Curriculum Spiritus

In a recent post I offered a perspective on religion which views it as a single transcultural evolutionary phenomenon, not merely this or that religious tradition but religion itself as the creative incubator of a higher spiritual wisdom. Already this sounds suspicious, given the fact that religions today (and for a while now) have been more conservative and reactionary as forces in society than genuinely progressive and spiritually avant-garde. That fact – especially today – cannot be denied.

But this goes to my more general argument concerning the validity of theism. If we can let go of our very modern reading of theism which reduces it to superstitious belief in the literal existence of god, and allow also that it provides a personified (metaphorical and literary) ideal of those virtues of character and community that humanity is evolving toward, then theism can be affirmed in its value – even as we contemplate our destiny on the other side of god (post-theism). When I defend the developmental necessity of religion, and more specifically of theism, I am not thereby automatically giving support to any historical version of it.

I chose four religions in particular: two strongly monotheistic (Judaism and Islam), one fully post-theistic (Buddhism), and one whose subsequent history abandoned the post-theistic vision of its “founder” (Christianity). Despite distortions and setbacks in each tradition, something of critical importance to the evolving wisdom of our species was clarified and offered up for us all. Part mystical realization and part ethical insight, the distinctive revelation – or, if my reader can’t hear that word without a supernatural backdrop coming to mind, then the distinct discovery – of each religion marked an advance in our human understanding of and progress into genuine community.

What’s more, the chronological sequence of the four traditions (Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam) represents a progressive development, with each revelation building on and extending earlier ones. Whether these realizations and insights spread through time by cultural diffusion (migration, commerce, conquest) or by means of something more akin to Carl Jung’s “collective unconscious,” together they comprise what I propose to name the curriculum spiritus of our species.

Curriculum is defined as a course, literally a path or track; and spiritus is Latin for the vital breath that animates and enlivens. Together they refer to the path of human evolution, advancing by a progressive awakening to that distinct contribution of our species, genuine community – a conscious, creative, inclusive, and responsible way of life in the universe characterized by deep empathy. This choice of genuine community as our aim, over the popular notion of religion’s purpose as the successful rescue of the individual soul to everlasting beatitude in the next life, actually marks a recovery of its raison d’être (reason for being).

Again, I’m not suggesting that religions today really understand their greater cultural role as stewards of our collective spiritual wisdom, distracted as they frequently are by domestic squabbles, shrinking memberships, and the challenge of recapturing relevancy in the wake of secularism. Whether the four religions I feature here are healthy and true – in the sense of getting us closer and deeper into genuine community – is of secondary importance. The most important point is that the mystical realizations and ethical insights, in short, the spiritual wisdom gained over the millenniums concerning the virtues that conspire in the formation and longevity of genuine community, have already been uploaded. This wisdom is available to us now, regardless of our formal religious affiliation or lack of it.

So, let’s revisit this curriculum spiritus, which I am saying represents the collective wisdom of our species concerning the virtues that inform and sustain genuine community. My diagram takes the distinctive revelations in their linear-sequential order and rearranges them on a cross-axis to suggest some creative tensions inherent among them.

Covenant fidelity names the breakthrough realization where individuals in relationship consciously subordinate self-interest to the priority of their partnership together. Partners accept certain obligations and responsibilities to each other for the sake of strengthening community – the whole which is greater than the mere sum of its parts. Their need for belonging (fitting in) and recognition (standing out) is fulfilled, even as the call is honored to transcend ego in the interest of their shared life together. The general message is: Here’s what it takes to live together in peace and cooperation. Do your part and all will go well.

By placing universal compassion in opposition to covenant fidelity I am trying to bring out the creative tension between loyalty to the in-group and a wider sympathy that reaches to “outsiders” as well. Extending the horizon of fellowship to such an infinite degree as to include “all sentient beings” effectively removes the boundary separating insiders and outsiders, and forces us to reconsider the very notion of membership itself. If I am a middle-class, North American, white male human being, all of those distinctions except for the very last (being) can play into the trance that I am separate from the rest. Genuine community arises in the resonance of the “inter-being” (Thich Nhat Hahn) of all things, and when I live out of that deep realization of oneness, compassion flows.

We are all familiar with how such expansive compassion can suddenly collapse to exclude our enemy, referring not primarily to an outsider but to an insider who acts against us. When one partner betrays the other, or when one abuses the good faith of the other through theft, injury, or deception, a resentment and “righteous indignation” can build over time, such that no judicial process for setting things right can finally resolve. The one who has been hurt stores away this wrath until a moment, preferably aided by the element of surprise, when vengeance can be satisfied. But then, such retaliation only convinces the new victim that something must be done to get even – and back and forth it goes.

Unconditional forgiveness begins with the resolution not to repay evil for evil, but rather to “love your enemy.” The due process of justice can even be encouraged, given that, as Harold Kushner points out in his important book How Good Do We Have to Be? (1997), holding the wrong-doer accountable is how we acknowledge his or her humanity as an ethical being. Even with the wheels of Justice in operation, however, our willingness to release the desire for vengeance and regard our enemy with loving-kindness instead is at the heart of this virtue. And if your enemy doesn’t know – or worse, doesn’t even care that you are hurt and offended, then what? Let go, and love anyway. Genuine community must not only be bound by covenant fidelity and extraverted in universal compassion, but it also must inspire partners to honor and love each other without conditions attached.

The inevitable complications of living in community, and for community, make it tempting at times to surrender its ideal and settle for something easier to manage. Those in political authority, the economic class with the most market share, the greatest debt burden, usually those with the most to lose – such voices start to shift the moral discourse and social policy in favor of their own special interests. Something more realistic, but what inevitably turns out to be just another version of realpolitik privileging those in power, gets played out, inventing ways of justifying prejudice, neglect, oppression, and violence against the new outsiders.

What’s needed in this situation is absolute devotion to the ethical ideal of genuine community – to the covenant fidelity, universal compassion, and unconditional forgiveness that will keep us actively engaged in its pursuit. This virtue in the curriculum spiritus stands opposite the willingness to drop our moral right to retribution (i.e., forgiveness). And their tension – letting go of what is rightfully ours and simultaneously holding fast to an ideal we will not compromise on – is surely the place in this system of virtues where the entire project of genuine community most often comes to frustration.

What if we determined never, in any circumstance, to relax our devotion to the work of genuine community? What if our devotion, in this sense, was absolute – pure, unmixed, independent of ego ambitions, urgency, or expedience? What if, above all, we were committed to a life together, reaching out in love and letting go of anger, giving ourselves continually to this work and refusing to settle for anything less?

The world would be a very different place, would it not?

Holding Up the Mirror

Okay, so it’s time for another check-in. We need to do this every so often, just to be sure that my various thought streams are staying congruent with the big picture. Too easily, analysis can chase down the pieces and forget that all these finer distinctions are elements and features of a greater whole. We become widget specialists and lose our appreciation (if we ever had it) of how all of it seamlessly fits and flows together.

I’ll take you on a tour through the diagram above, first moving vertically up the center axis and then left-to-right. If you’ve been keeping up with my posts, the symbols and terms should be familiar, though I’ll do my best to give concise summaries where I can.

Arranged along the center axis are three mental locations where human consciousness engages reality: in the body (sensory-physical realm), the ego (socio-moral realm), and the soul (mystical-intuitive realm). Notice the correlations along each side of the three mental locations, the way consciousness turns inward on the left side and outward on the right. “Inward” and “outward” take on very different connotations, however, depending on the location being considered. Internal, subjective, and existential (left side), or external, objective, and transcendent (right side) are not synonyms but fundamentally distinct orientations of consciousness.

This isn’t really a controversial idea. Just take a moment to notice how the physical environment around you now is accessible to your physical senses, but how the assigned values and meanings that incorporate parts of the environment into your personal world are not. Stepping up one more level to the mental location of soul, you should be able to appreciate the extent in which the transcendent unity of existence is not something you can detect with your senses, and neither is it a mere construct of meaning contained within the horizons of your personal world.

Again, notice how the physical organs and urgencies in your body stand in a distinct dimension from the beliefs and prejudices carried in your ego. And then contemplate the ground of your existence as it opens within you and rises in the quiet presence of being-itself. There are no organs or beliefs inside the soul, only an expansive clearing of present awareness and inner peace. Your existential ground and the transcendent unity of existence are not somewhere inside or outside of you, but instead are the mystical-intuitive dimension of reality as accessed through the mental location of soul.

Then why are we accustomed to speaking of body and soul as “mine,” and as separable from each other? Why do I live “in a body” and “have a soul”? Come to think of it, who is this “I” that presumes ownership of a body and identification with a soul?

The answer brings us to the center of my diagram, to that mental location of consciousness known as ego. While body and soul are considered primary to what you are as a human being, your identity is something that was (and still is) constructed in the interpersonal context of society. It’s helpful to distinguish between essence (what you are in your being) and identity (who you are in the world). Whereas essence (body/soul) is what makes you human, identity (ego) is how you define yourself as a person. This notion of ego as a social construct wonderfully complicates the human adventure, since every individual ego is a product to some extent of the society that shapes it.

I’ll just give a summary account of the process as it relates to the left-to-right horizontal axis of my diagram. Your identity – and I’m referring not just to the roles you play in the world, but to yourself as a performer of roles – got started in the awareness that your tribe expected certain things of you. Earliest on, these expectations were focused around the need to take control of bodily impulses, and not merely to gratify them spontaneously whenever the urge arose. The morality of your tribe at this stage was simple and binary: Do this, and Don’t do that. Your options were clear between good and bad, right and wrong, yes and no.

The challenge of membership was not settled by the mere fact of your birth or adoption into a family. To be “one of us” and a good boy or girl, some mechanism of restraint was imposed on the urgencies of the body, and in the pause or delay opened up by that restraint, a quantum of consciousness was harnessed and steadily shaped into Captain Ego. Since you were dependent on your provident taller powers for protection, nourishment, and support, this discipline of repression – literally pressing those spontaneous impulses back into the body (or what is also called “holding it”) – eventually produced the illusion of an ego as separate from the body, as well as from the rest of reality.

As we now swing over to the left side of my diagram, we see how your developing ego was conditioned from the very beginning by a need for security, represented by a triangle. I’ve positioned the triangle on an arc stretching between the internal organism of body and the existential ground of soul, making the point that your need for security has both animal and spiritual implications. Already from the time in your mother’s womb, the body’s nervous system was fulfilling one of its primary functions, which is to match your body’s internal state to the perceived conditions of its external environment. (The obvious evolutionary purpose in this rapport-building is to initiate adjustments that will maximize your survival chances.)

Though the uterine conditions of your mother’s womb may have been optimal, the situation changed dramatically once you were delivered (or expelled, depending on the myth) into the social womb of a family. There, whatever distress your nervous system took along with it was either mitigated or magnified by the relative health and attentiveness of your family system. Security, then, is the sense that reality is supportive, provident, and sufficient to your needs. It has both an animal aspect, in the relative composure of your nervous system, as well as a spiritual aspect, to the degree that you are able to rest in the grounding mystery of existence.

And wouldn’t you know it, but nobody gets through this gauntlet without some insecurity – not even you. This brings us back to the center of my diagram, to the circle that surrounds ego, a shape representing attachment. This is how you compensated for whatever lack of security you may have felt: you reached out and latched on to whatever could help calm you down. Not surprisingly, the greater your insecurity, the more desperately you gripped down and held on. Along with this behavioral holding-on came emotional identification with the objects of your attachment, as well as increasingly unrealistic expectations (and expressed demands) that your objects never let you down.

Perhaps it was a combination of this imperial claim on reality along with a vigorous dis-identification with the body, that first inspired ego to impersonate the soul and insist on its own immortality. We should note that it likely wasn’t some keen insight into the evergreen nature of soul but a consequence of its own opposition to the mortal body, that motivated ego to regard personal identity as something that must live forever. Personal immortality is quite a late development in religion, but once it took hold as a doctrine, religion (in particular, theism) became increasingly preoccupied with ego’s escape plan.

But let’s stay in the world a bit longer as we move one more step to the right in my diagram, to a square which represents the ego’s need for meaning. Actually “world” and “meaning” are deeply synonymous, since your world is a personal system of meaning that you are busy constructing and maintaining in cooperation with your tribe. I have placed the square, with its four sides for boxing up reality, on an arc stretching between body’s external environment and soul’s transcendent unity of existence. This makes the point that your world is neither a simple arrangement of empirical facts, nor an infinite horizon containing all of reality. It is a very selective, biased, and egocentric work-in-progress.

Indeed, stronger attachment to the objects (other people, things, ideas, events) that compensate for your insecurity requires a system of meaning (personal world) where all of it makes perfect sense. A way of stating the consistency across the horizontal axis we’ve been considering is this:

A primary function of your world is to justify and protect the attachments which in turn pacify your deeper insecurity.

Ego’s subjective self and objective world are thus the inside and outside of “me.” But in truth both are constructions, two sides to a complicated role play, a lifelong project of make-believe. I’m using the word “truth” here as a reference to the way things really are, to the reality beneath and beyond the illusion of meaning, which may shine through or break apart your tidy system in moments of epiphany or apocalypse. That famous line from the film A Few Good Men (1992) – “You can’t handle the truth!” – applies to most of us, most of the time.

So what’s the upshot of all this? Why hold up the mirror this way and a take an honest look at yourself? Very simply – and this is the ultimate aim of what is called “awakening” – to help you realize what you’re up to.

As the morning sun fills your curtains, perhaps this will be the first day of the rest of your life.

The Progress of Wisdom

I write this on the day after the city of Paris suffered a coordination of terrorist attacks on its citizens. Just this morning we learned that ISIS (a radical sect of Islam that seeks to establish a theocratic state) has claimed responsibility for the slaughter of 129 innocent lives (and still counting). It’s tempting to jump on the anti-Islam wagon and talk about how dangerous this religion is to our civilized security and to the future of free democracy and human rights. How it should be pushed into extinction as quickly as possible – along with all religion while we’re at it.

But I won’t. Instead I’m going to offer a very different perspective on this religion and its place in what I’ll call the progress of wisdom on our planet. We gave our species the name Homo sapiens sapiens (“very wise person”) prematurely and perhaps in denial of the catastrophic foolishness of which we are capable. Or it might have been prophetic of the direction we are evolving, which is increasingly toward a more rational, cooperative, and ethically-minded mode of being. I realize that the atrocities in Paris argue against such an optimistic view, but I should emphasize that I am not making a claim for having arrived, only that we have been evolving in this direction over the millenniums of our ascent as a species.

My second point is a bit harder to defend, which is that religion has been crucial to our advances in wisdom. Today the voice and behavior of religion tend to reinforce the growing opinion that it is a regressive force in modern culture, closing down the mind, perpetuating superstition, and putting up walls where we should be building bridges. And I agree: religion itself is frequently the most strident opponent of spiritual awakening, reluctant to validate and quick to condemn our need to transcend ritual, creed, and orthodoxy for the sake of a higher realization. But as I’ve said before, the regression and corruption of a religion (or even all religions) doesn’t automatically mean that religion itself should be rejected out of hand.

As a system for “linking back” (Latin religare) the individual to his or her community, the community to its history, its history to the cosmos, and all of it to the grounding mystery of being itself, religion has been the glue in human culture. And in its guiding fictions, known as myths, religion has provided for the contemplation of our destiny, our obligations to one another, and of our own evolving nature. Its revelations have come in stages, at precisely the times we were ready to discover more of ourselves and actualize a higher wisdom.

Once an insight was gained or a principle introduced, its transforming power didn’t always, if ever, meet with unanimous acceptance. This is where it is helpful to distinguish between the historical religions (including the history of religion) and the stream of higher wisdom that has been progressing over the millenniums. Think of it this way: as religions evolved, new ethical insights and mystical realizations were “uploaded” to a collective depository of higher consciousness that transcends each and all local cultures. Every time these insights and realizations are contemplated, taught, shared, and put into practice, that wisdom is “downloaded.” The religions exist in local time and get closer or fall farther away from these truths depending on the political intrigues, moral campaigns, or economic hardships that happen to be tying up energy. The stream of wisdom, however, is timeless.What is the guiding ideal to which this stream of collective spiritual wisdom leads? As I survey four of the major world religions and consider the unique “upload” of wisdom represented in each one, the answer to this question becomes obvious. Humanity is evolving in the direction of genuine community – conscious, creative, vibrant, and inclusive. The essential principles and conditions that make such community possible have already been uploaded to the stream of wisdom. It just happens that downloading activity has fallen off sharply of late, which means we are not accessing this wisdom and putting it into practice.

In choosing these four religions I am not “rejecting” others. From my study of religion, which includes a fairly exhaustive survey of the major traditions, I find that these four in particular – Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam – were both originators and early outspoken witnesses of the “insights and realizations” that promote genuine community. Other religions may sound similar bells, but these voices were the first and clearest in articulating them. Let’s take them in chronological order, as suggested in the above diagram.

Covenant Fidelity

Judaism discovered and introduced the first principle of genuine community, which offered a way through the impasse caused when emotion and self-interest drive human relationships. Each individual finds pleasure in the other’s company so long as they can get along and stay in agreement. But when interests diverge and their goals fall out of alignment, or when one betrays the other or causes injury – then what? The rule of nature would likely motivate a separation, but not until the offense is redressed. And the more painful, the better.

The ethical insight of covenant fidelity places that relationship inside a system of constraints that are meant to “overrule” the impulses of emotional self-interest and retaliation. A covenant is a compromise (literally a “shared promise”) where individuals commit themselves to the health and longevity of their relationship, instead of being driven by what they get or hope to get out of each other. When disagreement, injury, or betrayal occur, the covenant holds them to their promise and exhorts their best efforts in working things out. As an ultimate aim of covenant fidelity, genuine community becomes the context for reconciliation.

It’s important to see that in Judaism’s concept of covenant fidelity, the objective is not to let wrongdoers get away with it, but neither is it the best thing to let the fur fly until the victim is fully satisfied. The rules of covenant say things like, “Love your neighbor as yourself” and “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” where a punishment must fit the crime in the interest of repairing broken or strained relationships. In the normal dynamics of any partnership individuals will fall in and out of affection for each other, but faithfulness to the covenant of their relationship will keep them both oriented on a greater good.

Universal Compassion

Siddhartha Gautama took the Hindu doctrine of Brahman as the One Being in myriad manifestations and followed it all the way to its logical conclusion: If all things are manifestations of One Thing, then all things must also be connected by a sympathetic energy. For the future Buddha the implications of this mystical insight were revolutionary and far-reaching. The outcasts of his society were no less deserving of happiness than those in the highest caste, and no one is exempt from the human condition, which he compared to the chronic pain (dukha) caused by a dislocated joint.

We are all off-center and out of alignment with our proper being. Insecurities drive us to attachments that inevitably magnify suffering as they fall short of our expectations, dissolve under their own impermanence, or change without our consent. In desperation we grip down all the more, only to make our problem much worse. All of our defenses and strategies, our hopes and convictions, end up pushing us deeper into suffering. What we need is to see – really see – that our suffering is self-induced, and that all of our aggressive self-promotion is counterproductive. Making it all about “me” makes us incapable of seeing beyond ourselves to the shining truth of existence.

This understanding of ourselves, where we can acknowledge the insecurity beneath the ignorance that in turn drives the damaging ways we treat each other, can ignite in us the power of compassion – not just for ourselves but for all people. With this ethical vision of universal compassion, rooted in the mystical realization of the interconnectedness of all things, our evolutionary path to genuine community made a decisive advance.

Unconditional Forgiveness

With Christianity – or I should say with Jesus, since the Christian religion was unable to institutionalize the heart of his teaching – came the invitation to accomplish something that would neutralize, or better reverse, that one inviolable moral imperative which holds every tribe together when all else fails: hostility for the out-group. Of course, the boundary separating insider and outsider can be drawn arbitrarily as impulse dictates, which means that what we’re really talking about is how we regard and respond to “the enemy.”

Obviously our enemy doesn’t have to be over the sea or outside our borders. The ones that cause us the most distress and provoke our greatest hostility are the enemies who were formerly our friends, people we trusted but who betrayed our trust, even those we had let into our deepest confidence and most private concerns. Looking around, Jesus observed how much unrest in human relationships is due to a perceived retributive imbalance between individuals and groups. One side has “gotten away” with something, has taken more than his or her share, or caused damage that must be repaired before things can be right again. The trading back and forth of this “retributive reflex” – each side getting even with the other but perpetually throwing off the balance in the other’s mind – is what locks us in never-ending border wars.

The orthodoxy of Jesus’ day had set limits to how many times one should be obliged to forgive an offender. According to rabbinical tradition a remorseful and repenting offender ought to be forgiven as many as three times – more than that puts the guilty party’s sincerity in question. Behind this limit-setting was the conviction that an unrepentant sinner doesn’t deserve the gift of forgiveness. In fact, an unrepentant sinner (as well as the perpetually insincere penitent) deserves to be punished. Instead, Jesus counseled the radical response of unconditional forgiveness. Effectively he told his disciples to just let go and stop counting; love anyway. When the retributive reflex in our hearts is extinguished, the world around us will change.

Absolute Devotion

Now we come to the contribution of Islam. As his generation was languishing amid a stifling pluralism and moral laxity, Muhammad realized that what they were missing was a commitment to something that transcended all the temptations and distractions in the foreground. This supreme reality was the will of Allah, and to submit oneself to the will of Allah would ignite a passion and purpose that no worldly power can overcome. The Muslim’s first task, then, is to vanquish the evils of greed, bigotry, and hypocrisy in his heart, by the systematic and relentless discipline of jihad.

By “absolute” devotion we are referring to an ongoing act of full surrender to Allah’s will, not calibrated on the basis of our circumstances or conditional upon our internal motivation. Absolute literally means perfect, not mixed or adulterated, free from restriction or limitation. Allah’s will is not interpreted through anything, whether it be a holy book or even The Prophet himself. It must be desired, grasped, internalized, assimilated, and realized in the world without compromise. There is an evident danger in this idea of an absolute will, and the Muslim doctrine of the Qur’an as the inerrant word of Allah that must simply be read and obeyed has made the religion especially attractive to extremists who come to regard their own wills as beyond question or debate.

Throughout its history Islam has shown vulnerability to take-over by radical ideologies. Whoever steps into power and assumes an air of authority has been able to exploit the absolute devotion of true believers. The violence in Paris is another example of how the internal struggle of jihad can get perverted and projected outward onto “the evil other” in a kind of religious insanity.

But if we can see this principle of absolute devotion in the sequence of revelations, as whole-hearted and unwavering commitment to something beyond the individual ego, a different picture emerges. I propose that each of the four principles builds on the others, extending and deepening our understanding of what genuine community entails.

Genuine community =

an abiding faithfulness to the health and longevity of relationship (covenant fidelity)

+ a profound appreciation of our shared suffering and connectedness (universal compassion)

+ a decision to release our grievances and treat our enemy with kindness (unconditional forgiveness)

+ a relentless pursuit of its realization on earth (absolute devotion)

The stream of wisdom is the property of no single religion or culture; it is ours collectively as a species. Homo sapiens sapiens.

Commence with the download!

Lifelines

Soon after you were born your family got to work, training you into a well-behaved member of the tribe (a “good boy” or “good girl”). Although you were already related to others in the circle by genes or adoption, the process of turning you into “one of us” involved the force of culture, as distinct from that of nature. A human society is more than a collective for mate-pairing, reproduction, protecting the young, and sharing resources. Again, at the cultural level it is also a system of morality and ideology – an orthodoxy that shapes the consciousness of its members into a common agreement concerning the meaning of life.

You weren’t born with a preconception of life’s meaning. What something means is a matter of making numerous associations within a coherent reference system, between that thing and other things, from that thing to antecedent causes, symptomatic effects, and prospective ends or outcomes. The meaning of something is about linking it into a web of proximal and distant, similar and different, identical and opposite, previous and subsequent other things. Putting this mental picture together takes time and experience, as well as some pretty serious construction work. Your tribe didn’t leave you alone on the job. It provided you with the materials and tools that meaning-making requires, as well as the blueprints and inspection codes you were expected to follow.

All of this mind-shaping, meaning-making, and world-building activity of culture conspires to put its members into a TRANCE, which has at its core that common agreement concerning the meaning of life mentioned earlier. By definition, a trance is a “passage” or transitional phase to somewhere else. A hypnotist puts his subject into a trance so that he or she will unquestioningly obey the hypnotist’s suggestions. The collective culture puts its members under a similar spell, for the purpose of seducing them with the suggestion that they are separate individuals and incomplete without what the tribe has to offer.

As you slowly slipped under, the dream of your separate existence – variously judged as special, flawed, ignorant, unworthy, or depraved – started to take on the feel of reality. You really were all those things! As you looked out the window from your solitary confinement, you saw other egos obeying the same commands, which only confirmed and validated what you felt. The moment you gave your full agreement to the orthodoxy of egoism you fell completely into the DREAM.

Across the wisdom traditions of the world, the word “awakening” is widely used in reference to the event (or process) that leads to liberation. This term also carries a diagnosis regarding the human condition, which is that you are caught in the dream state of ordinary consciousness – and you don’t even know it. As you look around it all seems very real, when you are really just looking at a dreamscape of your own making.

Let’s spend a little more time with this concept, as it is easily (and often) misunderstood. We are not saying necessarily that what we see around us is only an illusion – not actually there, but only appearing real. Leafy trees, clouds overhead, other people walking about: these are real facts in the external environment, even if their appearance, orientation, and proximity to you are an obvious function of perspective and depend on your relative position as an observer.

These same objects take on an illusory effect when we add your appraisals of them as good or bad, pretty or plain, useful or worthless, yours or mine – all labels rather than actual properties, opinions and not facts, projections of yours onto reality and not at all real. Such judgments concerning the value and meaning of things are part of the fantasy you believe. They are ego extensions; and just as your sense of being a separate self is a construct of cultural orthodoxy, everything that carries this doctrine of separation into your general outlook on reality serves to promote the dream and keep you asleep.

So all those labels, judgments, and opinions are projected onto the reality of things. During childhood you were steadily lured into a trance, taught to believe that you are separate and special, that everything else stands in some relation of value and meaning to you. As this whole process was a slow seduction, you gave your agreement without really knowing what was going on. At times even now you may catch a glimpse through the veil hanging over your mind and be momentarily startled by the realization that your worldview is a cultural incantation – a tribal convention, a mental construct, a fantasy of meaning. But pretty soon the sleepy smoke dulls your focus, the trance takes over, and you are comfortably back in the dream.

The thing is, this dream isn’t all candy canes and rainbows. Inevitably, as in the movie The Truman Show (1998) where the bowsprit of a runaway sailboat carrying Truman (Jim Carrey) tears into the fabricated sky at the edge of the world he believed was real, the social conventions that keep the veil of meaning in place slip out of position or fall into tatters. It might be the sudden death of a loved one, the collapse of a career, the breakup of a friendship, or what I like to call “consumer fatigue”: the progressive exhaustion of hope in chasing fulfillment through something outside yourself.

The Western – specifically North American – ego is powerfully conditioned to regard itself as empty inside, entitled and demanding, and in need of being filled up. Of course there’s no filling-up to any kind of lasting satisfaction, for the simple reason that the consumer ego is a fast open drain.

By whatever means the disturbance comes, the deeper fall from dream into NIGHTMARE can be devastating. Value and meaning have collapsed or leaked away, leaving you disoriented and grief-stricken. For some people this might be the end; seeing no reason to go on, they take their own lives. A few will survive the nightmare and slowly repair their damaged dreamscape, adjusting back into an egocentric existence, though tempered perhaps by a sharp edge of cynicism. And there are those who will endeavor to spread their nightmare onto others, becoming apocalyptic alarmists, militant crusaders, violent terrorists, or convicted fanatics.

If you happen to find yourself in a nightmare, you may be closer to AWAKENING than ever before. As I’m using the term, awakening is not a destination but a process; in this way we might think of it as the reversal of a trance. Just as trance is a passage into the dream state, awakening is the path of disillusionment that leads out. Awakening is ongoing. It can come dramatically or by increments, but the process never ends. Enlightenment can make it sound as if an end has been reached, but once any attempt is made to construct meaning around it, what we have is another illusion and not the persistent commitment to clear-sighted awareness that awakening signifies.

Nightmares are conducive to awakening because the work of disillusionment – the stripping away of illusion – has begun against your will, without your consent, and despite your best efforts at keeping the dream intact. The dream itself has built-in safeguards against awakening, with its 24/7 propaganda machine and seductive promises. In a nightmare, however, the gravity of your loss and the distress of your situation veritably scream a call for change. Sometimes pain can be your most effective teacher, and grief your most precious companion.

Upon awakening you can see things as they really are – without labels, without judgment, and completely free of meaning. You realize that reality is one, everything is interconnected, and nothing (listen up, ego) is separate from the whole. You can relax into being, observe without opinions, and love without fear.

It’s not really about you.

Here You Are

Once upon a time you fell out of union with maternal providence and exited to a realm of bright light, sharp noises, cold air, and hard surfaces. In an instant your animal instincts were activated in the business of keeping you alive. If all had been well in the womb, then in all likelihood this new blooming, buzzing environment soon resolved into the soft warm skin and cooing face of your mother. Her (or your caretaker’s) attentive presence quickly calmed your nervous system and helped you feel assured that reality was sufficient to your needs.

This assurance, imperfect as it is and without guarantees, is known as security. I symbolize it in my diagram above with a triangle, stable with a wide base and balancing everything else on its tip, suggesting that under conditions of insecurity the higher system might not hold together so well. When the nervous system registers a hostile reality instead of a provident one, the resulting pathology can be a borderline personality chronically at risk of falling through the floor and into the body’s urgency.

Your adequate care outside the womb provided an attachment bond which partly pacified your lingering insecurity, as well as served to shape your brain for life in relationships. Research confirms the vital significance of that primal bond, as a mother’s right (intuitive, emotional, and empathic) hemisphere entrains the infant’s brain into a coherent state. I have symbolized this need for attachment with a circle, with its suggestion of inclusion and belonging. If you imagine a vertical energy axis anchored in your gut where the environment is metabolized into the mass and energy of the body, then with attachment our focus has shifted upward to the heart-center.

While we’re on those shape symbols, let’s complete the set by adding a square to represent your emerging need for meaning – to have a mental model that makes sense of reality as you experience it. We’ve moved now from the heart to the head. The frame of your square tends to be as large as your attachments allow, which is simply to say that stronger attachments have the effect of shrinking the scope of relevance only to what is urgent or useful in keeping the bond intact. As a constructivist I regard meaning as something human beings construct rather than “discover” in reality. You are always busy making meaning that protects your attachments and calms your insecurity.

All of this goes into what I have called your Personality Code, referring to the preferred way you orient yourself in reality (gut/security, heart/attachment, or head/meaning) and the relative clarity of consciousness across the three centers. A high degree of clarity correlates with “ego strength,” where your personality is sufficiently stable, balanced, and unified to support experiences of ego-transcendence known as power, love, and truth. For more on the Personality Code, see http://wp.me/p2tkek-DE.

Almost imperceptibly we started with your birth once upon a time and followed the path of early development into your personal identity as an ego. The steps along the way to a fully established sense of who you are – all the drama around your need for security, attachment, and meaning – shaped part of your personality that sits just beneath and behind Captain Ego, called your inner child. I’ve put the term in square brackets to make the point that your inner child, which was who you were during your actual childhood, is today kept inside and out of your adult affairs.

However, still today as an adult whenever you get pinched, triggered, or poked emotionally, to the extent that you feel your security, attachments, and meaning threatened, something very “childish” comes out of you. You become reactive, impulsive, defensive, aggressive, manipulative, or sullen. The particular forms of expression this takes for you is what I have named your neurotic styles, which evolved as adaptive strategies for getting your way. For more on that, see http://wp.me/p3e1Rr-5Y.

It’s important to see that your ego is not some thing, like a metaphysical entity living inside your body. It is simply the self-referencing center of executive control that inhabits the roles provided by your tribe (family, peer group, professional community, political party, nation, etc.). Not only is your ego an actor playing a variety of roles in the realm of relationships, it also serves the function of managing the numerous “sub-personalities” that live inside you. You know these sub-personalities as distinct trajectories of impulse, mood, and motivation that come out and drive your thoughts, feelings, and behavior. One of ego’s principal contributions is to provide some executive management over these various (and occasionally competing) aspects of your personality.

For the most part your ego does a decent job managing this crew and steering through the role plays that comprise your daily life. Somehow through it all you want to keep your identity intact, feel secure, stay connected to the people who matter to you, and live a meaningful life. The system that makes this possible is called your world. In previous posts I have described this concept of a world on the analogy of a spider web. The spider (your ego) spins out a design of thread (your world) across The Void and proceeds to live inside it. Your world is your personal “spin” on things, the peculiar way by which you construct meaning, connect to others, and maintain your sanity.

In my diagram you’ll notice that ego isn’t the crowning achievement or last word on what a human being is or can become. While experience at this level is very dramatic and seemingly all-important, ego and its world are really nothing more than a delusion of consciousness. The neurotic styles of your inner child, the role plays where so much of your attention is invested, and even that executive center of identity called “I, myself” (ego) are a kind of reaction-formation entirely conditioned by your upbringing, your socioeconomic location, your life circumstances, and the somebody you’re trying to be. It’s not only possible but highly likely that most people spend an entire lifetime (in the Orient, numerous lifetimes) striving to keep it together, hold on to what matters, and reach a better station at some point in the future.

The spiritual life is ultimately about an awakening of consciousness beyond ego and its world. While this idea is too often conveyed in mythic-literal language as an out-of-body, end-of-life deliverance to a heavenly paradise, it is actually all about here and now. In fact, because the ego-world duality effectively cuts out a genuine present-moment awareness of existence, awakening from this trance (earlier I called it a delusion) brings you to the very ground of your being, where “I” dissolves away and All is One. This is what I name the present mystery of reality.

Your higher self, then, not only refers to your taller adult self that is capable of taking a more rational and responsible perspective on things. It also names your creative authority for transcending (“going beyond”) me and mine (as well as beyond the tribal us and ours) in a larger, more inclusive, interconnected, and holistic understanding. It is in this spirit that the term “universe” is used to speak of all things turning as one. Rather than merely naming a scientific fact, this concept expresses a spiritual realization, which is to say, a realization reached by your spiritual intelligence (SQ) of the unity of being. In other words, as I’m using it here, “universe” is not simply what’s out there and all around us, but a sacred name for the breakthrough intuition that here and now is all there is.

The universe is not only infinitely larger than your personal world, insofar as it exists on the other side of meaning; it is also prior to all meaning, deeper than words, and nothing (no thing) to speak of. It is: this – farther out than you can see, and That which quietly contemplates it all through your eyes …

Deeper Into Your Personality Code

Let’s begin by arranging the following clusters of values in order of priority as you consider your personal preference.Is it more important in your opinion to know the truth, love and be loved, or have things under control? Most likely you value all of these, but which cluster is highest on your list? Obviously you shouldn’t choose the one you think I will admire most in you, or the one that those closest to you hope you will select. Just be honest. Whichever ends up third on your list isn’t necessarily of no value to you, but merely of lower value relative to the other clusters.

Personality Code Now, on the graphic to the left write the letter ‘S’ inside the square, or the letter ‘C’ inside the circle, or the letter ‘T’ inside the triangle, depending on your preferred cluster of values. Only insert the letter in the shape of your top choice, leaving the other shapes blank. Got it?

Let’s move on to the next step.

How would you score yourself on a scale of 1 (low) to 3 (high) that measures how flexible your belief system is? Are you fiercely committed to what you believe, or are you constantly updating your knowledge and opinions as you go along? Would you consider your world – referring to the system of meaning that you have constructed around yourself – less or more reality-oriented? Do you test your beliefs on a regular basis to be sure they square with the way things really are, or would you regard yourself a person of strong convictions that you won’t let go of so easily?

If your belief system is flexible and reality-oriented and you regularly test and update your perspective on things, then give yourself a 3 (high). If you don’t think these qualities describe you at all, give yourself a 1 (low). If you’re somewhere in the middle (somewhat flexible and open-minded but still pretty set in your views), then go with 2 (moderate). Write your number to the right of the ‘equal’ sign next to the square.

Now, how would you score yourself on a scale of 1 (low) to 3 (high) that measures the strength of your relationships with others. Do you move quickly and easily into relationships – and just as easily out of them when partners become controlling and abusive? Is staying in a dysfunctional relationship preferable to being on your own? Would you agree with the statement that “love makes the world go round,” or have your efforts at love more often thrown you into a whirlpool of hurt and confusion? Do you seek out occasions and opportunities where you can meet people, make friends, and expand your network of social support?

If you get along with others and don’t very often get caught in conflicts, then give yourself a 3 (high). If you frequently get crosswise with people and have an impossible time untangling your feelings, give yourself a 1 (low). If you’re somewhere in the middle (preferring company but hesitant over jumping in), then give yourself a 2 (moderate). Write your number to the right of the ‘equal’ sign next to the circle.

Finally, how would you score yourself on a scale of 1 (low) to 3 (high) that measures how stable you are in yourself? Are you doubtful when it comes to your abilities and the support you need to succeed in life? Is it easy for you to give away your power and let others call the shots? Do you hide behind authority and work hard to shine glory on those in control, to such a degree that you have little light left of your own? Are you chronically anxious over the possibility of things not working out, or can you stay grounded come what may?

If you are anchored in your being and in touch with your source of creative power, then give yourself a 3 (high). If on the other hand you lack confidence in yourself and reality in general, give yourself a 1 (low). If you’re somewhere in the middle (capable of trusting but preferring to play it safe), then go with 2 (moderate). Write your number to the right of the ‘equal’ sign next to the triangle.

You should end up with a letter in one of the shapes and a number to the right of each shape. This is your Personality Code. You might be a C132 or a T213 or an S321, or something like that. The letter identifies your preferred locus of engagement with reality, at the level of your head (square), heart (circle), or gut (triangle); while the number sequence represents the relative clarity of consciousness across all three loci.

(For more context, see my introduction to Your Personality Code.)

The number range from 1 (low) to 3 (high) places you on a continuum of ego strength, where 1 is borderline, bipolar, and dissociative (not necessarily at clinical levels of pathology) and 3 is stable, balanced, and unified. As explained in previous posts, normal development will satisfy the individual’s need for security, attachment, and meaning, to the point where he or she is capable of (i.e., possesses sufficient ego strength for) transcending “me and mine” in the experience of self-actualization. The clarity and flow of consciousness in self-actualization is variously named power, love, or truth depending on the favored locus (gut, heart, or head respectively) of the individual.

Personality Code Figure Your gut (particularly the digestive organs and glands) is where the raw materials of nutrition undergo conversion into the mass and energy of your body. For that reason it is the portal of consciousness into its own grounding mystery and the deep source of your creative power. This is also why, when your security is threatened or your power is momentarily lost, you feel upset in your gut.

Your heart is where you make emotional connection to what’s around you, most importantly to those human others – family, friends, strangers, and enemies – who collectively shape your personal identity. It is the portal of consciousness into the realm of relationships, your center of empathy and love. For this reason, you might speak of a loss of love as heartbreak and experience it as pain or heaviness in your chest.

And your head (mind) is where the mental construct of a world is made out of your assumptions, beliefs, thoughts, and intuitions of meaning. It is also the portal of consciousness into reality on the other side of meaning, which shines though (or burns away) the veil in moments of truth. However, if the veil is too opaque to let in the light of reality … or we might also say, if a naturally questing intelligence is locked inside inflexible and outdated convictions, this ignore-ance of what’s really real can cause mental fatigue and migraine headaches.

The Personality Code is not intended to render a diagnosis and lay one more identity contract on you. But perhaps it can be useful in helping you see why you get poked and hung up the way you do sometimes. It might also suggest a way through the suffering to a more authentic and fulfilled life.

Paths Into Reality

Although I spend a good amount of time defending the role of religion as the “system of utilities” that translates our spiritual intuitions into the structures of meaning in everyday life, I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that intuition precedes the structures which translate it, and that meaning is secondary to the mystery at the heart of experience. My utilitarian account of religion, where its validity is determined by its usefulness in representing the mystery and supporting a way of life that promotes genuine community, offers a helpful criterion for criticism as well as one that appreciates religion’s valuable contribution.

Religion’s behavior of late has provided more grist for criticism than appreciation, however, leading many to wonder if perhaps its long career is approaching an end. As science and secularism continue to spread across the planet and pervade modern consciousness, perhaps it is time to just let religion go. The problem with letting religion go is that it isn’t going away as many hoped it would, but is instead going the way of irrelevancy and conviction (which are really flip-sides of each other), increasingly willing to condone or commit violence in defense of its idols.

So I will try again to rehabilitate religion to its proper role in personal life and society, this time not by tracing out its system of utilities but instead by looking deeper into the spirituality it intends to embody and express … at least originally. If it doesn’t do this very effectively at our cultural moment, our task should be (I would argue) to deconstruct religion back to its source – not its prehistoric origins but to the source-experience of mystery that informs all true religion, whether animistic, theistic, or post-theistic. Tao Paths I’ve chosen the symbol of Taoism as the backdrop of my illustration above, for the simple reason that it is perhaps the best visual image available for contemplating the nature of reality (or anything) as a dynamic duality of principles. An experience of the present mystery of reality takes place and unfolds along primarily one of two complementary paths, an interior path to the Grounding Mystery (or ground of being) or an exterior path into the Provident Universe (or universal order).

The interior path descends into deeper centers of solitude, progressively farther from the light of sense discrimination and “world awareness,” to the Grounding Mystery where all mental associations and even consciousness of oneself dissolves away. For this reason it is named the “dark path.” This movement apart (or away) from others, objects, and external reality generally is also called apophatic, which refers to the subtraction of words and a refusal to attach mental labels to one’s experience.

A more determined discipline of abandoning names and representations of the mystery is known as renunciation – saying “no” to something that qualifies, delimits, or otherwise interferes with one’s direct experience of the Grounding Mystery. Since the dark path proceeds by separating oneself from surface distractions, surrendering attachments and refusing to put words on the mystery, it often goes by the Latin name via negativa (way of negation). The goal ultimately is to lose (one’s sense of) oneself entirely in mystical union with the Grounding Mystery, to the point where Nothing (literally no thing) remains.

It is out of this ineffable awareness of Real Presence that the meditator will be refreshed in his or her intuition of oneness; that just as his or her deep inner life opens into the Grounding Mystery, so it can be said of all things. The existence of each thing is really a process of be-ing whereby it manifests the mystery of being-itself in its own limited form. All of existence takes on a sacramental character as the outward manifestation of this deep inner mystery.

In many early cultures, and even into the medieval period, a people’s cosmology (their mental model of the universe) was honored as a sacred picture of reality. This helps us understand why the revisions introduced by empirical science were so strongly resisted, and why even Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton initially explained their observations with adjustments, such as epicycles in planetary orbits, that could preserve the sacred cosmology to some extent.

This outward turn leads naturally to our consideration of the second path. The exterior path ascends into higher orders of communion, farther out into the light of sense discrimination and beyond world awareness, to the Provident Universe where all things “turn as one.” At this highest level, nothing is left out and all things exist together as illumined parts of a greater whole. For this reason it is named the “bright path.” This movement towards (or joining as part of) others, objects, or external reality generally is also called kataphatic, which refers to the addition of words and qualifiers in a fuller description of experience.

On this ascending path we are saying “yes” to the distinctions that qualify reality into a Provident Universe, where all things conspire together for the emergence of life and consciousness. Our ability to contemplate this is itself evidence of the fact that our universe is provident, not only in the organism of our body and highly evolved nervous system, but in Earth’s pro-life environment by virtue of its proximity to the Sun, along with the relative position of our galaxy within the expanding fabric of space-time. Theoretically every bit of it makes a contribution to the whole, suggesting that the farthest distant nebulae somehow play (or once played) a part in our present contemplation.

As we move up and out from ourselves, then, we are engaged upon the via positiva, a path where every new encounter is added to our understanding of the whole. The self is not negated but affirmed, world awareness is not renounced but transcended – surpassed and included within a larger frame of communion (literally “together as one”). Whereas the Grounding Mystery is deep within all things and accessible only by the inward via negativa, the Provident Universe is all around each thing and includes all things by the outward via positiva.

Now that we have the two paths of spiritual experience in view, I will draw my reader’s attention to the square at the center of my diagram. This is the box of identity, of the individual personality and its captain ego, which is conditioned according to its driving ambitions for security, attachment, and meaning. Each of us along the way enters into, negotiates, wakes up inside, converts to, and occasionally abandons (betrays, forsakes, releases) the identity contracts that define who we are. The rigid strength of this box is what I call conviction, which is the point where belief takes control of the mind rather than the healthy vice-versa. Just like a convict, an otherwise free and creative intelligence is “bound and determined,” and we all know where that leads.

To the box-dwelling ego, both spiritual paths present an intolerable threat for the simple reason that they require an individual to let go of “me and mine.” Security, attachment, and even the meaning locked up in one’s orthodoxy must be surrendered in the interest of touching and really seeing the present mystery of reality.

But since boxes are easier to manage (as well as mandate on others), most of us choose to stay inside.

Your Personality Code

The triangle symbolizes security and power. Its broad base gives it stability, while the ascending peak anchors its energy to a central axis that keeps it from tipping or being easily moved. This might be a favored shape in your own personality code – referring to the preferred way you orient yourself in reality and engage the world around you. If it does represent your modus operandi in life, this doesn’t have to imply that you are a power monger or tend to push others around, but you probably do enjoy having influence in what’s going on.

Heart_Circle The circle symbolizes attachment and love. Its round enclosure suggests wholeness and inclusion, while the endlessness of its curve speaks of rhythm and eternal recurrence. If this is the favored shape in your personality code, then you probably place high value on connection, inclusiveness, and intimacy. It doesn’t have to mean that you are sappy or an emotional pushover – although you could be. You might guess correctly that Triangle people and Circle people sometimes don’t get along well, or else they get stuck together in co-dependent relationships.

The square symbolizes meaning and truth. Its boxy shape suggests containment and conclusion, where things are packaged up and put away. The four sides also connote wholeness – not by inclusion (as the circle) but through bringing together different aspects, dimensions, or viewpoints (as in the four cardinal directions and the “four corners of the world”). If your personality code favors the square, then you are a person who engages the world rationally, who wants things to fit together and make logical sense.

I started our review of personality-code shapes with the triangle and ended with the square because that particular order reflects the actual sequence of stages in human development. Our need for security dominates early infancy, when we are forming our deepest impression concerning the provident nature of reality. This impression is registered in our nervous system as a set-point to which our mood, mindset, outlook on life, and emerging worldview will be tethered as we develop.

Depending on whether we feel secure in the care of our higher powers, attachment proceeds either in a healthy direction (infant-mother bonding) or else we attempt to pacify our anxiety by desperately clinging to mother and insisting on being comforted. If our mother (and the family system overall) is anxious and insecure, our insistence on keeping her close will regulate somewhat her anxiety, thereby pulling us both (or all of us) into a co-dependent web of mutual support.

If our family system was characterized by a general insecurity and these co-dependent attachment strategies, our personal construction of meaning was probably closely monitored and prescribed by the higher powers in charge. It was necessary that our mental picture of reality (or worldview) conform to their “orthodoxy.” The stories we told about others and ourselves, our beliefs concerning good and evil, right and wrong – along with the metaphysical backdrop of supernatural forces and principalities – all of them had to match up and justify our shared outlook on things. To belong was to be a confessing member of this orthodoxy, “one of us.”

What I’m calling your personality code, then, might be thought of as the way your individual history (especially your early history) programmed your engagement with reality along an axis of three coordinates situated at points corresponding to your gut (security/power), your heart (attachment/love), and your head (meaning/truth). If the triangle, circle, or square represents your preferred way of engaging reality, then the values associated with that shape (as briefly described above) are what typically orient and motivate your choices in life. Thus we might speak of “triangle types” (or T-types), “circle types” (or C-types), and “square types” (or S-types) in naming how individual personalities operate in the world.

The physical location of these centers in the body is easily verified in ordinary experience. When we feel that our support is being threatened or taken away, when we don’t feel prepared or confident in our ability to meet a challenge, when we are required to stand in front of a group and give a speech – in such times, don’t we typically experience upset in our gut? And when a loved one betrays our trust, abandons us in our need, or is taken from us by death, don’t we commonly speak of this as heartbreak? Finally, when we are unable to make sense of something, when life throws us a curve and our working theory of how it all holds together no longer works, don’t we often experience the disorientation as tension around our eyes and a dull throbbing headache?

Instead of reading the “/” (forward slash) in the word-pair as “and,” as in security and power, the terms actually comprise an opposition of sorts. In fact, a real appreciation of the difference between security and power, attachment and love, meaning and truth might dawn for most of us only later in life, at that critical time when our spiritual awakening is pushing against the boundaries of who we think we are. Our identity up to that point is a summation of numerous identity contracts we hold with ourselves and negotiate with others around us, going way back into our infancy when we formed that deep impression regarding the provident nature of reality.

If we can allow the realization to rise within us, we will come to understand the extent in which our authentic power has been relinquished for the sake of a false sense of security. We will understand how our attachment to possessions, other people, and tribal identities has closed down our capacity for empathy and genuine love. It will become clear to us how our commitment to meaning actually removes us from direct contact with reality, with the truth of things. When we are locked up as convicts inside our convictions, the true nature of existence and its ineffable mystery is inaccessible to us.

The point here is that, while security, attachment, and meaning are necessary to our healthy development, these very developmental achievements can interfere with the full activation of our spiritual intelligence (SQ). This interference can be particularly strong if our personality code is complicated by early trauma, chronic adversity, and tribal mind control.

But the good news is that our innate drive toward self-actualization – what propels every organism into maturity (Aristotle’s entelechy) – continues to seek fulfillment. The day hopefully comes when we discover our power, embrace all things in love, and allow our veils of meaning to fall away before the present mystery of reality.

Human Doing and Human Being

Morality (from the Latin mos, custom): Folkways of central importance accepted without question and embodying the fundamental moral views of a group.

Ethics (from the Greek ethos, custom): The body of moral principles or values governing or distinctive of a particular culture or group.

My description of the ethical function of religion has prompted a few of my readers to request a more careful definition of what I mean by the term “ethical,” and how (or whether) it differs from another word, “moral,” that is commonly used in this regard. Before I answer this question, I’d like to put the ethical function of religion back into context where it serves as the fulfillment-in-behavior of an experience that begins in the (sometimes shocking) awareness of the grounding mystery in which All is One (i.e., the mystical function).It’s helpful to consider the system of religion’s four functions on the analogy of a tree. The mystical function corresponds to the tree’s roots reaching deep into the silent ground, while the ethical function is symbolized in the fruit, which is where the mystical nourishment from down within finds productive expression and fulfillment. As I see it, this flow from mystical experience to ethical behavior is not direct, but is rather mediated through the other two functions of religion.

The articulate structure of the tree’s trunk and branches represents the doctrinal function, which is where the spontaneous realization of oneness is converted into meaning. (Don’t we still talk about the various “branches” of knowledge?) Ultimately, the behavioral product (or produce) of ethical conduct calls on the support of inquiry, judgment, reasons, and justifications – in other words, it depends on a context of meaning. We don’t just “automatically” do the right thing; ethics is about intentional behavior that involves a reasonably articulate understanding of what really (and ultimately) matters in a given situation.

In my illustration above, the leaves of the tree are opened out to the light of the sun from whence they draw the energy necessary for photosynthesis. Both the sun and the outreaching leaves symbolize the devotional function of religion – the sun as a representation of the deity, and the sunward orientation of the leaves representing the aspiration of devotees. In religion the deity isn’t only “above” the community as the object of its worship; he or she is also “ahead” of the community as its aspirational ideal, depicting the higher virtues (compassion, kindness, fidelity, forgiveness, etc.) into which human nature is evolving. As they elevate a merciful god in their worship, the community is really glorifying the virtue of mercy itself as an ideal worthy of worship …

… and worthy of ethical pursuit. This is where in theism the devotional and ethical functions connect. And whereas in theism proper this connection operates under the radar of explicit awareness, in post-theism the literary character of the deity is appreciated as a construct of the mythic imagination which has been evolving in an ego-transcending and humanitarian direction over its long career.

This distinction between behavior that is pre-reflective – “under the radar of explicit awareness” – and behavior that is guided by critical reflection is the most helpful way of distinguishing morality and ethics. As can be seen in the dictionary definitions above, both words trace back to the same basic idea (a “custom” or way of doing something), one deriving from Latin and the other from Greek.

As their meanings later merged and developed in common usage, morality and ethics became differentiated to where morality now refers to the “unquestioned” rules and value-judgments that group members live by, while ethics entails a higher level of philosophical reflection on the principles that (perhaps should) govern human behavior.

This difference corresponds exactly, I would argue, with the phases of “early” and “late” theism, where early theism enjoins right behavior “because god commands it and will punish you if you don’t” and late theism exhorts followers to “be merciful as your father in heaven is merciful” (Jesus in Luke 6:36). This is the shift from obedience to aspiration, which I have suggested is a leading indicator in the genuine progress of theism into post-theism (see “Stuck on God“).

We all know that Nietzsche was bitterly critical of what he called “morality,” urging his generation towards the ideal of his “Overman” or ethical superman who throws off the chains of unquestioned moral customs – especially if these are placed beyond question by ecclesiastic orthodoxy – in order to take up their own lives in world-affirming passion. He didn’t believe that taking away the moral prescriptions of childhood would leave grownups without ethical purpose or direction. In this respect Nietzsche sounds a lot like the apostle Paul:

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. (1 Corinthians 13:11)

Our continuing challenge, as I see it, is to urge adults to grow up and not stay in that comfortable groove where because I said so – the “I” here being the parent, the police, or the patron deity – is the motive force behind our actions. True enough, actual children need this supervisory incentive for pro-social behavior, as their brains and social worldview are still in the process of opening up beyond the limited range of self-interest.

What we need are adult caregivers and educators who have advanced sufficiently into their own self-actualization and expanded horizons-of-life to support and encourage youngsters into maturity with “reasonable urgency.” We can still speak to them of provident reality in personal terms, as god’s benevolent care for all creatures, even as god’s loving concern for each of us. But at some point, the adolescent needs to be invited to take up his or her creative authority and become a self-responsible benefactor of the greater good, to embrace life on the other side of god (post theos).

So we progress, however slowly and by fits and starts, from morality to ethics.

A Provident Reality

A reader familiar with my thought stream in this blog knows how central is the concept of a “provident reality.” It also becomes obvious that I use this term in a way that’s not entirely consistent with its classical definition, where it referred to the way of god towards those who trust and believe in him (a masculine reference dominates the tradition). Over time, Providence (usually capitalized) came to be used as a substitute term for god’s benevolent provision, particularly as believers look to the future.

Rather than the notion of providence deriving from our experience of god, however, I have argued that our concept of god arises out of and reflects our (especially early) experiences of reality as provident or otherwise. As I use the term, a “provident reality” does not name a being who cares for us, but the extent in which the totality of existence supports life, community, and the evolution of consciousness. The fact that we are alive and conscious and creative and intentional means, in the very least, that our universe is all of these things – in us.

Despite all our abilities and the positive illusion of our individual autonomy, each of us is deeply dependent on the reality outside our ego for what we need. To live, to thrive, to flourish, to love, to construct meaning and awaken to our full human potential – we depend on reality to provide for us every step of the way. We need air, water, and food; we need shelter, intimacy, and connection; we need language, tools, and the skills to use them; we need guidance, exemplars, and forgiveness when we fall short.

All of us were born into some kind of family system – even if our arrival is what made it a family. We began as helpless dependents, equipped by biology only to breathe on our own, and really not much else. We needed to be fed and cleaned and cuddled and carried. Without a provident higher (taller) power to care for us, we would certainly not have survived. The relationship with our higher power(s) was formed most significantly around those needs of greatest urgency concerning our physical security and the material resources our body required. For reasons I’ll make clear shortly, I will name this providence of the first order.

Depending on how provident the higher powers were with respect to our first-order needs, a corresponding impression of reality was encoded into our nervous system. If the supply was sufficient and the care was adequate, our brain was allowed to settle into a coherent state of focused alertness and relaxed calm. The compatibility between our dependent condition and a reality that provided for our needs promoted the formation of what Erik Erikson called “basic trust” and what the religions name “faith” – faith in the provident nature of reality.

Erikson also observed plenty of cases where individuals demonstrated a compromised ability to trust reality and simply relax into being. Their deep and chronic dis-ease registered an early life where a first-order providence was lacking or perhaps inconsistent. From a neuroscientific perspective we might today diagnose their brainstates as incoherent – confused, irritable, and/or depressed. In religion, such individuals typically express a desperate demand on god’s vigilance and granting of prayers. They also tend to orient themselves to external authorities for the security and resources they require, even into adulthood.

If too much of our energy and attention gets wrapped into first-order concerns, we might never experience or benefit from providence of the second order, referring to social encouragement and creative opportunities in life. Where physical security and material resources are scarce and unreliable, it is common for family systems to fall hostage to a ravaging spiral of anxiety, resentment, and despair over matters of basic survival. Second-order providence sounds like a luxury when one’s daily existence is in question.

This is why nearly every ethical revolutionary in history has made the abolition of poverty central to their vision of a New World. Whatever its contributing factors, the fact that abject poverty destroys the human spirit and erodes the foundation of any society is beyond doubt. As these messiahs, mahatmas, prophets and reformers have insisted, our resolve as a community to provide security and resources to our weakest and most vulnerable members is ultimately what will bring salvation to the world.

When that first-order providence is in place, the social encouragement and creative opportunity that I’m calling second-order providence can work its magic. A human being not only struggles to survive, but every individual embodies the evolving spirit of our species – what the philosopher Aristotle called an “entelechy,” an inner aim, or what I also like to call our evolutionary ideal. As Abraham Maslow pointed out, when our basic needs are adequately met, the farther reaches of our human nature can be actualized.

My definition of second-order providence should make it clear that our higher nature depends for its actualization on the benevolent social support of a community. Social encouragement conveys our commitment to the individual’s emerging creative authority, and our bond of service continues in making opportunities available for the individual to learn, grow, and develop to his or her full potential. Obviously this providential responsibility begins in the family, as parental taller (higher) powers not only put food on the table but also nurture the soul-seeds in their children.

Family is the first theistic system. The dynamic relationship between providers and dependents – so critical, as I have argued, to the healthy emergence of self-responsible creative adults – ultimately plays itself out on the larger stage of culture. Deities are our “fathers” and “mothers” and we are their “children,” which makes the fellowship of believers a sibling circle of “brothers” and “sisters.” (Universalists like Jesus have used this theistic metaphor to make the point that all of us, believers and nonbelievers, friends and enemies alike, are members of one family and deserve each other’s deepest respect. But look where that got him.)All of this is to say that the inner aim (entelechy) of theism is the full actualization of human beings and the flourishing of a fully inclusive community. An impossible ideal, you say. And I would agree – as long as we stay on this side of god, where the concerns of first-order providence preoccupy our consciousness. On this side, there will never be enough and all we can do is await our deliverance to a better place later on.

On the other side of god, in the spirit of post-theism, we discover that it’s been in us all along to become compassionate caretakers and visionary creators of the New World. To fulfill what our god could only command.