or the unwanted control of others in our business can motivate us to actively seek ways to game the system and negotiate an exemption for ourselves. If a liberal democracy depends on legislated mechanisms like taxation and assessment for the revenue it needs to maintain itself, we will still do our best to minimize, defer, suspend, or avoid having to pay our fair share. We reason that, as many are paying into the system, we shouldn’t have to – particularly if the amount being “taken” from us (as an absolute rather than a proportionate value) is so much greater.

Autonomy literally means “self-rule” or “self-control,” and it was not only a key driver in the settlement of the New World, but also figures prominently in human psychological development – playing in creative opposition to the interest of forming bonds and joining groups (affiliation). Without the healthy achievement of autonomy, we cannot gather sufficient ego strength to hold our own in the world. Taking control in our lives – developmentally from our parents, politically from an English monarchy – serves to establish within ourselves a center of conscience, judgment, freewill, and self-determination.

For most of us, this path to healthy autonomy was rather rocky, with self-doubt and insecurity chronically urging us to give up on its pursuit, or else try to take it aggressively and prematurely. The result was vainglory, which can be difficult to distinguish from, and can easily slide into, clinical narcissism and megalomania.

When our center of self is not well-established, we try to compensate by getting attention, stealing the spotlight, and insisting on our superior – “no other president in the history of this country” – genius, talent, achievement, and success.

Finally, a Republican identity favors competition over cooperation, which is understandable when we tie it to the cluster of autonomy, liberty, and merit. In all these ideals the individual – and we can expand the concept to include an individual team, an individual class, an individual race, or an individual nation – is regarded as competing with other individuals (teams, classes, races and nations) for rank, privilege, resources, or whatever happens to be the prize.

A clean win is often not enough to satisfy Donald Trump and his Trumplicans, however. Domination, and if at all possible the humiliation of an opponent, is where the real victory lies. Not just to win a competition, but to overwhelm the competition, to beat them down with embarrassment and shame, so they look up to you from their pathetic state as “The Supreme Champion, best ever anywhere” – that’s what really makes the victory sweet.

But of course, complete domination, while it may soothe the insecurity inside our vainglory, also extinguishes the fuse of competition by destroying our opponent in the process.

With all that said, it’s important to reaffirm the validity and historical importance of the Republican political philosophy. All the priorities it has advocated for are essential to the health and vitality of American democracy – as long as they can stay in constructive dialogue with those of Democrats.

Admittedly it is not easy to respect and defend values that pull in the opposite direction of our own, but this is the secret to constructive dialogue and the genuine community sustained through its intentional practice.

Wisdom’s Long Journey

The spiritual wisdom traditions teach that every human being is somewhere in the process of waking up, that we are each emerging from a long, deep sleep. We’re not yet fully awake, most of us, but a new way of being – what Paul Tillich named the New Being – is even now available, and it’s calling us, calling on us to step into the liberated life.

The main organizing plot of this good news is indeed the foundational myth of Wisdom herself, pictured frequently in feminine form, evolving across three distinct “vehicles” or modes of existence: first as an animal, then as a person, and finally as creative spirit. The larger story is an account of Wisdom’s journey, and also therefore of our own human transformation through time.

But if you think it’s all about you, that only means you haven’t gotten far enough in the story yet.

The larger story of Wisdom’s journey and human evolution is unfolding even now in your own brief lifetime. In fact, the spiritual wisdom traditions insist that until you can see your own life in the myth of Wisdom, your apprehension of its truth will only be a conditioned and veiled understanding – it won’t be anything more than a religion.

So let’s take a closer look at you – not merely your “I” who is busy playing at being somebody special, but all of you, the full reality and potential of what you are. That fullness is represented in Wisdom’s three modes of existence, her distinct manifestations, according to the larger story.

You, too, began life in animal form. As a newborn infant, your animal nature was the vehicle of consciousness, the primary facility of your experience of life and engagement with reality. Deep in your physiology are behavior codes called instincts, with ancient histories reaching back millions of years and across numerous species.

These present codes are themselves evidence of their success in securing the survival and reproduction of your pre-human and human ancestors.

Your animal intelligence – the wisdom of your body – is intuitively aware of the deep reciprocal nature and interdependence of things: of its own urgencies for food, water, oxygen and energy, and the provident supply of these by its physical environment. Rather than thinking of your body as an organism apart from its environment, science has helped us to understand it as an “energy exchange” facilitating a constant back-and-forth flow in the dynamic balance of life.

In your animal form, especially back in those early days of life, you had no sense of yourself as separate from everything else – not yet. Your experience of life and engagement with reality was energetic and spontaneous, compulsive and reactive.

Slowly, however, consciousness began to ascend into self-consciousness and you found yourself on a new plane of existence, at a different center of awareness and mode of life. You were becoming a person. While the upward thrust of this emerging sense of yourself is inherent to the process of becoming fully human, its shape and character were determined to a great extent by the influence of your tribe – first your family of origin, and then, expanding outward, of the larger society that held your membership.

This personal mode of existence is what we call your ego, which is Latin for “I” – the one referenced earlier as playing at being somebody special. Now, what I say next may come as a shock, and it typically takes a fair amount of time, reflection, and courage for someone to comprehend its implications.

But here it is: Your personal identity – not the upward thrust but its shape and character – is a social construction and entirely without substance or reality.

Think of it this way. Identity is always a function of identifying with something: “I am (a) ________.” In the early years your tribe filled in those blanks for you. “You are one of us. This is who we are as a people. This is what we believe. This is how we live. These are our values. This is what it means to be a member in good standing.” And so on. All of those identifications were gradually weaved together into a canopy of meaning that became your world.

Yes, your world is also a social construction, a construction of so many veils suspended between consciousness and reality, for the purpose of clothing your ego with identity and meaning.

Just as with your animal mode of existence, so your personal mode as an ego playing at being (pretending to be) somebody special is a polarity of two dimensions. We’ve already mentioned your world, which is the objective dimension of identity. The term objective literally means “thrown over” (like a canopy) and is commonly confused with other terms like external or factual. As we are using it here, objective only makes sense as a corollary of ego – of the one whose world it is.

Because your world is shared in large part with others (that is, with other egos), it seems to exist independently of you, as the way things really are. But that is an illusion, and believing it makes you a victim of delusion.

The other side of the polarity in personal identity is what you call your self. It is the subjective dimension, literally “thrown under” (or beneath) who you are playing on stage. As your tribe was busy shaping your identity and filling in the blanks, you were taking it all in – experiencing life and engaging with reality as the so-and-so you were pretending to be.

Earlier we referenced the myth of Wisdom as the larger story of our human transformation through time. The spiritual wisdom traditions hold our sacred aspiration, along with the necessary insights and meditative skills, of completing the journey and breaking through to the liberated life of spirit. It is precisely at this juncture of the journey, however, where you are doing your best to meet the expectations of society and be a “good _______,” that the path gets complicated.

This is also where many get stuck and might spend the rest of their lives, asleep in identity.

Let’s come back to you. Your tribe gave you both clear and confusing messages about what was accepted and expected from you. Think of how much time and effort – all the desperate and anguished effort – you invested in seeking the approval of others. You needed their validation; your very identity depended on being recognized by them as so-and-so, as somebody special. Another thing to understand, however (and this should not come as such a shock), is how unfair, unrealistic, even outright manipulative and abusive some of those demands were.

But you weren’t old enough to know better, and your need to belong was irresistible, so you agreed (though not always consciously) to be what others accepted and expected of you. And even though some of those demands were unfair and abusive, you began to withhold and pack away parts of yourself that didn’t fit your society’s templates of identity.

The result was a shadow in your personality, a side of your self that was forbidden (by society) and hidden (by you), kept off-stage and out of the play.

This is where many are stuck – and where many more have expired over the long history of our species: trying to fit in, desperate to stand out, holding themselves back, burdened by guilt and shame, just about ready to surrender the whole exhausting pursuit of being somebody special.

Here, finally, is our third revelation, which really amounts to an apocalypse – literally an insight that “blows off the cover” and pulls down the veil of your illusion. This moment, where you are ready to give up on the entire project of being somebody special, is what Jesus and other wisdom teachers have called the “narrow gate” to freedom and the liberated life. It is the breakthrough from a personal mode of existence to a spiritual (contemplative and transpersonal) one.

In the myth of Wisdom, this is often depicted as a new birth, a resurrection from death, the butterfly abandoning its cocoon, a waking from sleep, the free flight of wild gander against a blue sky.

Now, if you are especially attached to your personal identity, entangled with your shadow and a hostage to your world, the prospect of breaking free will likely seize you with terror. True enough, proceeding into the apocalypse can be profoundly disruptive, and it will undoubtedly strip off and away all your attachments. In human history, this is where ego has opted for self-inflation over self-transcendence, for everlasting life over an authentic, liberated life here and now.

But if you were to drop the charade and get over yourself, the awakening of consciousness to a soul-centered mode of existence would enable you to look back at this moment as but a blink of an eye – so light, so quick, so easy.

What you’ll find on the spiritual plane of awareness are two transformative insights, correlated according to the polarity of your soul. On one side is a realization that breaks beyond your world, and on the other a realization that breaks within your self.

Beyond your world and its canopy of meaning, All is One; this is the holistic truth of our universe, the higher wholeness of all things, which of course includes you. Within your self and its delusion of substance, is the present mystery of being-itself; this is the essential truth of your ground, deeper than words can reach but simultaneously rising in you and as you this very moment.

There is a paradox of wisdom that should be apparent in all of this: The liberated life requires you to drop the chains that tether your identity, and still you might choose the security of your chains to the wild freedom of spirit.

Spiritual Exercise

Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and feel yourself relax into your body. The “drop” of consciousness into the biorhythms, life-force, and material gravity of your body begins from a place where a lot of your time and attention is invested. It’s a place of chronic anxiety and exhaustion, of curating and managing a personal identity inside a busy social arena.

We’ll come back to that place after a while, but for now just “breathe and be” in your living body. Don’t observe your body from some elevated perch; in other words, don’t make your body into an object of study. Simply breathe and be, feeling your breath come and go, rise and fall. In the background you may also hear the soft “hum” of consciousness as it idles in your nervous system.

Notice that “down here” in your body you are fully present in the here and now. All that fuss up at the surface has been left behind, as your awareness rides gently in the rhythms of life. If you rest here long enough, tuning your mind to this grounding mystery of being, you’ll begin to sense the boundary between your body and the reality around you begin to open up and dissolve away.

We know from science that your body is not separate from the physical environment in which it has evolved. Events and conditions of external reality translate near-instantly into reactions, perceptions, and changing internal states of your nervous system. Material nutriment, water, oxygen, and light “out there” is metabolized into cell structure and living tissue; into glands, organs, and organ systems; into the organism of your living body.

Organism-environment is the reciprocal dance and mutual transformation of matter and life.

One metaphor that captures this idea – this experience you are having right now of the fluid communion of your body and its environment, is a web. The descent of conscious awareness from the surface where you manage an identity on the stage of social role-plays, brings with it the revelation that everything is connected and interdependent – a web of communion.

From science again, we know that this web of communion is very ancient, with each new generation of life a contemporary manifestation of a long line reaching back millions, even billions, of years into the early history of our planet. Every speck of matter comprising your body derives from primordial stardust. The design code of your DNA and the instincts that drive your unconscious behavior are inherited from primitive ancestors, from long before the emergence of humans.

Because so much of your daily life is tied up there at the surface, an occasional descent into your body and its web of communion seems a welcome respite. Long ago, however, our human ancestors lived here all the time. Time itself didn’t stretch between a “past” and “future,” as it does for you, but instead revolved through cycles that synced with the rhythms of life in the body. Their place and participation in the web was respected by them as a sacred privilege.

Their religion, called animism, was centered in the body and focused on the ritual responsibility of honoring and renewing the bond between “human” and “nature.”

Over many thousands, even millions, of years human consciousness continued to evolve, facilitated and accelerated by the influence of language, symbolism, storytelling, technology and culture. What eventually arrived, in fact, was the very same center of self-conscious identity that you released at the beginning of this meditation, when you dropped into the “breathe and be” of your embodied experience. Well – not the exact same center, since each person’s center of identity (or ego) is unique and separate from all the others, as well as from everything else.

So let’s go back up to the surface.

Life up here is a staged affair, and interpersonal transactions follow according to certain prescriptions of identity: roles to fill, parts to play, rules to observe, and masks to wear. (Our word “person” derives from the Latin persona, referring to a stage actor’s mask through which (per) she would speak (sona) her lines.) When consciousness inhabits one of these roles, it becomes self-conscious as So-and-So in a socially prescribed role-play with other so-and-sos.

With this invention of identity and its countless roles, society was able to evolve and further facilitate the growing complexity of human populations. A virtually infinite number of social interactions was now possible – as many roles and masks as could be invented. The perception of time was no longer circular and rhythmic, but instead became linear and terminal as a projection of the individual’s sense of himself as arriving on stage and finally exiting the stage.

The more invested and involved humans got in this identity game, however – and you can attest to this from your own experience as a person – the less aware and mindful they became of the body and its web of communion. Performing roles and managing a personal identity entails a kind of disembodiment of consciousness and its individuation as an ego (Latin for “I,” the actor). So while the body continued as it had for many millions of years, the social complications and anxieties at the surface syphoned more and more consciousness into the business of trying to be somebody special.

This second great cultural shift in human evolution, from a nature-and-body-centered experience to a society-and-ego-centered one, brought with it a new type of religion as well, called theism.

Now religion wasn’t so much concerned over harmony with nature, but grew increasingly invested in the management of traditions, institutions, and ideologies that preserved and enforced the moral codes of culture. Theos, the god or deity who stood behind and above this moral order, was conceived and projected as a “superego” (the “I” in the sky) whose will directed all things and whose ordination legitimated human authorities on earth.

We don’t need to go much deeper into theism, but it should be obvious how hand-in-glove the notion of “god above” is with the separation of consciousness into a personal identity and its social role-plays. Just as your ego is separate from your body and harnesses the impulses of its animal nature for the sake of acceptance, approval, recognition, and social status, so the deity in theism ensures that the “body politic” of society is obedient to its moral mandate.

A second function of the deity in theism is to exemplify the virtues of moral character, and to motivate devotees in the imitatio Dei (the aspiration to be like god), to be more patient, gracious, faithful, compassionate, and forgiving – to name a few of the outstanding virtues of god, as depicted in myth and theology. To be “like god” in this regard is considered the highest calling in healthy theistic religions.

Throughout the history of theism, a few individuals have reported an experience of “waking up” from the spell of belief and seeing through the veil that separates personal identity from ultimate reality. They speak of a hidden wholeness, a higher Truth, and a universal Spirit beyond the fractured lens of ego consciousness.

They have also consistently challenged the conventional belief in god’s objective existence, which for obvious reasons has made them enemies of theistic orthodoxy. Their religion is properly called post-theistic.

Standing here, centered in your personal identity and unconcerned with either promoting or defending yourself to others nearby, distant, or long dead, the universe invites you back into its web of communion.

But whereas down there in your body the experience was of an undifferentiated oneness (the fluid transformations of matter and life), up here and looking out from the position of your individual ego you can see that All is One: a differentiated togetherness. The “mystical” (ineffable, intuitive) communion felt deep in the grounding mystery of your embodied life is revealed from this perspective as the “transpersonal” (consilient, integral) community of all things.

There. With that you have completed one rep of this spiritual exercise. Keep working out.