How Things Seem

Reality is our code-word for What Is. If something is, it is real or has reality. We often speak of Reality as what stands beyond, or on the other side of, our veils of meaning – of what’s on our minds or only in our imagination.

But what if there were no human minds or imaginations to hang veils in front of Reality?

Obviously, nothing would be said about It, nor could anything be known – at least as humans think we know Reality. With no humans around to sense It, perceive It, process perceptions and form opinions, theories, stories and beliefs about Reality – just imagine. No, check that.

Perhaps the most appropriate name for this ineffable something-that-is-no-thing is the Present Mystery of Reality.

We capitalize the term to remind ourselves that Reality is not this or that particular thing, or even the sum total of all particular things. With Paul Tillich we can say that Reality is the power to be (or be-ing) in all that exists. It is here and now (Present) but cannot be named or known (Mystery), except by the slanting picture language of metaphor.

Without human minds and imaginations, of course, there would be no metaphors or the experience of meaning they make possible.

Once self-conscious human persons poked their heads above the sea of sentient consciousness enveloping the earth, Reality suddenly split into two distinct realms: a realm “around me” and another “within myself” (my self).

The center of self-conscious personal identity from which these dual orientations are taken is named “I” (ego in Latin).

Whereas thousands of generations of many millions of sentient species before humans had perceived Reality via their sense receptors and nervous systems, Reality for them was not – and still isn’t – divided as it is for us, between around and within.

Such a split orientation is only possible as reflexive awareness (proto-ego) is sufficiently inflated with the possession of myself that it breaks above the surface of pure sentient consciousness to become self-conscious as me, “out here” in the middle of everything yet paradoxically feeling all alone.

Now, you might think that existing (literally “standing out”) above the sea of spontaneous sentient experience is some kind of catastrophe that shouldn’t have happened so many millenniums ago – but also a million times each day around the planet, as two-year-olds wake up to themselves as separate egos.

You wouldn’t be alone in thinking that.

A majority report among the world religions insists that our human rise into a separate center of self-conscious identity (ego) was actually a fall from (or out of) a more perfect state, and that things got worse for us after that, not better.

As a consequence of this fall from grace (aka paradise or Pure Spirit), humans are mortal, insecure, and selfish. If something isn’t done, we are going to fall even farther down – or get thrown there by a god who can’t manage, or perhaps doesn’t care enough, to save us.

Interestingly, this religious diagnosis of the human condition – minus the offended and exasperated deity at the end of the story – is in essential agreement with our earlier account. Whether our separation into self-conscious identity is the outcome of an emergent rise from something deeper or a disintegrative fall from something higher, both metaphorical accounts can be true.

Before the religions invented heaven and hell, and then later flipped things to the horizontal timeline, a vertical fall-into-separation was how the ancient tradition of Sophia Perennis depicted the human condition.

At the beginning of the First Axial Age (800-200 BCE), a new paradigm of emergence from below started rippling across the higher cultures of East and West. Its more ‘organic’ model would serve in the West as the theoretical foundation of the Life sciences and their eventual consilience in a unified theory of evolution.

For this reason, it is easier for modern Western scientific minds to envision the separation into self-conscious identity as a rise rather than a fall. Still, there are many modern Western religious minds who prefer the Fall metaphor – although for them it’s not metaphorical but an historical event that occurred around six thousand years ago, according to their literal reading of the Bible.

Let’s not get hung up in the difference. Remember, the Present Mystery of Reality is unqualified, ineffable, and meaning-less – until human minds and imaginations begin draping their veils of meaning over it.

To help you appreciate how the two accounts (fall and rise) are really complementary perspectives taken from the vantage point of your self-conscious ego, I will ask you to get centered in your own personal identity. Acknowledge when you have reached the place from whence you can look “around me” as well as (but not simultaneously) “within myself.”

This place is named “I” (ego), and your entire quality world turns on it.

Notice I didn’t say that Reality turns on your ego. That’s a privileged position reserved for the superego of religion’s god, which, as you have probably already figured out, is an important character embroidered on its sacred veils of meaning.

From this location of ego, everything around you appears as a multiplicity of random, disconnected things. Because you are looking out through space, each particular object or cluster of objects seems to be contained in a vacuum and set apart from other objects. The space between things is, in its own way, a kind of evidence that each thing is separate from everything else.

What you don’t realize is that the separation evident all around you is really an effect and function of the fact that your “I” (ego) had to withdraw to its own unique and separate center in order to exist (stand out). You see things as separate because you, in your ego, have separated yourself from it all.

In Reality, all things are connected in a harmony of higher wholeness, as a system of reciprocal interdependent relationships. You also are included and fully belong to this All-that-is-One.

Now turn your attention to the complementary orientation and look “within myself.” This move may be more challenging than the one of going out and beyond (i.e., transcending) your ego to the inclusive wholeness of Reality. Instead of an experience of being united with everything “around me,” this second path requires consciousness to release and drop away from the outpost of your ego, deeper “within myself” where “I” cannot go.

Here the experience is a communion of deeper oneness, sinking and dissolving into the Source of your existence, what Sophia Perennis names the Ground of Being. Deepest within, Reality is Nothingness (no-thing-ness) and you are Nowhere (now-here). In following the descending roots from mind into body, and from body into soul, awareness finally arrives at the terminus – and simply lets go.

Sophia Perennis 3.0

As an infant and very young child, you were an animist. Experience was centered in your Body – technically the BodySoul, referring to your essential nature as a human (Body) being (Soul), although at that time the intuitive and introspective powers of your Soul were operating below the range of conscious attention.

BodySoul is the complementarity of consciousness – the ‘Tao’ of your essential nature – with an extraverted and outreaching (more life!) principle of ‘Yang’ in communion with an introverted and inreaching (deeper ground) principle of ‘Yin’.

By two years of age you were on your way to becoming a theist, learning the language of your tribe and finding your place on the social performance stage. Experience now re-centered in your emerging Ego, referring to the self-conscious actor (ego: “I”) who experiments with identity by pretending to be somebody in a variety of roles.

These personas (a term taken from ancient theater for the character masks through which an actor would speak their part) adapted you to the interactive environments of your family and fantasy life. Theism is a type of religion that is socially situated and oriented on the special authority of higher powers – analogs of the taller powers (i.e., parents and other adults) who managed and supervised your theater of identity during childhood.

The religion of theism at the sociocultural level follows the same developmental progression as it did for you growing up. Its initial orientation (early theism) is on god’s authority and will, where devotees are expected to obey, follow the rules, and do what’s right. Theism constructs and clarifies its concept of god using the media of stories (mythology), images (iconography), and ideas (theology).

As constructs of the human mythopoetic imagination, the gods of theism are metaphors of provident authority and personifications of higher power, fashioned on the archetypes of your mother and father in childhood.

You didn’t remain in that posture of obedient dependency, however. As you continued to develop, the relationship to your taller powers also evolved. It’s not that their will and authority no longer mattered, but something else started to shine through – at least we can hope it did, to some degree.

This something else is what we call virtue, referring to their charisma as role models or exemplars of goodness, generosity, integrity, compassion, understanding, and wisdom – to list just a few of the higher character virtues attributed to the gods of theism.

Indeed, these six virtues in particular serve as leading indicators along the arc of human higher evolution. Societies in which theistic religion clarifies these six virtues in its representation of god tend to be far healthier, happier, and more resilient than those with religions that don’t.

This shift or expansion from an early focus on god’s authoritative will to a developing appreciation of god’s virtuous character, marks the progress to high theism where the dedicated effort of a devotee – just as it was for you in middle childhood – advances from a motive to please, placate, flatter and impress the powers-that-be, to an attitude of admiration and worship.

Instead of standing above them in the position of authority, gods of high theism grace the sanctuaries, shrines, and altars of worship, standing before their devotees, inviting praise and veneration of the virtues they personify.

It should be emphasized that high theism has not eclipsed the more Body-centered concerns of animism and early theism – the need of the child/devotee to feel safe, to be seen, and to belong. These needs remain, but they are now, with this shift to more Ego-centered concerns, taking a secondary position to the “higher calling” of becoming – and garnering respect as – a certain kind of person.

In worshipping a god of love, love itself is glorified. What is lifted up before the devotee gradually becomes an aspiration, a fervent desire to be like god.

What happens, psychodynamically speaking, when a virtue such as love, which is perfectly personified in the deity, is glorified in worshipful admiration, to such a point of ardent focus and aspiration where the devotee longs to be like god and love as god loves? The answer, in the context of religion, is that theism – the type of religion oriented on god – begins its final forward shift in development and enters the phase of late theism.

Looking back on your own late childhood and early adolescence, can you recall a time (or period of time) when the virtues you admired in your taller powers started to take root mysteriously inside you as well? It wasn’t just that you were perfectly imitating their example, but rather those very seed-qualities were beginning to awaken in you.

Those virtues – the six we are holding in mind: goodness, generosity, integrity, compassion, understanding, and wisdom – are transpersonal, which is to say they lie at a depth beneath your personality and reach farther beyond your individual ambitions, anxieties, and prejudices.

In late theism, the center of experience and concern “drops” from the Ego to the Soul – technically the BodySoul, though now, in contrast with animism (or pre-theism), the intuitive and introspective powers of the Soul have at last become conscious. Theists of this late phase find it more relevant and meaningful to speak of god less as above them (an authority to obey) or before them (an exemplar to worship) than within themselves, as a presence to be realized (i.e., made real or manifested) in their daily lives in the world.

Are we stepping toward atheism here, or have we inadvertently stumbled into the sinkhole of humanism? Is the end of our path a life without religion and devoid of spirituality?

No. In fact, atheism only makes sense as theism insists on the literal and objective existence of its mythopoetic construct (god). Such a stance already indicates a loss of metaphorical imagination and spiritual freedom. And a chauvinistic humanism, where only human values and interests are respected, is itself a symptom of alienation from the ground of being within us and from the web of life around us.

Late theism and its spirituality of “god within” very naturally spreads its wings into post-theism, where the realized virtues of goodness, generosity, integrity, compassion, understanding, and wisdom conspire to create the provident environments that will support and nurture the faith of those coming up behind you.

In finally breaking through to the liberated life, you help make it more likely that others will one day find their way here as well.

True Story

On one side are believers, who read the story of Jesus’ incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection as an account of revealed journalism. Everything in the narrative happened just as described, to the exact detail.

How not? It’s the Bible, after all.

On the other side are atheists and the general population of nonbelievers, including devotees of other religions with their own stories and scriptures. The story of Jesus might be interesting and even inspiring to some extent, but that’s all it is.

What if the story of Jesus – specifically that three-part structure of incarnation (entering the human world by way of a virgin birth), crucifixion (giving up his life and dying on a cross), and resurrection (raised to new life and higher freedom) – isn’t an historical account or ‘just a story’?

What other choice is there? It either happened or it didn’t, right?

What if the story of Jesus didn’t originate with an itinerant teacher in the Galilee region of first-century Palestine? Not that it took its facts from some other historical figure, maybe in another part of the world, but that its truth is not about facts we can measure and record.

Could it be that the tripartite story of Jesus has had such magnetic power over people down through history and all around the world because it taps into something deeper than historical facts?

Fair warning to my reader:

We are stepping into the mythic realm here, where stories reveal and activate something essential in the human being, something archetypal and potentially transformative.

Rather than treat the story of Jesus as an analogy of things metaphysical, long ago, or far away, I will draw associations to the universal path of human development and our archetypal quest for the liberated life.

An archetype is a “first form” or generative pattern that drives and shapes our individual formation according to its exemplar. In this case, I am suggesting that we take the tripartite structure of Jesus’ story (incarnation | crucifixion | resurrection) as archetypal of our own human journey and potential transformation.

In the illustration above, the major aspects and dimensions of human consciousness are labeled. Starting at the bottom (in what the wisdom traditions name the Ground) we see the complementary dynamics of Body and Soul, written as “BodySoul” to remind us that our conventional way of dividing human nature into a body and a soul is historically late and a corruption of the originary insight.

BodySoul is the grounding mystery of our nature as human manifestations of being – as human beings. In us, consciousness is turned outward through Body to the larger web of life and, complementarily, inward through Soul to the deeper ground of being. It is from (or out of) our essential nature as BodySoul that each of us eventually takes our place in the world, as an Ego (Latin for “I”) playing roles on the social performance stage.

It’s important to understand that the modicum of consciousness channeled into the roles and tasks of managing a self-conscious personal identity neither originates with nor belongs to our Ego. It must draw current from the BodySoul in order to manage a meager circuit of its own, which it does by rehearsing the various scripts of identity that tell the story of “Who I am.”

In the archetypal language of myth, self-consciousness (Ego) is “born of a virgin,” which is to say it is not the product of two but a differentiation of One, of the prima materia or “First Mother” of BodySoul. The Christian concept of incarnation is very intentionally representing Jesus/Ego as arriving in the world by a kind of vertical entry rather than through the temporal chain of sexual reproduction.

We know from science that while the genetic traits of temperament are passed along from one generation to the next, Ego identity is not inherited but assumed (or “incarnated”) by the individual personality in the process of socialization.

The adventures of becoming somebody (i.e., an ego-centered identity) are infinitely amusing, but it can also be incredibly exhausting. Human beings didn’t evolve with the ultimate aim of personating roles and playacting on the social performance stage – notwithstanding the benefits of membership, recognition, and celebrity that might lock in our character and make us feel we have “made it.”

According to the worldwide spiritual wisdom traditions collectively known as Sophia Perennis, our true and higher aim is to become fully human, just as every other living species grows and develops toward its epigenetic Ideal of maturity and fulfillment (Aristotle’s entelechy).

Human consciousness – or we might better say, the evolution of consciousness in our human species – will not find fulfillment or be satisfied managing an identity on the social stage. No matter how lofty the role and how meaningful it makes our life seem, personal identity is still only somebody we are pretending to be.

There comes a time when something inside us turns our aspiration in a different direction: not out to the world, but inward to the grounding mystery of being.

As it plays out in the story of Jesus and is interpreted archetypally, crucifixion represents the surrender (as sacrifice, an act of devotion) of Ego to the BodySoul, of the personality to spirituality. In Christian terms, it is the historical Jesus dying into the eternal Christ. Medieval paintings (Pietàs) of the dead Jesus cradled in the arms of his mother Mary, still miraculously a virgin, poignantly render this deeper mythic meaning.

When consciousness is released from the roles, attachments, and distractions of managing a personal identity, it descends to awaken in the BodySoul. As the apostle Paul reflects in his letter to the churches in Galatia, “I have been crucified with Christ and I [ego] no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” Such an awakened present awareness is only possible to this degree after we have “died” to (i.e., detached and released from) the persona of our identity in the world.

In the gospel stories, Jesus speaks of the necessity for a seed to “die” so that the vegetal lifeforce of the plant can be unbound.

Likewise, it is necessary for the one who seeks authentic life to loosen their self-definition in order that the deeper truth of what they are can be set free.

“On the third day,” which is to say, after the surrender of Ego is complete, the newly activated spiritual intelligence rises with a fresh, expansive freedom. Resurrection, rising or being raised up, tracks the path of transformation from the BodySoul to Spirit. Whereas BodySoul is the grounding mystery of our being in deeper oneness, Spirit (from word origins meaning breath or wind) is dynamic, free-range, and communal, lifting awareness into the experience of higher wholeness and genuine community.

So you see, the story of Jesus is really about you. It’s your choice whether it comes true.

Necessary Delusion

Check this out. Everything around you includes you in its higher wholeness, and what is within you grounds you in deeper oneness. Harmony and communion are the special terms designating these distinct dimensions of Reality – around and including you, within and grounding you.

The concept of harmony requires you to be centered in yourself. It’s from your center that you can connect and interact with other centered beings. Just as the harmony of an orchestra is only possible as each individual instrument contributes its own sound to the symphony, harmony as a concept of wisdom spirituality acknowledges the critical importance of being yourself as you participate in the higher wholeness that includes you.

Communion is a deep-within concept rather than an all-around one. The com- (with) still centers you in yourself, but the -union is where distinctions begin to dissolve away. To speak of it in terms of oneness instead of wholeness is to put the accent on a more essential Reality, like that of an ocean beneath the waves, rising into their myriad forms and receiving them back again.

In wisdom spirituality, communion refers not to your relationship with something else (another “wave”) but rather to the “ocean” of Being that rises into the person you are – material, organic, sentient, self-conscious (egoic) – and receives you back again in each moment of your existence.

So if you are included in higher wholeness and grounded in deeper oneness, why are the experiences of harmony and communion so vanishingly rare and seemingly impossible to sustain?

The answer is not that there is something wrong with you, or even that you are all that unusual. If we should pin the reason on the psychological fact of your ego-centered identity, we need to be careful not to make ego into an enemy. Neither good nor bad in itself, your ego is a necessary achievement in your development as a person with freedom and agency.

Working to suppress the ego, to hogtie or otherwise limit its critical function of centering and managing your personality and behavior, ends up pushing normal development into disorders of various kinds.

If you occasionally (or frequently, even chronically) feel separated from the harmony and communion of Reality, what you need is not deliverance but understanding. Indeed, a major theme in wisdom spirituality is focused on seeing – really seeing, with insight – the truth of your situation; taking your view from the position of “standing under” it.

The illustration above plays on the sound-alike phonemes “eye” and “I” (ego) in order to bring this truth into focus. The open eye inserts a division in Reality between above and below, which translates for the self-conscious ego into what’s “around me” and what’s “within myself.” It should be obvious that without the eye/”I”, these distinctions wouldn’t exist and there would only be What Is – with no angle of perspective or context of vision.

The split in Reality between “around me” and “within myself” is actually a delusion of your self-conscious ego. Remove that eye/”I” from the field, and the distinctions of around and within immediately disappear. Without a separate center of self-conscious personal identity (ego), there is no “me” from which point everything not-me can be regarded as surrounding (and including) “me.” Just as obvious, without an “I” to take in the subjective line of view, consciousness is without a position from which it might contemplate the grounding mystery within (manifesting as) “my self.”

It is given this dual vision of your ego – out and around to the harmony of higher wholeness, down and within to the communion of deeper oneness – that we are justified in calling it a “necessary delusion.”

The worldwide spiritual wisdom traditions collectively known as Sophia Perennis or the Perennial Philosophy have long maintained that your separate center of self-conscious personal identity is a critical stage in the fuller journey of human evolution. If ego’s developmental achievement has introduced the risk – or rather, the likelihood – of humans experiencing insecurity, alienation, loneliness, and estrangement, the remedy of what the religions call “salvation” will not come about by ego-annihilation or supernatural rescue.

Only as the delusion of your separateness is understood, and then used as a platform from which consciousness can drop-and-dive into deeper oneness, or leap-and-fly into higher wholeness, is your true healing (salvus) even possible. It’s neither in deliverance nor renunciation that human fulfillment and the liberated life are to be found, but only as your ego is sufficiently fit to facilitate the inward drop and outward leap of consciousness.

The power of delusion is ended in the very moment of understanding.

This dual vision and strategy in the practice of spirituality form the major plotline (Greek mythos) of Sophia Perennis. Its wisdom and guidance have helped many millions of people around the world just like you, and over many centuries.

The truth of its teaching is nothing esoteric, if by that we are referring to the secret knowledge of an elite illuminati dressed in robes and chanting liturgies by the glow of candlelight. But neither is it summed up and cataloged in the orthodoxies of popular religion, where right belief is sold (quite literally) as the ticket to heaven.

There is no need to join a religion or believe in a god. The purpose and goal of spirituality, if it can even be said to have a purpose and goal, is to fully awaken to the magnificent mystery of being alive.

With a deep refreshing inhale, gather your focus to a self-conscious center – but don’t grab on. Feel the lifeforce rise in your body; let your senses touch the infinite horizon of all things. From your center of “I,” exhale and let awareness drop away, sliding gently into the communion of deeper oneness.

Down here in the grounding mystery of Being, the surface distinctions of your identity have completely dissolved away and there is only This.

Words lose their definition, thoughts unwind, and “the thinker” is perfectly still.

Take in another slow, deep breath. Now place your intention in the toe-hold of the present moment and let awareness rise up, out, and beyond the “I,” as if on wings, into the harmony of higher wholeness. Up here in the universal order of beings, you are included and belong – not for who you are or what you bring, but just because that is the Way (Tao in Chinese).

How about that? The long journey to becoming somebody special, with all its twists, turns, and setbacks, has harbored the inner aim of helping you eventually get over yourself.

Are you ready?

Spiritual Fitness and Our Human Future

Just as we might go to a gym to work out, or into the hills for a hike, we have a basic understanding that improving our fitness requires immersing ourselves in environments where the activity is sufficiently strenuous but not too much to manage.

Of course, if we never exercise, our muscles will lose tone and start to atrophy. Nature’s law is Use it or lose it.

The same principle holds true for our emotional, volitional, rational, and spiritual fitness as well. If we don’t “exercise” these faculties of human intelligence, they will become weaker to the point where they are not only ineffective but also begin to undermine or interfere with the others.

In this post, we will consider some of the consequences of an underdeveloped or atrophied spiritual intelligence. The “fitness environment” for our spiritual formation is called religion, whose word origin is in the metaphor of “linking together,” where we can almost see the cables and pulleys of gym equipment.

My returning reader knows that by religion I’m not necessarily or exclusively thinking about the familiar brand names and their numerous sects or denominations.

Essentially, religion refers to the system of stories, symbols, routines, practices and beliefs that ‘link’ our self-conscious experience to the ground within us, to our community and its history, to Nature and the web of life, and to the cosmic context of our Universe. However we manage the “cables and pulleys” of our life in time as human beings is our religion.

The familiar (name brand as well as off brand) religious features of deities, sanctuaries, liturgies, holy days, scriptures and orthodoxies are secondary components to what religion is in essence.

Without some kind of religion – informal or institutional – our spiritual intelligence cannot develop and function optimally.

A major challenge facing humanity today is a consequence of religion’s decline in the modern and postmodern eras. This has much to do with the inability – more frequently, the willful resistance – in the various traditions of theism to remain relevant to the context and concerns of contemporary life.

When theologians insist on the literal truth of their myths and the objective-factual existence of their god, intellectually attuned church members and citizens of the global scientific milieu just cannot pretend it’s for real.

More are choosing to leave and fewer are deciding to join.

One of the primary interests of post-theistic religion is in cultivating a spirituality that is relevant – but also vibrant, creative, relational, practical and morally responsible. The emerging post-theistic cultural landscape might still feature denominational churches, seminary campuses, and centers of outreach.

But the mindset of dogmatic belief and the missionary atmosphere of “saving lost souls” for heaven will be a vanishing exception instead of the rule.

Instead of doing away and living without religion, humanity’s future will depend on how intentional we are in linking our lives to those four dimensions identified earlier: to the ground of being within, to other persons in community, to the web of life on Earth, and to the Universe itself. At the moment, the recession of organized religion is leaving more and more of us without a proper “fitness environment” to exercise our spiritual intelligence.

For some context to help us better appreciate what’s at stake and what we can do about it, my diagram illustrates the model of human intelligence I have been developing in this blog on creative change. Named our Quadratic Intelligence for the four distinct faculties, centers, and threads of intelligence that together comprise its “braid,” my model offers a way to appreciate them as a system working together.

In this post we will give the rest of our time to understanding the virtues and benefits of a well-developed spiritual intelligence, as we also consider some evidence of its current neglect and atrophy. The distinctive contributions to the quadratic system of our visceral-volitional intelligence (VQ1 Body and VQ2 Will), our emotional intelligence (EQ Heart), and our rational intelligence (RQ Mind) are explored in more detail elsewhere in this blog.

In the middle my diagram is the center of our self-conscious identity, or Ego, whose very existence (existere = to stand out) entails a separation from the Body and its present reality – a cause of deep insecurity and neurotic suffering.

This is the very separation, by the way, that religion evolved to address and overcome with its system of “cables and pulleys” (religare = link together).

Our spiritual intelligence is conducted by a faculty along a thread uniting two poles or centers: SQ1 Soul and SQ2 Spirit. As suggested in the illustration, our spiritual intelligence serves the healthy functioning of faculties in closer proximity to the Ego (centering our human needs for presence, connection, meaning, and purpose). It does this by grounding us in deeper oneness or communion (SQ1 Soul), as it simultaneously elevates our sense of belonging to a higher wholeness or harmony (SQ2 Spirit).

Whereas those more ego-proximate needs are felt as “mine” and “part of who I am,” the effect of grounding is to dissolve the Ego while belonging transcends it. In healthy spirituality and personal development, the well-practiced routines of grounding serve to cultivate faith, fortitude, equanimity, and inner peace. At the other end of the spiritual intelligence continuum, our amplified sense of belonging activates gratitude, wonder, generosity, and joy.

Place those virtues and benefits of spiritual fitness – faith, fortitude, equanimity, peace, gratitude, wonder, generosity and joy – alongside what we see across our human situation today, and the consequences of being spiritually out of shape are immediately evident.

  • Not faith but anxiety
  • Not fortitude but fragility
  • Not equanimity but agitation
  • Not peace but discontent
  • Not gratitude but entitlement
  • Not wonder but conviction
  • Not generosity but greed
  • Not joy but depression

This list of spiritual maladies ranges from anxiety to depression – the very bipolar macrostructure of mental disorders that seem to be multiplying every year.

The worldwide spiritual wisdom traditions known collectively as the Perennial Philosophy or Sophia Perennis caution us against merely treating symptoms, or trying to fix a weakness in one faculty of intelligence by building up the others. We might try to think (RQ) our way through an emotional tangle (EQ), for instance, or make a goal (VQ2) to be present (VQ1). The result of our effort is predictably more pain, more dysfunction, and more suffering.

Our spiritual intelligence holds the promise of a more authentic, abundant, and liberated life.

It’s time to get to the gym.

Four-Square Spirituality

Ego sucks.

I don’t mean that as a judgment, but as a simple statement of fact. I happen to believe that our separate center of self-conscious identity – ego (Latin for “I”) for short – represents a transformational breakthrough in the evolution of human consciousness, and we need it to get around in the world.

However, its breakthrough comes at a cost, which is that for ego to even exist (also from the Latin ex=sistere meaning to “stand out”), it must siphon its share of energy from the essential supply of consciousness known as the Human Spirit.

That’s why it is simply a statement of fact to say that ego sucks.

I offer the graphic above as a heuristic, or teaching tool, for helping to clarify the picture of where ego sits in relation to the Human Spirit in each of us. What I just named the “essential supply of consciousness” in humans is elsewhere in this blog explored as our quadratic intelligence.

The quadratic model itself draws together important traditions and theories of research, each tradition focusing on one of the four threads of intelligence:

  1. Visceral intelligence (VQ) – Sigmund Freud’s Id
  2. Emotional intelligence (EQ) – Daniel Goleman
  3. Rational intelligence (RQ) – cognitive psychology
  4. Spiritual intelligence (SQ) – Danah Zohar

Together, these four threads comprise the “braid” of our quadratic intelligence. Identifying this braid with the Human Spirit may seem like a bold move, given the long history in religion of equating Spirit and Soul. But in the still-deeper history of the spiritual wisdom traditions, collectively known as the Perennial Philosophy or Sophia Perennis, their distinction is paramount.

In the present post, we will opt with the wisdom traditions in regarding Spirit and Soul not as separate parts or things-in-themselves, but rather as essential distinctions in the dimensional wholeness of human consciousness.

It should make sense as we step into it, so let’s get started.

In the graphic above, each thread in the braid of our quadratic intelligence is identified with the faculty that centers and hosts its distinctive activity. Thus:

  1. Visceral intelligence (VQ) is centered in the Body which is our locus of Power
  2. Emotional intelligence (EQ) is centered in the Heart which is our locus of Love
  3. Rational intelligence (RQ) is centered in the Mind which is our locus of Truth
  4. Spiritual intelligence (SQ) is centered in the Soul which is our locus of Peace

Let’s take a moment to acknowledge the extent to which these four aspirations (as we might call them) for Power, Love, Truth, and Peace have shaped our human experience over the long millenniums of history.

Our tendency to fuse these aspirations to concrete and temporal achievements, attainments, and possessions in life is the contribution of ego, which lacks the capacity to even comprehend how aspiration might be an objectless longing of the Human Spirit.

In this post we won’t go too far into the complications introduced by ego. They are designated by four terms enclosing it in the illustration: insecurity (leads to) attachment (which forges) convictions (that in turn fuel) ambitions for the achievements, attainments, and possessions it believes will bring happiness – or at least less insecurity.

But those ambitions only generate more insecurity, sending ego round-and-round the cage in a perpetual spiral of exhausting discontent.

This characteristic of ego has caused some to conclude that our liberation from its cage will only come as ego is successfully suppressed, extinguished, or altogether eliminated from the picture. The futility of such an approach lies in the fact that any attempt to control the ego is an ambition of the ego itself, which only squeezes the frantic spiral even tighter and frequently leads to depression.

Then we go to therapy or the pharmacy to find out what “I” (ego) must do to get unstuck!

Let’s set that sucking sinkhole aside for now and focus instead on the Human Spirit and its four faculties (threads and centers) of intelligence. Back to the graphic above, we should take a little more time clarifying what we earlier named the four associated aspirations – Power, Love, Truth and Peace.

What are these experiences, and how are they related? We’ll take them briefly one at a time.

The Human Spirit’s aspiration for Power is centered in the Body. We are not talking here about power-over something or someone else, which is typically how ego regards it. Very simply, the Body’s Power is the lifeforce in its cells, tissues, and organs, focused through the urgencies of survival, the drives of instinct, and in the will to live, grow, and flourish as a living animal.

The generator of this lifeforce lies in the visceral organs of the Body, which is why the thread is identified as visceral intelligence (VQ).

Our aspiration for the experience of Love is centered in the Heart and its thread of emotional intelligence (EQ), which evolved for the purpose of giving animals the ability to respond, learn, and adapt to their environment. Love also includes interest, desire, affection, tenderness, kindness and care – all distinct frequencies of our longing for harmony, community, and wholeness.

The physical organ of our heart is where such feelings are centered.

Truth is the aspiration of the Human Spirit centered in the Mind. In the evolution of animal life, the species that developed an ability for creating mental maps, making conceptual distinctions, and using logical thought in the construction of meaning outperformed those without it.

Processing impressions and experiences of the world through a set of more or less rational beliefs allows for an abstract, generalized, and comprehensive worldview, freeing the “rational animal” from having to rely only on instinct (VQ) and situational learning (EQ).

Here, Truth is a measure of the transparency of belief.

The Greek word for Truth, aletheia, literally means to uncover or reveal, referring again to the degree in which a mental construct (or belief) in the Mind serves to focus, clarify, or amplify our knowledge of Reality. Whereas ego frequently gets locked inside our beliefs, in which case they are called convictions (convict = a captive or prisoner), the Human Spirit, as Mind, longs to see through them to the really real.

Another way of defining conviction is as a belief with no transparency, that actually blocks (or covers) our view of Reality.

The thread of spiritual intelligence (SQ) has only recently found acceptance in the scientific literature, and only after theorists were able to set aside and get past the metaphysical realism that has grown around the Soul under the stewardship of religion.

More accurately, we should regard Soul as the faculty of the Human Spirit that engages consciousness with the inner mystery of Being. It is neither inside nor separate from the Body, as many religions teach, but adds its thread to the quadratic braid, anchoring to the deeper oneness of Reality and hosting our aspiration for inner Peace.

So far, our expedition around the four faculties of the Human Spirit has been fairly schematic, defining each and moving from one to the next. What’s left now is to get a sense of how the Human Spirit flows through these distinct centers and threads of intelligence for the holistic experience properly named spirituality.

We will leave the more thorough definitions for another time, but in the space that remains let’s turn our attention once more to the graphic illustrating what I will now call “four-square spirituality.” Crossing the boundaries between our four faculties and their respective aspirations are four channels, each of which facilitates the flow of the Human Spirit’s circulatory system.

  1. The channel and spiritual practice of grounding connects and facilitates the flow between Body and Soul. In grounding, Power and Peace come together.
  2. The channel and spiritual practice of compassion connects and facilitates the flow between Soul and Heart. In compassion, Peace and Love come together.
  3. The channel and spiritual practice of understanding connects and facilitates the flow between Heart and Mind. In understanding, Love and Truth come together.
  4. The channel and spiritual practice of equanimity connects and facilitates the flow between Mind and Body. In equanimity, Truth and Power come together.

And so it flows, continually.

Spirituality is thus the committed discipline of four essential practices: grounding, compassion, understanding, and equanimity. In cultivating these practices, the Human Spirit enjoys greater and greater liberation, wellbeing, and fulfillment.

Perhaps time will grant us a future opportunity when we can explore these four practices of spirituality in more depth. At least for now, the profound difference between the neurotic spiral of ego’s religion and the holistic balance of a vibrant and active spirituality should be plainly evident.

Stay tuned.

Deckchairs on the Titanic

Are you familiar with that metaphor of arranging deckchairs on the Titanic?

The message is that while we are busy piddling around with minor things, the really Big Thing needing our attention is going down – taking us and our trivial fixations with it.

Besides being a helpful call-back to our priorities in business, family, and personal life, the Deckchairs metaphor also has relevance to life in general – to what the philosophers have long referred to as human existence.

As we get distracted into the egosomatic disorders of everyday life – attachments, obsessions, anxiety and depression – our existence is slowly but surely sliding beneath the waves.

Now, it could very well be that our fixation on trivia is providing a kind of therapeutic distraction keeping us from having to look at or think about what’s really going on.

Perhaps if we didn’t have these “everyday disorders” to preoccupy us, the full-frontal realization of our mortality would drive us bat-shit crazy.

The wisest of our species throughout history have called attention to what really matters.

They don’t typically stand there scolding us, reprimanding our stupidity for getting stressed and exhausted over mental minutiae. Instead, the best and brightest of these prophets, sages, and mystics appeal to something inside us that already knows the truth. We just need the courage to fully accept it.

And what is that truth? Actually, there are three.

The first truth identifies human nature as harboring a potential we can barely even imagine. In the illustration above, this potential is depicted by the four centers of consciousness arranged on a vertical axis: Spirit, Ego, Body and Soul. Considered through a developmental and evolutionary lens, however, the progression from potential-to-fulfillment would have us read them organically from bottom to top: Soul, Body, Ego and Spirit.

Circulating through these four centers is the current of human consciousness itself, shown in the illustration as an undulating golden colored wave, amplifying or attenuating as it weaves along the circuit. As it ascends or descends from one center and frequency to another, distinct dimensions of experience are activated.

The full activation and “four-dimensional” experience brings our human potential to fulfillment – which is the fully self-actualized state identified in the first truth.

The Soul centers consciousness in deeper oneness, in what the worldwide wisdom tradition known as the Perennial Philosophy or Sophia Perennis names the Ground of Being. Asian schools of Sophia Perennis use the term nondual, or “One without a second,” in speaking of the Ground – which, technically speaking, cannot be named or known because it is not a thing. This is what they mean in calling it Nothing (no thing), or ultimate reality without qualities (nirguna Brahman).

As we proceed with our ascent of the axis to the center next in line, we are expanding the frame on our understanding of human potential, as we are also introduced to (or reminded of) a second truth.

The Body centers consciousness in the sensory-physical realm, linking it to the great Web of Life upon which our survival depends. It hosts our sensations of pleasure and pain, excitement and fatigue, joy and grief, hunger and thirst.

And, as is true of all other living and sentient organisms on Earth, our Body is mortal and will eventually succumb to entropy, exhaustion, and death.

There are numerous traditions both inside and outside Sophia Perennis that teach the separation of Body and Soul, where the Soul, conceived as the essential Self, is immortal and moves on after the Body dies – either to another Body, to some disembodied state in paradise, or to full union with the Absolute or Supreme Reality.

Other traditions of Sophia Perennis, however, regard the Body and Soul as complementary centers of consciousness, like Yin and Yang of the Tao, with the Body engaging with our experience as an animal (of the species Homo sapiens) in the Web of Life, and the Soul releasing inwardly to the Ground of Being. One doesn’t contain or inhabit the other; at death, their shared circuit of energy breaks and the light goes out.

This notion of the extinction of consciousness at death is a much-debated topic, as you might imagine. Anecdotal reports of near-death and postmortem experiences, adventures in reincarnation, or visions of the afterlife are especially appealing when we find our own mortal extinction difficult to accept.

The part of us that struggles most vigorously with the prospect, however, is neither the Body nor the Soul, but the Ego center of consciousness.

Ego (from Latin for the first-person “I”) is where consciousness becomes self-conscious for the first time. It serves as a kind of converter bridge in the cross-over of consciousness from the animal Body and onto the performance stages of society. Out on stage, Ego “personates” (i.e., puts on and acts out) various identities (personas) associated with distinct social theaters (e.g., family, school, workplace, teams, clubs, and social media groups).

On stage is where Ego, as actor, feels most at home, and paradoxically where it can feel out of place and utterly alone.

The function of Ego as a converter bridge not only directs our attention to the social performance stage. It also exposes a functional dependency of Ego on the primal energy of the Body. Without the upward feed of the Body’s lifeforce, the Ego would have nothing to work with; indeed, it could not even exist.

This dependency on the Body, while rather obvious and straightforward as we consider it objectively, becomes a source of profound anxiety for the Ego as it learns the news that the Body will one day die.

With both endpoints of the converter bridge clearly in view now, we can anticipate how Ego’s anxiety over going down with the Body might translate into mental states and social behaviors on stage that would interfere with the role-plays of identity, recognition, and belonging.

Insecurity motivates attachment, which drives ambitions that in turn lock our mind inside rigid convictions, blinding us to the Reality around us. We obsess over arranging deckchairs, as the Titanic is going down.

And this is the third truth. What we so quickly and chronically get worked up about is not even real.

Our neurotic attachment and worry give it the weight of something substantial, but that’s all it is: a feeling entwined to a fantasy.

The “salvation call” of Sophia Perennis, if – IF – we are in a mental state where we can even hear it, invites us to break free from our convictions, surrender our ambitions, drop our attachments, and sink through our insecurity to the Ground within. As we find the courage, grace, and faith to do this – which according to the Chinese tradition of Sophia Perennis is really a non-doing (wu wei) – the full channel of human consciousness is allowed to complete its circuit.

At the center of Spirit, consciousness opens at last to the higher wholeness of Community. Our experience is of a dynamic participation in the All that is One. Community itself is a dynamic term, qualitatively different from a mere collection or assembly of things. Its analog at the largest conceivable scale is the Universe, referring to all things “turning as One” (uni-verse).

In order to arrive at this level of Unity, consciousness has to detach and transcend Ego’s personal orientation and concerns, for a new and higher – transpersonal – perspective on existence.

Suddenly we wake up to realize that our obsession over deckchairs is itself a kind of spiritual tragedy of the greatest magnitude.

The Truth of What You Are

This identity you are managing inside the world is not what you really are. What you are is deeper and more essential than who you are. What you are is a human being – or better yet, a human manifestation of being, while who you are is about your personal identity – the wardrobe of personas you put on and take off as you pretend to be somebody special on the social performance stages of your life.

The self-conscious center of autonomy, agency, and ambition that acts out your various roles of identity is called the ego (Latin for “I”).

It’s important to understand that your ego is really nothing but an actor looking for work, and its work is out on the performance stages of your world, playing the roles that identify you to others and assign your part in the scripts. From ego’s mental location, you look out into an objective world (i.e., the theater and stage) that is “thrown or put before” you (objectāre), as you also look into a subjective self (i.e., your human nature: what you are) that is “thrown under” you (subjectāre).

Ego’s first function, psycho-developmentally speaking, is to serve as a mechanism of self-restraint, by exercising executive control over the channels of urgency and impulse coming up from the body. A second function of your ego, following on this progress in self-control, is to redirect or sublimate those primal instincts into prosocial behavior, which is to say, into behavior that is compliant with your tribe’s moral frame.

In this context, a moral frame sets the standards of what a “good person” and “right action” mean inside the theater and on stage.

Your ego was coaxed and shaped early on by your tribe with instructions to behave as a “good boy” or “nice girl” should. To the degree you complied, your reward was acceptance, approval, recognition, and belonging. Your objective world – what I prefer to call your quality world (after William Glasser) – thus came into shape around you, anchoring and reflecting back a sense of yourself as somebody special.

In the above illustration, a spiral has locked your ego into a neurotic obsession over the question of identity: “Who am I?” Because the moral standards and social expectations of your quality world are, or can be, fickle and unforgiving, the task of managing your embattled self-esteem requires practically all of your attention. “Am I _______ enough? Do I have what it takes? Will people like me?”

Earlier, a critical distinction was made between who you are – this ego-and-persona-in-a-quality-world experience – and what you are, referring instead to something deeper and more essential: a human manifestation of being, or a human being for short. This is your authentic or true self, what easily gets lost from view in your relentless pursuit of personal identity.

Your true self is actually a communion of body and soul, where “body” names the phenotype of your biology as a human organism, and “soul” names the in-reaching depths of consciousness in the ground of your being.

Body and soul are also mental locations. But whereas ego centers you inside the theater of your quality world and on social performance stages of identity, these other mental locations orient you in Reality – not in roles and role-plays, but in the really real.

The organism of your body participates in and belongs to the greater Web of Life and the sensory-physical environment of Nature. “Organism” and “environment” constitute a basic unity, as Alan Watts reminded us, and willful ignorance of this basic unity amounts to “a serious and dangerous hallucination” (The Joyous Cosmology).

On the other side of this Yang-Yin communion, your soul rests in the Ground of Being and contemplates (beholds in awareness) the higher wholeness of all existence in a holy image of the Universe. Not to be mistaken for just another name of the physical environment at the largest scale, Universe is the consilient (“leaping together”) unity of all things, the harmony of beings – which, of course, includes you.

The beheld image of a unified Reality (i.e., the Universe) is a correlate of your grounding in Being; one implies the other.

So, the mental location of consciousness in your body orients you as an organism in a physical environment, as the mental location of consciousness in your soul grounds you in Being and beholds all things as the Universe. However, the mental location of consciousness in your ego separates you from this essential communion, in preparation for the adventures and misadventures of becoming somebody special in a largely make-believe world.

Precisely because ego-formation separates you from the body-and-soul communion of your true self as a human being, in pursuit of something that is imaginary, ephemeral, and inherently precarious, the spiritual wisdom traditions of Sophia Perennis have long regarded it with suspicion.

Anything that is separate from Reality is by definition not real.

What’s more, ego’s ambition to do enough, be better, have more, go farther, and get the reward – gold stars, trophies, diplomas, promotions, wealth and power, immortality in heaven – diverts your focus and energy away from the wonder of being alive and fully human.

Rather than suing for the suppression or extinguishment of ego, however, Sophia Perennis invites you to appreciate its delusion of separateness as providing consciousness with a detached position (a third mental location) from which you might ponder and celebrate the mysteries of being human.

Only from the distance afforded by self-conscious awareness is it even possible to see that you have a body and a soul, despite the fact that you (that is, your ego: “I”) don’t really own them, nor are body and soul mere parts of you. They are, together in communion, your true self.

As long as consciousness remained immersed in this communion of body and soul, there could be no apprehending the marvelous facts of your place in the great Web of Life and of your roots in the Ground of Being. And yes, putting on an identity and playing your part on the performance stages of your quality world ushers you into the uniquely human realms of culture, freedom, purpose and meaning, where the ecstasies of becoming somebody special await.

The danger and temptation lie in the way your pursuit of identity can pull you into a tightening neurotic spiral, where the ambitions and attachments of who you are make you forget or fail to discover the truth of what you are.

Educating the Human Spirit

In a recent post entitled The Vocational Clarity Table of Elements I made a case against a growing sentiment which regards a college education as a waste of time and money.

Of course, I had to preface my argument by first acknowledging the dismal statistics – 80% of college students change their major multiple times, 50% will not complete their program, and of the half that do make it, 75% end up finding jobs outside their degree.

I called that “the trap of going to college.” Colleges don’t help – because they don’t address the real problem – by implementing interventions and accommodations to keep students from dropping out. Students are still dropping out, and now colleges are burdened with funding all those ineffective failure preventions.

The real solution, I argued, lies in a change of paradigm, away from intervention and more intentionally toward a paradigm of empowerment.

While the mindset and methods of intervention are based on the assumption that students are deficient in what they need to be successful in school and life – and this paradigm governs Western education across all grades – the mindset and methods (i.e., the paradigm) of empowerment assumes otherwise.

Students already possess the potential, intelligence, curiosity and desire to learn; the work of education is to ignite this potential and “lead out” (ēducāre) each student’s natural curiosity into a deeper and wider understanding of themselves, of the world around them and their place in it.

Do students arrive to college confused, already depleted, bored with school, and emotionally disengaged? Yes, obviously. Is that because they are missing some key element that only a subject or service expert can provide? Interventionists say, Yes, our role is to keep students in their program – whatever the cost.

Proponents of empowerment – let’s call them education catalysts – recognize that the mental, cognitive, and emotional condition of these at-risk college students is itself a consequence of intervention and accommodation strategies from the early grades.

If the goal of intervention is to prevent failure and keep students in school, empowerment seeks to support and guide their progress in vocational clarity. Rather than trying to “fix the problem” (i.e., the high confusion, disengagement, and dropout rates), we will better serve college students by taking time to discover what they already have inside themselves, develop their individual intelligence, clarify their interests, and guide them (ēducāre) in exploring occupations that center the types of activity they enjoy and find interesting.

We would be wrong to conclude that a college education is only about getting graduates into jobs that align with their degrees, however. Vocational clarity is more than just having a clear path of purpose through college.

Even though the concept of vocation has been folded into other career-related terms like occupation and profession, its scope is much larger and reaches much farther. From the Latin vocāre, vocational clarity is about an individual’s “calling,” purpose, and direction in life.

Certainly, college and career fit into this bigger picture and longer view, but without a clear calling, purpose, and direction in life, students (like the rest of us) tend to fixate their expectations for fulfillment on jobs, status, and salaries – only to be disappointed.

In light of this, I have updated my Vocational Clarity Table of Elements to include an additional dimension of elements that directly addresses this quest of the student for fulfillment in life. That earlier model (now 1.0) placed John L. Holland’s concept of “interest” at the nexus of horizontal (outward) and vertical (inward) axes.

In Holland’s scheme, interest attaches (outwardly) to types of activity and the associated skills of work, as well as serving as a focusing lens (inwardly) of one’s deeper intelligence and talent.

In that earlier post I advocated for the empowerment paradigm of education, predicting that the statistics measuring student success will dramatically improve as colleges and universities intentionally (mindset) and strategically (methods) work to activate the potential students already have within themselves. Holland’s career theory and interest assessment have proven effective in helping individuals match their natural endowment (i.e., talent and intelligence) to occupations in the world of work.

The additional dimension of elements (2.0) returns to the nexus of interest, but now ascends the vertical axis to identify elements that engage students with the bigger picture and longer view of life. If interest serves as a focusing lens of intelligence – coming up from within, as it were – it also directs intelligence in the exploratory initiative of curiosity.

Developmentally, curiosity is most active in early childhood, losing much of its wide-open wonder in subsequent years as society shapes and fills (i.e., instructs) the mind with its cultural operating system.

But the creative, playful, and exploratory curiosity of childhood doesn’t have to be foreclosed under the regime of realistic and practical concerns – what many of us regard as adult life.

Curiosity projects the human spirit through the lens of interest along trajectories of aspiration that seek, or long for, fulfillment. There are five human aspirations: for peace (what I name our mystical aspiration), for love (our ethical aspiration), and three more that are centered in our vocational quest for freedom, purpose, and meaning.

My more complete model of vocational clarity – the Vocational Clarity Table of Elements 2.0 – identifies in human beings, and therefore in every college student, the longing for a chosen path of purpose that makes life meaningful.

Taking into account this higher element of aspiration, it becomes painfully obvious how an instructional system designed to fit students into standardized rubrics of knowledge and technique is actually working against their aspirations for freedom, purpose, and meaning.

Instead of clarity in their big picture and long view of life, student horizons are collapsing (being collapsed) around the trivial pursuits of grades, degrees, and jobs. Such things can be measured and managed, which explains why instruction has largely replaced education, since we can control what we put into (instruct) students and what they are required to recall on assessments.

But that spiritual longing? Those aspirations of the human spirit?

Who knows what could happen if educators embraced their vocational role as catalysts – igniting, activating, equipping, guiding, and then releasing the force that students already have within themselves?

No telling.

How to Avoid the Trap of Going to College

When I visit students in classrooms as the manager of career services on a college campus, I stand in front of them, introduce myself, and gesture as if I am pulling open my shirt to reveal an imaginary superhero insignia.

Greetings! I am here to save you from the trap of going to college.

This trap has a lock and the lock has a combination, I continue. When you understand the combination, your risk of falling into the trap of going to college will decrease dramatically.

Then I write the combination on the classroom whiteboard: “80-50-75.”

Eighty percent of students going to college will change their major multiple times.

I see heads nodding in my audience: Done that.

This tells us that students are trying to decide why they are in college and where they are going, but many can’t figure it out. One thing is for sure: they are confused.

A consequence of this persistent confusion is that half of students going to college – 50% (the average between four-year universities and two-year community colleges) will not complete their program or transfer. It’s not that they are not capable or intelligent enough to succeed, but perhaps they come to realize that college is a waste of time and money – if you don’t know why you’re here or where you’re going.

Now I draw an invisible line with my hand down the middle of my classroom audience.

So, 50% of you will complete your program and graduate – congratulations! But hold on. Here’s the final number in the combination of that lock on the trap of going to college: Seventy-five percent of college graduates end up getting jobs outside their degrees.

Eyes widen.

Typically, the blame for this last statistic is pinned on the job market. There just aren’t any openings, so these graduates have to find Plan B – or is this now Plan C? The more likely reason, however, is that these disillusioned graduates, who were certainly successful in completing their programs, come to realize that the occupations their degrees prepared them for aren’t really all that interesting.

What about the 25% who do find jobs that align with their degrees? Well, they can be further divided into those who end up loving what they do, and others who discover that their job is stressful, exhausting, uninteresting or even flat-out boring.

Whether they were chasing the salary, following in the shoes or taking the advice of family members, or just “going to college” because that’s what you’re supposed to do after high school, they came to the painful realization that they had climbed a ladder which was leaning against the wrong wall.

How can students avoid the trap of going to college? By clarifying the big picture and long view of their life, which includes a career doing work they will love.

When we are curious about someone’s occupation, we don’t typically ask them about their salary – at least not at first. Instead we ask, “What do you do?” What types of activity are centered in the day-to-day responsibilities of their job? Work is inherently about activity – manual, mental, creative, social, strategic, and routine. Any occupation will center 2-3 of these types of work activity.

Getting paid a high salary for work we don’t enjoy or find interesting, but that instead makes us feel stressed, burned-out, or bored, can nevertheless motivate us to show up – for a while.

Eventually we will reach our threshold: How much of our life at work are we willing to spend doing something that doesn’t connect to our interests, intelligence, and talents?

For many the answer is, “Quite a long time.” Which explains why the notion of work in our day is associated not primarily with creativity, satisfaction, enjoyment and meaning, but rather with “labor,” strain, necessity, and exhaustion. Work is what you have to do, not what you want to do.

But can work be a generator of satisfaction, fulfillment, and even joy? The answer is Yes – to the degree you find it interesting.

John L. Holland (1919-2008) found that the correlation of interest to activity, and types of activity (just six) across the wide variety of occupations in the world of work, is a strategically useful concept in the quest for a promising career and in the productive engagement with responsibilities of work in one’s current occupation.

College students – preferably in the earlier secondary grades, before they arrive in college – need a lens that can help them better understand what they have within themselves (interest, intelligence, and talent) and identify occupations in the world of work that center the types of activity they already enjoy and find interesting.

This is how they can develop vocational clarity, which will guide them in making good, sustainable choices in college – and well beyond.

A good tool can filter out the noise and help students focus in on the signal.

By using a career site like O*Net (the Occupational Information Network, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor) and its Interest Profiler tool, students can avoid the trap of going to college and instead find their path through college into careers doing work they will love.