Tracts of Revolution

Change Your Lens, Change Your World

Most of us have had the experience of getting our vision diagnosed by an optician. A fancy instrument, called a phoropter, is maneuvered in front of our face and positioned on the bridge of our nose. As the technician clicks various lenses over each eye and we try to read some letters or view a scene, we are asked to judge which of two clicks makes the picture more distinct. Eventually we arrive at the specific power of refraction that will compensate for the weakness and astigmatism of our unaided eyesight.

If we think of the phoropter as a metaphor for culture and the way it clicks various lenses between our minds and reality, we have a useful illustration of constructivism. The basic idea is that our minds do not merely look for and find meaning in reality, but instead they make meaning by constructing a model of reality and using this model as a frame for draping the stories, theories, judgments and expectations that constitute our personal worlds. I’m using ‘worlds’ in the plural because each of us manages a world unique to us (so we all have one), and we also progress through a variety of distinct worlds (or worldviews) over the course of our lifetime.

In a recent discussion with others in the wisdom circle I attend, we were reflecting on the different worlds of the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States, and the profound differences between our Western world and the worlds of other cultures and nations. From the ancient Greeks we inherited our accent on the individual as a separate and irreducible center of identity, dignity, sentiment, and agency. Perhaps as an effect of the fact that the Greco-Roman culture overarched a wide region of numerous indigenous societies, the detached and self-standing individual became the locus of supreme value. After the ‘dark age’ of medieval Europe, this priority of the individual reasserted itself with the Renaissance ideal of the hero-artist.

lenses Other cultures, both ancient and contemporary, view reality through a different lens from that of Western individualism. Instead of looking at the collective through a preference for the individual, they define an individual through the lens of community. It’s not that the individual is unimportant; rather, the individual only makes sense as a function of the whole. Self-sacrifice on behalf of one’s community takes precedence over competition among individuals for self-advancement.

Not only might competition of this sort be discouraged in community-oriented cultures, such a mentality and behavior will likely be condemned, even punished by banishment from the group. A Western individual is apt to condemn this attitude in turn as both repressive and ignorant, since a community exists for the sake of individuals and not the other way around.

Not all Westerners are individualists, and we could surely find many individualists within the more community-oriented cultures of our day. The point is not to draw a geographical or even a cultural boundary between the two types, but to reflect for ourselves as to which lens holds priority for us. As we view reality and construct our worlds, which lens is in front of the other? Our first lens (the one in front) will automatically filter and qualify the other, as the core beliefs by which we construct our worlds and live our lives.

The answer is probably more complicated than my question leads us to think.

When the individual is before (i.e., in front of the lens of the) community, typically the rights of the individual will take precedence over his or her responsibilities to the community. In my recent post The Great American Divide I suggested that capitalism, as one of the seedbed traditions beneath the American world(view), is based on a philosophical preference for the individual over the community. According to this view, a community is essentially a collective of individuals seeking economic opportunities that will support and promote their personal ambitions. This is not to say that capitalism necessarily breeds selfishness in its devotees, but Adam Smith did affirm ‘rational self-interest’ as one of its driving forces (competition being the other).

A preference for the individual over community keeps the tether of moral values firmly staked to a concern for the benefits and risks to the self. If altruism plays any part, then it’s in the form of what the communitarian philosopher Philip Selznick calls ‘bounded altruism’ (The Moral Commonwealth, 1994). Here the outreach of individuals extends to familiars and fellow members, but not to strangers or outsiders. The reciprocal turnaround of value back to the individual needs to be fairly short in order to justify one’s investment, charity, or sacrifice on behalf of others. Generally speaking, commitments of this kind to strangers or outsiders do not bring reciprocal value to the benefactor – a liability for which American capitalism offers compensation in its provision of tax write-offs for donations.

On the other hand, when community is before (i.e., in front of the lens of) the individual, a responsibility to the greater good sets constraints around individual rights. This doesn’t mean that individuals can be arbitrarily stripped of property and freedoms whenever it serves the collective interest, which is how individualists often paint the problem. Granted, when the collective is really little more than an aggregate of individuals under the control of a dictator or special-interest bureaucracy, the individual – particularly those at the bottom or outside the circle of power – is, we might say, perfectly expendable. History has shown this time and again.

So obviously we need to be more careful in the way we define ‘community’. It is decidedly not merely a synonym for the collective, that essentially disconnected aggregate of individuals mentioned above. A community (literally “together as one”) represents a qualitative shift in consciousness where the self-other reciprocity and competition of capitalism is transcended (included and surpassed) in the experience of empathy, advocacy, and communion. The individual is not subtracted or subordinated, but rather honored and lifted into this higher consciousness of community life.

Again, in my post The Great American Divide I made a case that democracy, as the second seedbed tradition beneath our American worldview, is based on a philosophical preference for the community over the individual. For Jefferson and other framers of the US Constitution, this order of priority meant that individuals are not essentially competing units of self-interest; rather they are self-transcending agents in the synergy of ‘a more perfect union’. With its emphasis on our individual responsibilities to the community, this tradition of American liberal democracy insists that our rights as individual citizens are only defensible within a larger culture where individuals work together for the common good.

So what I earlier called the ‘great American divide’ turns out to be a fundamental dilemma posed to each of us. As we step into our creative authority, it is up to us to decide which of these lenses has priority to the other. Each commitment provides some counterbalance to the other, and in their tension is where we must construct a life of meaning.

The Will of the People

The biggest problem for Republicans these days is that their 2016 presidential candidate is not a Republican. He is by name, of course; Donald Trump’s name is on the GOP ticket. But Trump apparently has little understanding of or regard for the principles of civility and decency, cooperation and respect, dialogue and compromise, ethical leadership and responsibility, temperance and self-sacrifice on behalf of ‘we the people’ – in other words, little understanding or regard for the foundations of liberal democracy.

As the circus approaches election day, even Republicans are offended and embarrassed, poised now to renounce their candidate in the interest of our nation’s future. How did he get this far? How was it possible that a dozen or so much more qualified contenders got pushed off the stage – a few of them viciously maligned and forced (or so it must have felt) into some mud-slinging of their own? A few reputations and political prospects were not only injured but maybe even permanently wrecked in the fray.

I have a theory.

In evolution there is a force at work that Darwin named ‘natural selection’, which has to do with the ongoing necessity of living things to maintain their ‘fitness’ in the interest of survival and reproduction. A later proponent of evolutionary biology, Herbert Spencer, coined this idea into the phrase “survival of the fittest,” referring not simply to the strongest and most aggressive individuals who can bully their rivals and out-compete for females, but to any organism that can successfully adapt to its environment and find a provident niche where it can thrive. By putting this requirement on living things, nature has raised a gradient against the likelihood that genetic mutations and individual deviance will survive and reproduce, unless it can win this struggle for fitness.

In economics there is another force, which the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith saw at work in free-market capitalism, where rational self-interest and competition in business conspire toward ‘the wealth of nations’. As individuals and industries compete with each other for market share, the cost value ratio of what they offer to consumers keeps the quality of their goods or services from slipping out of favor. This is another kind of selection, and fitness here allows a commercial enterprise to survive and maybe spawn a new generation of innovations. Smith wasn’t praising selfishness in business but rather an interest in building one’s own competitive edge in delivering genuine value.

And in politics there is yet another force, which in liberal democracy has been called ‘the will of the people’ or ‘the general will’. The idea here is that the collective effect of individuals voicing and voting for what they want is a clarified expression of what is best for the body politic. In representative government the people elect officials who carry the responsibility of defending and promoting the majority interest of their constituencies. Not everyone gets what they want, but a broad base of shared value is eventually established where the security, freedom, and each individual’s pursuit of happiness can (at least in theory) be protected.

Now over many decades the Republican Party has been steadily undergoing a transformation of character, from the republic-defending, ethically centered, and unifying efforts of Abraham Lincoln, to what we have in Donald Trump. (Just put those two individuals side-by-side in your mind for a moment and you should start to feel the twisting vortex of cognitive dissonance.) Along the way, the Grand Ole Party sidled up to various special interest groups, some endeavoring to forward a few constitutional rights that are more period-specific than they want to admit (like the right to bear arms against the encroachments of a hostile government), and others seeking to bind our nation to a religious orthodoxy that historically has condemned the advances of science, the liberalization of morality, the creative authority of individuals, and the rise of inclusive community.There is a deep underground reservoir of repressed insecurity, resentment, and bigotry in our national unconscious, which has been kept below a thin threshold of civility – at various times not so successfully. As things progressed for liberal democracy, many of these inner demons made their way into legislation while others got projected onto whatever scapegoats we could find. Unfortunately this repressed shadow attached itself to the Republican Party, altering the platform from a philosophical avant-garde for individual freedom and social responsibility, to something just short (maybe) of institutionalized racism and bully politics. This is not Lincoln’s party, and it’s not what Americans aspire to be.

My theory is that this mysterious force called ‘the will of the people’ orchestrated the steady elimination of worthy GOP candidates and left us with this one very crass and blatantly bigoted contender for the presidency, for the purpose (not conscious, mind you) of pushing the Republican Party into extinction. If there is to be a resurrection at some point, Republicans will need to get their house in order.

Personal Myth and the Anatomy of Character

The diagram above illustrates my newly refined definition of religion, as a cultural system that links together (from the Latin religare) individual consciousness (or psychology, represented in the purple triangle) and the larger order of existence (or cosmology, represented in the dome overhead) by means of sacred stories (or mythology, represented in the moving wave between them) that serve to orient us in space, guide us through time, connect us to one another, and support us across the adventure of life.

Once again, I am speaking here of religion itself, not necessarily of this or that religion, numerous examples of which have indeed lost this unifying function and fallen out of relevance in our day. I’ve explored in other posts what happens when religions misread their myths by taking them literally, defend outdated models of reality, and neglect (or even condemn) the inner depths of mystical awareness. They die, but continue on in fundamentalist orthodoxies, megachurch celebrity cults, metaphysical roadshows, or militant end-time sects.

Effective and relevant religion will provide the orientation, guidance, connection, and support that individuals and communities require throughout the full course of human development. Ultimately this will also include breakthrough realizations of a ‘truth beyond’ our conventional beliefs, and of a ‘power within’, deeper even than that cherished center of personal identity (i.e., ego) which religion itself (as theism) had earlier made the focus of salvation. This post-theist excursion into a more experiential, communitarian, and globally-minded spirituality is where the evolutionary design of our human nature is headed.

In a recent post I suggested that the narrative device of Apocalypse, which can be found in all developed mythologies, is not referring to a future cataclysm of world-collapse, but instead represents a self-conscious awareness inside the mythopoetic (storytelling) process itself, of their status as sacred fictions. Outside these narrative constructions of meaning is the present mystery of reality, the terminal end of our stories and thus of the storied world itself.

If mythology has done its work – referring to the orienting, guiding, connecting, and supporting functions mentioned earlier – then we are ready for a psychological breakthrough to a more rational, responsible, and reality-oriented way of life.

My term for this liberated mode of experience is ‘creative authority’: when the individual not only sees through the constructions that had earlier draped both reality and consciousness with veils of meaning, but goes on to take responsibility as the principal author of his or her own personal myth and its associated world. If it sounds like we’re returning to life under the shroud, I must emphasize the key insight of this breakthrough realization, which is that the individual is now a self-conscious storyteller.

In other words, we have entered the ‘ironic mode’ (Northrup Frye) where the storyteller is aware of the fact that he or she is spinning narratives across a mystery that cannot be named.

This brings us to the interesting challenge of composing our own personal myth. The art of storytelling (or myth-making) is millenniums old, which means that we have a vast library and useful tools at our disposal for the project before us. In this post I want to reflect on the features of well-developed character, using this term in its literary and not so much its moral (or moralistic) sense. A character is thus a narrative personification, an identity in story who strives (Greek agon) for (as protagonist) and against (as antagonist) the plot in its unfolding. A ‘good’ character (again, not in the moral sense) is one that evinces certain traits and makes the story particularly interesting.

Our work as self-conscious storytellers of our own personal myths will involve constructing an identity for ourselves that possesses four traits in particular: memory, integrity, grounding, and volition.

Memory

In any good story, character is an identity that becomes stronger (i.e., more definite and self-consistent) over time. A character’s memory has to do with how recognizable it is with respect to what we’ve already come to know about him or her in the story up to this point. The story’s audience starts to anticipate how a character will respond by virtue of how he or she behaved in similar scenes or challenges earlier in the narrative. With growing confidence in a character’s memory, they are better able to trust his or her performance.

As we take responsibility for the construction and management of our personal identity, each of us should consider the fidelity of our character to the person we have been. This is not to suggest that we simply repeat the mistakes of our past, or that spontaneity and fresh departures are out of the question. Even if we should undergo a conversion of some sort, the memory of character will deepen our understanding and empathy for others, adding dimension and complexity to the person we are. This is an aspect of what is known as wisdom. Alternatively, neglecting the character trait of memory can make us insensitive to others, even projecting on them the dark energies of our own repressed and forgotten shadow.

Integrity

If the character trait of memory is what establishes consistency through time, then integrity is about consistency across space, or across the landscape of life situations and social engagements. A narrative character who changes dramatically from one engagement to another leaves the audience unsure as to ‘who’ will show up next. In psychology this lack of consistency across situations is evidence of ‘dissociative identity’ (formerly ‘multiple personality’), where a personality lacks sufficient ego strength to coordinate and unify otherwise diverging streams of subconscious motivation and demeanor.

In the early years of ego formation when we were being shaped, instructed, and managed by our tribe into a compliant member of the group, identity contracts dictated our role in each social situation. Now, stepping through the Apocalypse and into our own creative authority, we can take ‘authorial control’ over the person we want to be. We can join the role-play, fully aware that it is just a social convention in make-believe. Or we might take a stand for a more authentic, self-honest, re-imagined and creative way of being together. This is what Jesus called the kingdom of God.

Grounding

A ‘grounded’ character in story doesn’t simply drift above the moving scenes, essentially detached from the situational dynamics of time and setting. He or she has the feel of belonging, of being rooted in that narrative world and not just an alien passing through. In this sense the story isn’t merely ‘about’ the character, but unfolds around and through the character’s individual evolution.

My returning reader will recognize this idea of grounding from my frequent references to ‘the grounding mystery’, that inner depth of spiritual life where our personal identity sinks and dissolves into an ineffable sense of being. Of course, if ego is caught in a neurotic tangle of insecurity and self-defense, any suggestion of sinking and dissolving into something else will be vigorously resisted, and inevitably misunderstood. Creative authority requires that we ‘loosen up’ and release ourselves to the deeper process, so that we can carry that ‘power within’ into the affairs of our daily life in the world.

Volition

Our fourth and final character trait picks up with that last sentence – as we take action and work out the evolving plot of our personal myth. In story, the action of a ‘weak’ character will be determined by external events and circumstances, whereas a ‘strong’ character chooses and determines it for him- or herself. Volition (from the Latin vol for will) is about a character taking action rather than reacting, moved by an internal drive or desire. The better stories in mythology, literature, film, and stage are those that are driven by strong characters whose action seems to proceed from their center.

As we break through from a mode of role performance (acting out the instructions and expectations of our tribe) to one of role transcendence (using our role in a more purposeful and creative way), we are able to construct a personal myth that supports the life and genuine community we really want. We don’t pick up a mask of identity (a persona) because someone else tells us to, because a tradition (or consensus trance) calls for it. We can live out of our own center, for values and aims that others might not find agreeable. Our action is not about defiance or transgression, but instead arches toward a deeper, higher, or longer goal.

More and more of us are ready for the responsibility of writing our own story, of composing our own personal myth. Our tribe and culture have done their part, for better or worse, and now it’s our turn. We have finally come to realize that our identities and the worlds we inhabit are really nothing more than narrative constructions, meaningful fictions of our personal and interpersonal life.

It is time to step into our own creative authority, take leave of the gods, and become fully human. This is life after the Apocalypse.

The Great American Divide

In the 2016 Presidential debates two candidates stand before us: one a super-rich white businessman, and the other a female politician (also wealthy and white). So while the differences between them could be much more significant (a middle-class Latina against an Asian-American Buddhist, for instance), in the process of the debate I am struck by how the deepest difference between our candidates coincides with a profound fault-line through the center of our nation. It’s not male versus female, white versus black, or even rich versus poor.

Back in my seminary days I had the assignment of researching the agreements, compatibility, and contradictions between American ideology and the gospel of Jesus. Needless to say, while I could find numerous points of agreement (even complicity) between American ideology and Christian orthodoxy, favorable touchpoints with Jesus’ message and way of life were very hard to find. He was not a big fan of empire or orthodoxy, nor of the egoism that drove both of them against his communitarian vision. His ‘campaign’ was on behalf of human liberation, and of a life awakened in love for others.

Orthodoxy and empire cannot allow for the creative authority of individuals. Jesus was killed because his gospel ran counter to the religio-political domination system of his day.

But as I looked deeper into the American psyche it became evident to me that our national history has been a tale of two visions, which are not only incompatible but run in opposite directions. On one side are the principles of democracy as set forth in the Declaration of Independence (1776) and embodied in The Constitution of the United States (1789), committed to the sacred and self-evident truths of dignity, liberty, equality, and community.

The Constitution’s “We the people” very clearly takes the perspective of all citizens, together as one voice. (Granted, neither blacks nor women were explicitly included in this democratic collective at the time, but the Constitution would later be invoked on their behalf as well, demonstrating its essentially inclusive spirit.)

On the other side of the American Divide are the perhaps equally sacred ambitions for privacy, property, and financial profit, as laid out in the Bill of Rights (1794, Constitutional Amendments 1-10). True enough, these Rights were articulated with the principles of democracy in the background, but they really aren’t about democratic aspirations at all. Their cause is with free-market capitalism,

an economic system in which investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of wealth is made and maintained chiefly by private individuals or corporations, especially as contrasted to cooperatively or state-owned means of wealth. (Dictionary.com)

If America is a Land of Dreams, these are dreams about breaking out of poverty, making a living, and getting rich. The individual has a right to property and wealth, which must be protected by all means against unnecessary taxation or confiscation by the government. (Hence also “the right to bear arms.”)

It could be argued that democracy and capitalism name two fundamentally different enterprises of a society (its government and economy) and have really nothing to do with each other. And yet, as seedbeds for a general philosophy of life these two value systems advance contrary ideologies. One (democracy) looks at the individual through the lens of community life, while the other (capitalism) looks at society through the lens of individual self-promotion.

Side by side, democracy and capitalism seem like they should get along. After all, haven’t they coexisted since the beginning of our American Experiment? Yes, but their apparent compatibility has been about as natural as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump sharing the stage.

The candidates speak very different languages, for the clear and simple reason that Clinton speaks the language of democracy while Trump speaks the language of capitalism. One is centered in the responsibilities of liberty, equality, and community; the other stands passionately on the rights for privacy, property, and profit. One is a proponent of all of us, together. Her opponent speaks mainly for those at the top, as well as for the large number who dream of getting there one day.

In this election, perhaps we are finally having to come to terms with the Great Divide in our character as a nation.

Thoughts on the Apocalypse

In popular religion and culture ‘apocalypse’ refers to an end-of-the-world scenario where the order and stability of life as we know it breaks down, stars fall from the sky, evil powers are unleashed, and zombie herds ravage the few unlucky survivors. Even in ancient religions we can find this dystopian picture of catastrophic destruction and world-collapse, signalling the finale of temporal existence. The curtain comes down and the lights go out.

Or do they?

There is good evidence that the Persian prophet Zoroaster may have been the first to treat the Apocalypse as a future event rather than a mythological device announcing a phase transition from one mode of consciousness to another – which I will explain shortly. Zoroastrianism inspired similar prophecies in late Judaism and early Christianity, leading up to our own evangelical end-timers as its present-day descendants.

Zoroaster divided reality into two absolute and opposite principles: Ahura Mazda, the personified principle of light and righteousness, versus Angra Mainyu, the principle of darkness and evil. The human situation was thus characterized as caught in a cosmic-moral conflict, with each principle vying for our devotion and allegiance.

Zoroaster’s division in the very nature of reality was the cosmological projection of a psychological shift in human consciousness, in the formation of that separate center of personal identity which we know as ego. Instead of the seat of immortality that Zoroaster presumed it was, contemporary schools of ego psychology are approaching agreement in their regard of it as a social construction – not immortal or even all that self-consistent over an individual’s lifespan.

Ego formation is the process whereby a human animal is shaped by his or her tribe into a person, a term tracing back to the Latin persona and Greek prosopa, referring to a mask actors wore on stage to ‘personify’ the characters of a play. By constructing an identity and assigning roles for the individual to play, the general role-play of society could be carried off with functional success. Intrinsic to this process of identity-formation was the individual’s gathering sense of him- or herself as a separate center of affection, perspective, and agency.

Standing in its own unique (but socially invented) space, an ego must identify itself with certain things and against others, in commitments that are mandated and closely managed by the tribe. Around this center of personal identity everything seems to fall very naturally into pairs of opposites – outside/inside, above/below, behind/ahead, right/left, self/other, mine/yours, us/them, good/evil. And since the individual’s obedience to the moral code of the tribe is so essential to the tribe’s cohesion, it was Zoroaster’s genius to invent a cosmology that turned around – and in turn motivated – each person’s moral behavior.

How does dividing reality into opposing principles of good and evil motivate moral obedience? By making the ego immortal, Zoroaster made it all very personal, since the question of the individual’s postmortem destiny was now suddenly relevant and unavoidable. He preached that only obedient and righteous believers (those who believed his myth and its message) would enjoy an everlasting bliss in the paradise of Ahura Mazda, while doubters and sinners would be tormented in hell forever.

Apparently his motivational system worked, for many submitted themselves to the moral code and its unforgiving orthodoxy. The priests and prophets who spoke for Zoroaster and his god used the promise of paradise and the threat of perdition to keep their congregations in line and under control.

And so it was as well in late Judaism (cf the Book of Daniel) and early Christianity (cf the Apocalypse of John), down to our own day (Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and that strange celebrity cult of TV evangelists). But whereas the Apocalypse of John (aka the Book of Revelation) was written for first-century Christians under Roman persecution, with figurative references to current events and personages in the effort to encourage their faith and lift their hopes, today it is interpreted against our current world situation, but more for the effect of demonizing enemies and justifying bigotry than bolstering a commitment to the nonviolent way of Jesus.

End-time religion is a multi-billion dollar industry, which is odd considering how its message is about the world ending tomorrow. The more insecure people feel, the more likely they are to buy into schemes that promise relief, escape, or a decisive end to their trouble.

I’m not really arguing that the Apocalypse is a bunch of hog-monkey, only that taking it literally is. It bears repeating that Zoroaster (along with his Jewish and Christian descendants) was not the originator of this idea of world-collapse and history’s end; it was in the collective planetary consciousness of world cultures both before his time and outside his sphere of influence. He’s the one who took it literally, made it imminent, immortalized the ego and pitched the whole thing into a moral contest for the individual’s postmortem destiny. Prior to and outside of him, the ‘end of the world’ carried very different implications – very different.

My diagram illustrates the relationships among a people’s mythology (the collection of sacred stories by which they orient their lives), its background cosmology (current theories regarding the structure of reality), and the psychology (including stages of consciousness) that gives rise to the whole affair. In other posts, I’ve written about the consequences of dogmatically perpetuating a mythology that has fallen out of date with respect to our current understanding of reality. A prime example is the way that early Christian myths, which were composed upon a reality conceived as a three-story, vertically oriented structure, eventually lost credibility as science revealed an outward-expanding cosmos. (Jesus ‘coming down’ and ‘going up’ just doesn’t make as much sense anymore; and where exactly is heaven, if not above the clouds?)

This connection between psychology, mythology, and cosmology might actually help refine our definition of religion – not this or that religion, but religion itself. As the system that ‘links back’ or ties together (from the Latin religare) human consciousness (psychology) and the greater universe (cosmology) by means of sacred narratives (mythology), religion gives us (or once gave us) a way of holding everything together as one coordinated and meaningful whole. The Western advance of science disturbed this marvelous unity-of-experience when it challenged the traditional cosmology. And the stubborn reaction of Christian orthodoxy in denying these scientific discoveries and insisting on the literal truth of its outdated myths only precipitated our slide away from a relevant spirituality.

As I said, from inside mythology the Apocalypse will be seen as near or far in the future. Those whose consciousness is still centered in a mythopoetic (storytelling) mode of experience will look out on reality through the lens of sacred fictions. They are oriented on the archetypes, characters, exemplars, and ideals designed to urge their imitation, obedience, and aspiration through the course of their coming of age.

From the body-centered psychology of animism and well into the ego-centered psychology of theism, the great myths frame their sense of self and reality.

In ancient cultures the Apocalypse was in part a statement regarding the transient nature of existence, along with an imperative on the tribe to ritually renew itself at key points and thresholds along the way. The observable winding-down nature of time required periodic rites of renewal to keep things going. Many of our religious holidays have their roots in seasonal festivals and sacred ceremonies when the cosmos would be wound back up and order restored.

But at a certain stage of psychological development, as a rational and reality-oriented intelligence is waking from its incubation beneath the warm emotional covers of mythopoetic consciousness, the stories are recognized as cultural creations and not necessarily as representing the way things really are. For the individual this means that one’s adult higher self is stepping out of an earlier mode of make-believe (the now inner child), in order to acknowledge a reality on the other side of the mythological enclosure, of what we’ve known as ‘my world’ and ‘our world’, that is, the shared world-view of our tribe.

And this is the world that comes to an end with the Apocalypse. In other words, what had been interpreted from inside the myth as a future event for the world as we know it, is, psychologically, the moment of realization when an individual begins to understand the world for what it is – a narrative construction of meaning. Such a realization is one-part liberating discovery and one-part shattering disillusionment. The mythological enclosure is gone, and now the present mystery of reality breaks in. It’s not that we’re done with story at this point, only that we are now aware, as we once were not, that our constructions of meaning are exactly, and only, that.

Our challenge and opportunity becomes one of working out a relevant spirituality and way of life, together, as the curtain comes down and the lights go on; after our world ends, and on the other side of god.

The Galilean Rocket Man

Rocket Man After his natural life and rather sudden death, Jesus the Galilean started on a mythological career which carried him all the way to the top-floor corner office of the universe, as none other than God Incarnate. A surprising majority of those who confess to be Christian have little knowledge of how a backwater itinerant teacher eventually became the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. The obvious reason for this ignorance is rooted in their belief that Jesus was God Incarnate from the very beginning, just as Christian orthodoxy says. In other words, the story starts there.

But the advancement in our knowledge since the fourth century, when Jesus was officially promoted to his fully-divine status, makes such a confession today a matter of willful ignorance. Discoveries from the study of history, cosmology, sociology, mythology, psychology, and the development of Christian doctrine itself have to be deliberately ignored for the sake of ‘keeping the faith’. In this case, faith becomes a matter of believing it anyway, as if intentionally sweeping aside all evidence, rationality, and common sense against the claims of Christian orthodoxy is somehow a demonstration of spiritual virtue. All it really demonstrates, however, is that individuals prefer the security in what they believe to the risk of being wrong.

Having served in professional ministry as a church pastor for fifteen years I am well acquainted with this phenomenon, technically known as fideism – the exclusive reliance on faith as a substitute for rational thought and reality-testing. Many believers don’t realize how they are being gamed by a system that constructed its most prized doctrines in the head, but cautions parishioners against using theirs.

This rise of the Galilean Rocket Man progressed by stages, like a rocket breaking through the stratosphere as it disengages and drops off the weight of parts no longer needed. By the end of his mythological career Jesus had become the most significant item in existence – nothing less than God himself, the supreme Lord of the universe. At the stage just before this one he had achieved the status of World Savior, whose crucifixion and resurrection saved the world from sin, the devil, and death itself – or we should say, he saved those who can believe this.

Earlier still, before the focused effort of orthodoxy got underway, Jesus walked the storyland of the gospels as a Miracle Worker healing the sick and bending laws of nature. Actually he was one of many highly honored and well-remembered holy men in and before his time. It was common practice to represent such figures in narrative scenarios, short stories, and hero legends giving miraculous performances in exhibition of their unusual powers. To suspend or transform conventional reality, even if only in storyland, served to keep the holy man alive in the memory of his disciples and descendants.

It would be a tragedy for Christians to remember the one who worked miracles, saved the world, and took his place as god, but not give serious reflection to what he had to say or how he lived. Granted, it is not easy to sift the authentic message of the historical Jesus from the embellishments of hero worship, myth-making, and emerging orthodoxy in the Bible. But the tragedy turns into a double catastrophe when those who profess to be Christian follow the Rocket Man into heaven and completely eclipse the vision he had for life on earth. As long as they have assurance of joining him when they die or witnessing his return in the meantime, what he said and how he lived before his mythological ride into abstraction has little relevance to them.

Am I saying that Jesus isn’t (or wasn’t) God Incarnate, savior of the world, or a wonder-working miracle man? Yes, at least not in any literal or factual sense. If he is or did all those things he is worshiped for, then he is and did them inside the mythopoetic construction of an early Christian worldview – a vertically oriented three-story cosmos, a fallen human condition in need of rescue from above, and the popular portrayal of important historical figures as possessing supernatural powers. Look around. Our view of reality today (i.e., our contemporary scientific worldview) is very different.

Interestingly enough, we do still flock by thousands to watch celebrity faith healers and charismatic self-proclaimed prophets perform miracles – right before our credulous eyes. Something inside us knows that it’s a put-on, but we fail to pause and ask why these faith healers don’t have an office inside local hospitals where so many more of the suffering and ill could benefit from their extraordinary gifts.

Because so much of Christian identity is invested in an outdated cosmology and in a mythology taken literally, the religion will continue to decline, breaking into numerous sects, cults, and extremist factions on its way to extinction. And along the way, more damage will be done. The way out of this tragic predicament is to take one more step down to earth with the Galilean Rocket Man – out of mythology and the abstractions of orthodoxy, and back to the vision and way of life of a Wisdom Teacher.

You’ll notice that I didn’t say ‘the’ Wisdom Teacher. That’s because as a teacher of wisdom, Jesus was not, as we say, one of a kind. I realize that may sound disrespectful, irreverent, and even blasphemous to many Christians. But in the great stream of wisdom teachings which has been coursing through the world cultures for thousands of years, the personal identity of a teacher is much less important than the clarity, depth, and real-world relevance of the wisdom he or she has to share. As a Wisdom Teacher Jesus was one of many. But as is true of all the others, his unique personality, family background, life experience, and historical situation conspired to bring this wisdom to bear on the concerns of his time in a highly individualized way.

Wisdom is about the challenge and opportunity of being human, profoundly (i.e., thoroughly) mortal yet grounded always in an eternal now. How can we live out this life with integrity, authenticity, mindfulness, and compassion – for ourselves, for others, and for the whole community of life? How can we step beyond fear, suspend judgment, and be more genuinely present in the moment, wherever and with whomever we find ourselves? Jesus had some very timely things to say, but the wisdom he shared is timeless.

Before he became the Rocket Man of Christianity, Jesus the Galilean was a human being. That was his true glory.

In my diagram above I have distinguished two terms often used interchangeably: significance (vertical axis) and relevance (horizontal axis). As the root-word suggests, significance (from sign) is value we can point to. We talk of ‘high’ significance to acknowledge such value as up and above common or ordinary values. When Jesus got promoted to the status of God Incarnate, his significance was made absolute. But in the same stroke he also became utterly irrelevant, for relevance has to do with timely, real-world value. If Jesus was/is God Incarnate, what practical difference does that make in daily life? On the other hand, as a Wisdom Teacher Jesus is very relevant but not highly significant – that is to say, his value is not ‘up there’ or outside our situation in life, but in the very heart of it.

The Supreme Paradox

I’ve written before on what I call the Matrix of Meaning, referring to a deep code of primary concerns and narrative motifs that generates the very fabric of our worldview. A sense of self and reality is the central construct in our personal myth, orienting us on the pressing challenges and emerging opportunities in our journey through life. The Matrix is deceptively simple in design, but the patterns of meaning it can produce are beyond number. Your life story and personal worldview are very different from mine, but the same Matrix of concerns and motifs is behind them both.

My first-time reader needs to know that I am a constructivist and employ the term ‘myth’ in its more technical (rather than popular) sense, as a narrative plot that holds the body of a story together and drives its action. Although we may have authorial liberties regarding the style and idiosyncratic features of our personal myth, the deeper structure is determined by what the ancient Greeks personified in the goddess Ananke, or Necessity. In other words, how you respond to adversity, hardship, pain and loss is unique to you as an individual, but the inevitability of suffering is universal for human beings. This was the Buddha’s First Noble Truth.

My diagram depicts the Four Ages of individual development, and these, too, are universal archetypes in mythology: the Child, the Youth, the Adult, and the Elder. I’ve indicated the average years over a lifetime when we transition from one to the next, but these shouldn’t be taken as hard predictors. The developmental challenge of a given Age might not be successfully negotiated, in which case our neurotic hangups around its primary concern will be carried into the next challenge, compounding our difficulty in making it through. Indeed, the fact that none of us gets out of childhood without some insecurity throws light on the question of why the human journey can be so damned complicated.

Northup Frye’s four literary types are also included in my diagram, each one corresponding to an Age and its driving concern. Comedy is the up-swing to ‘happily ever after’. Romance follows the heroic quest for an ideal. Tragedy descends the plunge-line of misfortune. Irony provides a double-vision between what is said at the surface and what is meant underneath. Our personal myth will predictably move through these distinct narrative frames, forcing us to adapt our construction of meaning to the shifting focus of our life in time. Although many have tried, any attempt to impose a frame of comedy over the reality of suffering only ends up forfeiting a potentially life-changing insight behind a veil of denial and make-believe. Needless to say, otherworldly religion is especially good at this.

The multicolored arc across my diagram represents the progression of consciousness through an ‘animistic’ body-centered stage (color-coded black), through a ‘theistic’ ego-centered stage (orange), and farther into a ‘post-theistic’ soul-centered mode of life (purple). Only a small minority are willing, or even able, to release personal identity (ego) for a deeper mystical realization and larger ethical vision. The rest of us fall in line with the status quo, take refuge inside our convictions, and succumb to the consensus trance. This is when theism can become pathological and our god starts looking like a glorified version of ourselves – a moody, judgmental, and self-righteous bigot.

My purpose in touring through the diagram in such detail is to lift into view the paradoxes in play throughout. The security of early childhood is in polar tension with the suffering that comes on as we mature. Much of suffering has to do with the loss of attachments that anchor identity and meaning for us, but which also represent for us a reality that is safe and supportive. Security and suffering, as primary concerns coded into the Matrix of Meaning, are paradoxically related. It’s not security or suffering, but the tension between security and suffering that drives our construction of meaning. Similarly, freedom and fate are polar opposites, making the interplay of our control in life and the conditions outside our control a second creative opposition. Freedom and fate only seem to exclude each other, while real wisdom involves learning to live inside and with their polarity.

This consideration of the paradoxes inherent to the Matrix of Meaning, and how these concerns compel us to make meaning that is at once relevant to our situation in life and capable of orienting us successfully throughout our journey, brings me to what I’ll call the supreme paradox. I refer my reader back to the diagram, specifically to that arrow arcing across from left to right. This represents the arc of our lifespan, tracking through the Four Ages (if we live long enough) from birth to death.

Especially during the first half of life, and most critically in those early years, we experience the uplifting support of reality in our growing body, a nurturing family system, and a wide world of opportunity. Such a conspiracy of virtuous forces instills in us a deep assurance of reality as the ground of our existence. We are the living manifestations of a 14 billion year-old process, a flower of consciousness emerged from this magnificent universe, the cosmos contemplating itself in wonder. Surely this is the root inspiration of true religion: the ineffable sense of being sustained by a provident reality, coming to be and living our days under the watchful intention of a mystery we cannot fully comprehend. All the mythological gods who provide us with nourishment, protection, guidance, and solace are metaphorical personifications of this provident ground of existence.

There are other gods as well, who begin peeking in as our exposure to reality becomes more complicated and challenging. These are dark forces – tricksters, shadowy forms, and unseen solvents that slowly erode the foundations of our neat and tidy worlds. Yes, reality is the provident ground of existence, but it is also the inescapable abyss of extinction. Coming-to-be and passing-away are the paradoxical reality of our life in time. We may want only a reality that supports and promotes our rise into identity, safekeeping our existence forever and ever, but that’s not how it is.

As Carl Jung pointed out many times and Lao Tzu made the central insight of his reflections on the way (Tao), light and dark are not absolutely exclusive of each other. Rather, they swirl together, pulling and pushing, blending and separating in the dance of reality, generating the ten thousand things and dissolving them simultaneously into the ineffable secret of the Tao which cannot be named.

Liberated to Serve

I promised myself that I would pick up where I left off in my last post, which was at the point of having broken through the consensus trance that holds individuals under the spell of groupthink. As I explained, consensus trances are seductive forces in your life because they provide the (feeling of) security that you’ve needed from the moment you were born. (See Life Outside the Consensus Trance for background.)

To the degree that your family system wasn’t safe and nurturing, you compensated by attaching yourself to whomever or whatever could keep you from falling headlong into the abyss – referring to the dark and fathomless urgency of your anxious state. You could survive and stay clear of this eventuality so long as the object of your attachment didn’t abandon you, become displeased with you, or change from what you desperately needed her (or him or it) to be for your sake.

To keep her close, you unconsciously adopted her general mood in life, her outlook on reality, the particular beliefs she held, and the manner in which she engaged with (or disengaged from) the world around you. So there you were: secure in the familiarity of each other, co-dependently attached, and firmly locked inside the convictions of what you both knew for certain. This mutual bond operated as a collective consciousness (even though there may have only been the two of you at first), wrapping the construct of your shared world around you like an illusion, which it was. And your inability to distinguish between the way things appeared to you and how they were in reality meant that you were under a delusion as well.

From this quiet nursery scene, the same mystifying trance spread outward as you got older – not out into reality, but farther across the social landscape with the enlarging horizon of your carefully managed world. Strangely your adolescent and adult relationships seemed to repeat many of those early behaviors, especially whenever you felt unsure of yourself or threatened by something unfamiliar, or when your defenses got worn down by the daily stress of life. If you were attached to abusers as a young child, you found yourself irresistibly attracted to abusers in your adulthood. Whatever neurotic style had helped you adapt to those dysfunctional family dynamics back then, so that you could get at least some of what you needed, tends to turn on and take over when you find yourself under pressure today.

So my definition of the consensus trance adds to Tart’s characterization of the shared delusion of groupthink across the various memberships in which our personal identity (ego) is managed, to include also the persistence and reactivation of earlier trances when our views of self and reality were just starting to emerge. If the consensus trance of a particular partnership or tribe only held its pattern by virtue of present conditions alone, it would be much easier to break (if we cared to). But in fact, these patterns, and the curtain they drape over awareness, are energized by much older and deeper (i.e., more primitive) impulses – reaching back behind our rational higher self to our emotional inner child, and even into the visceral urgencies of our animal nature.

Our full liberation from the consensus trance will involve an awakening of spiritual intelligence, to the ‘power within’ and the ‘truth beyond’ the self-world construct of personal identity. The critical question, of course, is how. If we are so far under the spell, how do we stand any chance of being set free? Well, we might ‘graduate’ or take our exit from a web of relationships in the normal process of growing up and moving on. Or something can happen that shocks us momentarily from our trance state: a crisis or setback can disrupt the pattern, or a primary attachment might call it quits, walk out on us, or pass away. We need to remember, though, that even in such instances the insecurity and cravings that held us in that particular co-dependency will likely drive us to find another just like it.

The good news is that we don’t have to wait for a shock event to wake us up. Meditation practices of various kinds have been used for centuries with the intention of assisting consciousness past the construct of personal identity. As this construct has two principal aspects, self and world, a practice of ‘getting over yourself’ can proceed along an inward descent (the mystical turn) whereby self is released to its grounding mystery (‘the power within’), or along an outward ascent (the ethical turn) that lifts awareness beyond “my world” to the higher wholeness of a universal order (‘the truth beyond’). This higher inclusion prompts us to reconsider how we ought to live, given that we are part of a much larger web of life.

It is wise not to wait for the jolt of disillusionment, but instead to cultivate a more or less disciplined daily practice that will gradually strengthen the ego to the point where it is no longer the neurotic center of everything. When you go back to the partnerships and tribes that hold your identity contracts – those masks and performance scripts that define your place in the role-play of social interactions – you will be a more stable and creative influence than before. You won’t take everything personally. You’ll be able to catch the retributive reflex before it springs back against the insult or criticism that someone else just slapped on you, opening a space in the exchange where you can do something outrageous, creative, and kind instead.

The challenge for anyone waking up from the consensus trance is focused in finding creative ways to stay awake. Prepare yourself for the scolding glances and more direct resistance from those who are still under the spell. No one that is comfortably asleep enjoys the flood of light when bedroom curtains are flung open to the morning sun. You are not superior to them. You are not better than they are.

Who knows, but maybe your liberation has now placed you in position to be a servant of their freedom. Yes of course, you could take your light and get as far as possible from the frustrations of this or that relationship. Or you might work out your salvation in a way that shares your light with the rest of us, helping us as well get just a little farther along the path.

Life Outside the Consensus Trance

The psychologist Charles Tart coined the term consensus trance in reference to the shared assumptions and agreements that hold social organizations inside the rules of groupthink (Irving Janus, 1972). As an aspect of what he named a consensus reality orientation (CRO), it reflects the tendency we all have in adjusting our perspective and aspirations to what ‘the rest of us’ believe is valid or plausible.

Why do we so quickly dismiss insights and ideals that others in our relational webs don’t understand or approve? Granted, there is an obvious benefit to all involved (including us) when some of our harebrained ideas and odd inclinations are not adopted by the group. What a very strange world it would be if everything we conjured up in our daydreams and private thoughts automatically became coin of the realm.

But in this case I’m thinking more about those times when a truly winning notion dawns in our minds or a genuine discovery with transformative potential turns up in meditation – and we get punished, scolded, or shushed. It might even be something so noble as a desire to engage our relationships with greater mindfulness and honest love, but our different energy disturbs the routine and upsets expectations.

Individuals who are caught inside a consensus trance prefer the predictability of those routines. The definition of reality that everyone accepts, albeit unthinkingly, provides an enclosure where they feel secure. Even if (mind you) those routines actually perpetuate conflict and suffering, this familiarity makes them preferable to the insecurity of not knowing what to expect.

A quick review of what I presented in my most recent post will help us better understand how consensus trances get to be such compelling forces in our lives. We come into existence as infants kept alive by virtue of a visceral intelligence (VQ) operating autonomically below conscious awareness or control. This particular strand of our quadratic intelligence has but one overriding mandate: to keep our body alive. It manages the metabolic process of converting external resources (e.g., oxygen, food and water) into its own animal energy, and then converting this energy by an aerobic process into adaptive behavior. Key words in identifying our VQ’s driving preoccupation are security and control.

Our early years are really at the mercy of the family system into which we are born. Since no family or single caretaker is perfect – and can’t be expected to be, nor faulted for not being so – we all carry a bit of anxiety in our nervous system (the special province of VQ). This is simply because our survival and safety needs could not be promptly satisfied the instant their urgency declared itself. Such anxiety is another name for insecurity, registered as the default setting of our resting mood and positioned somewhere between mild apprehension and frazzled hypervigilance. In the emergence of religion, our insecurity is likely what motivated those earliest ritual petitions to a provident reality.

As emotional intelligence takes its cue and starts opening up to our surrounding conditions, this deep insecurity seeks compensation through relationship with what D.W. Winnicott called “transitional objects.” Not only cuddle blankets and pacifiers, but even our primary caregivers were pressed into service. By attaching ourselves to these things we had the inarticulate expectation that they would calm us down by making us feel safe, loved, and perfectly content. Key words in identifying our EQ’s driving preoccupation, then, are attachment and belonging. Mommy and Binky were attachments, and we belonged together.

As time went on, this EQ dynamic of attachment and belonging got translated farther out into the world of peer groups, romantic partners, social classes, political parties, and organized religions.

A bit delayed but coming to play as we acquired a code system of words (e.g., dog), schemas (dog-bone), and stories (the dog buried the bone), rational intelligence (RQ) began constructing a worldview that could orient and connect us to a more complex reality. While we learned many words and heard many stories (even made up some of our own), certain words and stories were weighted with special significance by our taller powers – who, after all, were in control and had authority to decide whether or not to deliver on our emotional need to belong.

Very naturally, our personal worldview became a constructed copy of theirs. Together we looked from inside our tribal system and out upon a reality that we could name, impose with our values, and claim to know. Key words in identifying RQ’s driving preoccupation are meaning and knowledge, making sense of it all by fitting reality into our logical boxes and mental frames. Step into any social system, from nuclear families to global cultures, and pretty soon you’ll start to get a picture of how its members construct meaning and certify knowledge – and, if you pay especially close attention, how they steer the mind away from discrepant views.

From that fairly brief description of the process whereby individuals develop their sense of self and reality, only a slight sideways step will land us deep in the tangle of a consensus trance.

Close-minded worldviews (RQ) envelop and safeguard passionate attachments (EQ), which in turn compensate for a profound and chronic insecurity in the individual nervous systems (VQ) involved. Indeed, a deeper and more severe anxiety (insecurity) corresponds to – we can confidently say it will inevitably produce – absolute convictions which members are willing to defend at all cost. (I say ‘willing’, but the psychological fact is that they lack the freedom and authority to choose otherwise.)

The upward sweeping arc of an orange arrow in my diagram traces our developing sense of self and reality as it comes to pivot around a separate center of personal identity named ego. Ego occupies a central position within the web of relationships that defines its tribe. Instead of regretting its arrival on the scene – which is actually a slow-and-steady construction process – and making ego the source of all our problems in the world today, we need to draw a critical distinction between a healthy ego (possessing the virtues of ego strength) and a neurotic ego. The latter is what conspires in the consensus trance.

A neurotic ego is profoundly insecure, codependently attached, and a fiercely defensive convict of those beliefs (aka convictions) shared in common with its equally neurotic alter (other) egos. In this condition and fully entranced, egos play out the scripts they inherited (codependency scripts are commonly transgenerational) or picked up in the urgency of staying in the game. Thankfully the trance condition that we regard as ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary consciousness’ is not so neurotic and even possesses sufficient strength so as to allow for the possibility of breaking-through, or what is referred to across the wisdom traditions as ‘waking up’ or simply ‘awakening’.

In my diagram this breakthrough is represented at two points, one below (or deeper within) the self, and the other above (or farther beyond) the self. I have elsewhere distinguished these two points and the paths they open up as the ‘mystical turn’ (releasing self to the grounding mystery) and the ‘ethical turn’ (including self in the universal order), respectively. Because the mystical turn (at least as I’m characterizing it) engages in meditation practices that assist awareness in sinking into its visceral center of power, the grounding mystery can be identified as ‘the power within’. At the other end, an ethical turn elevates awareness into its rational center of truth and inspires a radical reconsideration of morality (how we should live) in view of ‘the truth beyond’ our self-serving values.

The benefits of such practice and reconsideration should be obvious. By breaking through to life outside the consensus trance we can free ourselves from the spiritual stupor of ordinary consciousness, going on to enjoy the flow of a fully functioning quadratic intelligence. In short, we can finally become fully human.

But then … we need to go back in there! My next post will be about the challenge of staying awake and living creatively inside the webs of relationship we call our individual worlds.

Get Over Yourself

While all the other creatures on this planet, so far as we know, develop their full potential and achieve ‘self-actualization’ in a single lifetime (given the opportunity and provident conditions), only we human beings have managed to undermine our own evolutionary progress. Why and how we do this has been a fascination of mine for some time, and over the years a theory has come together that offers an explanation. While many of the elements aren’t necessarily original with me, the unifying system is something that brings together and breaks through the limitations of other approaches.

Not surprisingly I have come with another diagram, and my returning reader will recognize all the component features from previous posts. What’s new here is not so much in the details as in the gestalt, in the whole picture of things apprehended all at once. You’ll find the familiar color codes associated with our four strands of quadratic intelligence – black for our visceral intelligence (VQ), red for emotional intelligence (EQ), blue for our rational intelligence (RQ), and purple for spiritual intelligence (SQ) – along with orange which signifies the dynamics of personal identity, or ego.

The four types of intelligence are arranged in a manner that reflects the developmental sequence in which they come online and start making significant contributions to our sense of self and reality. We begin at the bottom with the autonomic functions of visceral intelligence; open up very early to emotional engagement with our taller powers (caregivers, guardians, and teachers), siblings and playmates; and around age ten come into our rational faculty with its skills in logic, critical thinking, and conceptualization.

Even though it’s frequently in adulthood that individuals awaken to their spiritual intelligence, you’ll notice that I’ve positioned it in a way that transects the other three (instead of stacking on top). This is meant to suggest that while it certainly has (or can have) a profound influence on our sense of self and reality from very early on, the most important work of spiritual intelligence must await that crucial stage when our separate center of personal identity (ego) is strong enough to be transcended – not renounced, dismissed, or canceled out, but surpassed. Without sufficient ego strength, consciousness is unable to break past the neurotic self-preoccupation that compels us to grip down on ‘me and mine’.

Now that we’re on the ego, let’s take a moment to work out some of those details. I take the view which regards personal identity – this ego who is the center of self-esteem, world perspective, and moral agency – as a social construct and not an entity in the proper sense. Through discipline and instruction the tribe shapes our identity to be compatible (and compliant) with its shared beliefs and way of life. The nature of this shaping process anticipates and responds to the activation sequence of our quadratic intelligence.

Referring back to my diagram, you’ll see that I’ve placed key themes and concerns at each level corresponding to the developmental phases when they are dominant. Thus, in the earliest phase our visceral intelligence is dominant, making security, power, and control primary concerns that shape our deepest (preverbal) impressions of self and reality. Because even the most perfect family system cannot deliver instantaneously on our every need, we all carry some insecurity within ourselves, which we mitigate by attaching to whomever or whatever can calm us down. Attachment, love, and belonging come to overlay (and compensate for) those deeper concerns, continuing the process of our personification (or becoming a person).

By the time rational intelligence is ready to come online a lot has happened down below, in the calibration of our nervous system (VQ) and the adaptation of a relational style (EQ). We become better able to articulate the world that’s been forming around us and the perspective opening up from where we stand. Meaning, truth, and knowledge matter now to us as never before. It’s important to remember that the self-world construct – ‘who I am and what’s around me’ – is part of a social role-play, a cultural pretense of the highest magnitude that has been (not wrongfully) labeled by some, like the Buddha, as a delusion that holds our true nature under a spell, the so-called consensus trance.

Trances are all the more seductive according to the depth of our insecurity and the magnetism of attachment that we hope will compensate for it. In fact, the rational requirement for a coherent and reality-oriented philosophy of existence is all too quickly relinquished for the sake of maintaining membership in a club, class, or cult that promises to keep us safe inside the fold. This is when beliefs once held by the mind come to hold the mind captive (as a convict) to convictions that are placed beyond doubt, beyond question – beyond the probe of reasonable inquiry.

And there we have a picture of where most of us daily live: professing and defending a worldview (meaning) that protects the codependent relationships (attachment) which help us manage the profound (deep and ineffable) insecurity registered in our nervous system. With respect to that, spiritual intelligence stands little chance of awakening. If anything, its mystical intimations and transpersonal longings will be translated into doctrines of supernatural realities and afterlife destinies. Tragically many individuals today are trapped inside long-outdated (irrelevant) orthodoxies, for the sake of which they will sacrifice everything – rationality, property, fulfillment, and life itself – their own and that of ‘the enemy’.

But I can’t leave it there, with the majority caught in their convictions and the planet teetering on the brink of mass extinction. A few of us are fortunate enough, thanks to supportive families, open-minded and generous communities, our own dogged persistence toward an authentic life, and to the sheer grace of resources and opportunities made available in the moment, to arrive with sufficient ego strength that enables us to break through the self-world construct of personal identity. We don’t beat ourselves down as damned, helpless rejects, but simply let go of who we think we are, relaxing into the grounding mystery of being itself and rising into our creative authority among the countless beings that share (and manifest) this universe together with us.

When this happens – and I’m not one who believes it happens once and forever, but is rather a mode of experience that awaits our readiness to let go and our willingness to make the leap – an alignment of power, love, and truth opens us to the reality beyond ourselves. This is when ‘flow’ happens, when what we call the human spirit pulls deep on its faith in existence and reaches out to the wisdom of a universal order, where All is One.

Each of us is rooted in an unfathomable mystery and participates, whether aware or ignorant, in the turning unity of all things.