A Way Through the Mess

In the degree we each lack peace within ourselves, the power dynamics between us will be misaligned, dysfunctional and mutually damaging, allowing for very little possibility of love lifting us beyond our differences into selfless goodwill and genuine community.

The worldwide spiritual wisdom tradition known as Sophia Perennis holds a communal vision for humanity, saved, as it were, not by our technical ingenuity or an escape to heaven, but by the liberating power of love, grounded in peace. This tradition flows underneath and cuts across all the world cultures, gathering and safeguarding the insights, principles, and techniques for cultivating the spiritual practice of a liberated life.

Plumbing the mystical depths of human experience and scaling the heights of our most enlightened ethical aspirations, Sophia Perennis is a timeless – and always timely – testimony to our better angels.

As a vision of human wellbeing and fulfillment, its elements cannot be more simple, straightforward, and clear. It is we who make it complicated. Let’s step through this together in an effort to understand its message and identify where things tend to get stuck and twisted up in unnecessary complications.

The illustration above depicts two individuals, you and me, each a self-conscious person (an ego) trying to hang on and make our way in the world. Our egos, referring to the centered “I” of our individual self-conscious experience, are depicted as balloons tethered to a human nature comprised of an animal body and a spiritual soul.

The “and” is intentional and quite emphatic, as body-and-soul are not two things, two parts, or – as taught in many religions – our immortal self (soul) inside a mortal shell (body).

According to Sophia Perennis, our true self is a complementarity, or even more essentially, a communion of body and soul. So, while it may seem obvious to us that we have a body and have a soul, this possessive regard of our human nature turns out to be nothing but a mirage-effect of observing ourselves from the tethered position of ego.

In fact, ego is itself only an encapsulated quantum of animate (body-and-soul) consciousness, siphoned and contained inside its own balloon of reflexive (i.e., self-) awareness.

Our essential nature, in contrast to our conditioned and inflated identity (ego), is in constant touch with Reality. The body is connected to the sensory-physical environment, its Web of Life, and to the cosmic home of our Universe. It depends on, participates in, and contributes to the higher wholeness of all things. Inwardly, descending the interior depths of consciousness, the soul rests in the grounding mystery and deeper oneness of being-itself. Deep within, our essential nature dwells in Being, in the pure presence of Here and Now.

Deeper oneness and higher wholeness, the generative Ground of Being and the manifold Unity of Existence, the hidden wellspring and universal order of all things – these are together the Yin and the Yang, respectively, of the Tao we call Reality.

A consequence of ego’s separation from our essential nature is a certain degree of insecurity – of feeling isolated, exposed, and vulnerable inside a socially constructed and self-made illusion.

When we began our individual journeys to an ego-centered identity, we compensated for this loss of existential security by attaching ourselves, first to Mother, then to others, and from there to our kind (race, ethnicity, class, party, and creed), as well as to the status symbols of our tribe.

Ego is primarily a center of self-conscious experience, but it’s also an actor who slips into suits to play various roles on the social stage. From childhood, through youth, and well into adulthood, the principal share of our attention and energy is invested in this project of taking on identity contracts and becoming (or trying to become) somebody special.

The more profound our insecurity, the tighter we cling to our attachments and the smaller our identity shrinks.

Identifying as a White, middle class, Southern Baptist Christian (or whatever) means that we identify with other White, middle class, Southern Baptist Christians (and so on). They are the ones around whom we feel safe and comfortable. We like them because they are like us.

Others, though, who are of different races, classes, backgrounds and beliefs, pose a threat to our small identity. For our own safety we try to avoid them, keeping them at a distance with bigoted stereotypes, and even vote for politicians who legislate against their equal rights and freedoms. Our lack of inner peace (i.e., our existential insecurity) drives our use of power in ways that are biased in our favor and damaging to those whose mere existence threatens our crabbed and fragile identity.

Needless to say, when we are entangled in codependent relationships and running from or fighting against others who are just too different, too alien, to be trusted, all pathways to transpersonal community and genuine love are blocked. More accurately, such pathways are simply not available to us because our love of power – driven by a lack of peace – compels our defensive resistance to the power of love.

Now we can see how the world got into its current condition. Hopefully, too, we have a better understanding of our own complicity in the mess about which we so often fret and complain.

Even more importantly, we may be starting to see our way through to the wellbeing and fulfillment that we, together with all of our fellow human beings, so deeply long to find.

First Things

If we don’t really understand ourselves, how can we know what we need to be healthy, happy, and whole? In our ignorance we are left groping for what feels good, for what might help us get ahead of the game, or at least distract us from the anxiety of not knowing what “the game” is all about. Is it about material security, sensual pleasures, personal prosperity, out-Jonesing the Joneses?

Actually, we do know what human beings need to be healthy, happy, and whole.

The answer has been stored in the transcultural superconscious “cloud drive” of our species for thousands of years. Known as the Perennial Philosophy or Sophia Perennis, this deep tradition of wisdom spirituality has been cultivating, “uploading,” and safeguarding the answers to our ultimate questions as human beings.

The problem is that fewer of us today are “downloading” its wisdom into the concrete situations of life. Percentage-wise, a much smaller portion of the living human population on Earth even knows that such a repository of spiritual wisdom exists, compared to earlier centuries when the great mythologies and philosophies of life informed the world cultures.

We are left with social media and the news of the day to find our bearings.

Sophia Perennis is not merely the work product of some ancient authors who had the good fortune of living during times and under empires that afforded them leisure to ponder the ultimate concerns of human existence. In fact, its cloud drive of spiritual wisdom is more than an anthology of sage writings collected from around the world.

Locating Sophia Perennis in the Superconscious of our species – at the opposite end of a continuum of consciousness with roots in the collective Unconscious of Jungian psychology – acknowledges its primary form in living insights, images, concepts and ideals rather than as academic treatises on parchment in clay jars.

Each time some individual – anywhere – discovers a timeless truth or finds her way to a deeper understanding of the path to human health, happiness, and wholeness (in a word, to wellbeing), the insight of that discovery is instantly uploaded to the superconscious cloud drive of spiritual wisdom.

From that moment, it is available for download by anyone else – anywhere – in the world. Its mere presence in the superconscious cloud drive of spiritual wisdom makes access that much more likely for many others.

The addition of insights, maxims, skills, and techniques strengthens this “morphogenetic field” (R. Sheldrake), reducing the time, effort, and suffering it might take for others elsewhere and later on to attain a similar enlightenment or spiritual breakthrough.

So then, what answers can we find in the perennial tradition of spiritual wisdom to our questions about what humans need to be healthy, happy, and whole?

In brief, there are just three things we need: Peace, Power, and Love.

These “first things” (or principles) are correlated to the three dimensions of human consciousness: the Soul (esoteric/contemplative: Peace), the Ego (intra/interpersonal: Power), and the Spirit (communal/transpersonal: Love).

My illustration diagrams these three dimensions of human consciousness in a way that indicates their dynamic interactions. The critical pathway in human development and evolution is rooted in the Soul’s deep interior (Greek esoteros) and our need for Peace. From there it flows to the Ego and our need for Power. Finally, fulfillment is reached in the Spirit’s breakthrough to the higher wholeness of community and our need for Love.

Fulfilling a given need ensures a healthy support for the need next in line, so to speak. Thus a sufficient base of inner Peace provides the support that a healthy center of personal Power requires. This in turn establishes the stable point from which the transpersonal leap into communal Love is taken.

A complete picture of human health, happiness, and wholeness, then, is grounded in Peace, centered and connected in Power, and included in the unifying energy of Love.

Of course, we might also track this dynamic flow across the dimensions of human consciousness through the more common traps and obstacles along the way. Rather than focus on the many variations of more or less “normal” psychopathology, however, let’s review the positive steps and gains on that upward trajectory to human fulfillment.

The developing center of self-conscious identity in the ego is the “mythic hero” we will be tracking, with the positive steps and gains labeled in orange-colored text. (Throughout this blog, orange is my color code for all things ego-related.) In agreement with most Western schools of psychology, ego is here regarded as a critically important and positive achievement in personality development.

Without “ego strength” the personality lacks stability, balance, and integrity. Most so-called mental disorders are the symptom and consequence of a deficiency in ego strength.

When a newborn is received into the embrace and nurturing environment of responsive caregivers, its infantile nervous system calibrates to a frequency (state or mood) that is fully grounded in a Reality experienced as provident.

Inwardly, the body releases or relaxes into a state of calm as attention opens gently to the Here and Now.

This is what Sophia Perennis names faith, which is fundamentally – that is, energetically – different from how it is typically understood in the religions. Neither a belief nor even a willingness to believe, faith in the spiritual wisdom tradition refers to the release and surrender of basic trust in the Present Mystery of Reality. The corresponding experience is Peace: an ineffable assurance that all is well.

Absent this grounding of faith, anxiety possesses the nervous system instead – and every subsequent step and stage in development will be complicated by its disturbing effect.

Upon this stable foundation of basic, or existential, trust in Reality, other developmental strengths naturally emerge. The well-centered ego brings the nascent personality into integrity and forms sympathetic bonds of affinity with others. In this balance of (introverted) integrity and (extraverted) affinity – or what is effectively the healthy balance of personal Power, an adolescent ego enjoys a measure of freedom from urgency and reaction, which it redirects into the agency of deliberation, choice, creative purpose, and personal responsibility.

While Sophia Perennis safeguards the wisdom principles and practices that have helped seekers through the centuries cultivate inner Peace and personal Power, its teachings on the human need for Love make it clear that our fulfillment as individuals and a species lies in our devoted service to community.

Literally “together as one,” community certainly includes the transpersonal fellowship of ego-centered human beings, but also the extra-human realm of the planet, its web of life, and the cosmos as a whole. Our little-appreciated name for the cosmic environment, universe, carries this insight regarding the higher wholeness of all beings: “turning as one.”

In the spiritual sense, Love is much more than an urge, a desire, or a feeling, but refers to the force that fills, lifts, and includes us in the higher wholeness of all things. In serving wholeness we become whole.

Timeless Wisdom

It’s natural – or we should better say, it’s the expected outcome of our socialization as a self in a world – to find ourselves inside something that seems very real. From those early days, our tribe is busy orienting us to its worldview, beliefs, and way of life, instructing and shaping us into a conscientious member. By the time it’s all finished – with the corners tightened and the cracks papered over – we won’t know the difference between construct and Reality.

To illustrate this, my diagram depicts a “self” in its “world,” where we feel very solid and our world seems very real.

For many of us, this will be where we live out our days: managing an identity and believing the world – that is to say, agreeing intellectually with its representation of the way things are and committing ourselves emotionally to its truth.

The identity we often struggle to manage is actually a duality, with a center (self) and a boundary (world). One doesn’t exist or have any meaning without the other.

As our self develops and the world around us changes, we can suffer from confusion and disorientation. In earlier and more traditional societies, each time this happened our tribe could be expected to come with its rituals, interventions, and wise counsel to help us find our center in the world once again.

Historically this custodial responsibility for linking us back to the tradition, worldview, and life-ways of our tribe was handled by religion (religare, to link back). This is less often the case anymore, given the erosion of religion’s credibility in the Age of Science and its tendency toward otherworldly distractions.

Religion’s influence has actually gone in the opposite direction from its original design intention of facilitating healthy identity development across the lifespan, to the point now where “this world” is to be renounced, forsaken, and finally left behind for the Real Deal somewhere else and later on.

Thankfully, the perennial tradition of wisdom spirituality, which is the underground stream to all those overland tributaries of religion, has conserved and further cultivated their original charter of linking back, re-centering, orienting identity to the social roles and responsibilities of life in this world.

While the religions typically turn the focus of attention elsewhere, Sophia Perennis invites our contemplation on two normally invisible thresholds in the self-world construct of identity. In fact, the very notion that self and world are the center and boundary of a social construction is a central insight of wisdom spirituality.

What we ordinarily regard as solid (self) and real (world) are merely the subjective and objective orientations, respectively, of our personal identity, centered by the ego. Only as consciousness is looped back upon itself does it become self-conscious inside its own world boundary. Understanding this “makeshift” or constructed nature of self-and-world gradually brings those two aforementioned thresholds into view.

This is also where the difference between wisdom spirituality and otherworldly religion is most obvious.

The first of these thresholds is within the self, at the point where consciousness drops away from its center (at the ego) and descends the Essential Depth of Being itself. Also called the Ground of Being and the grounding Mystery of existence, this mystical dimension is the deeper oneness in all things, with each thing manifesting its power but in the disguise of a limited temporal form.

In a variety of meditative and contemplative techniques perfected over the millenniums, Sophia Perennis reminds us that our center of identity, which puts on and takes off the roles that match us to our age-appropriate responsibilities of life at each stage, might also be surrendered for a deeper experience of ineffable Mystery, boundless presence, inner peace, and authentic life.

Give it a name if you need to. Call it God if you want. Personify it as a god that you can worship and obey. But just know, this is your mind’s way of scooping a bucket from the Living Stream of Mystery.

A second threshold is at the boundary of our world. The illusion for a normal socialized identity conceives of the world as “all there is,” expanding outward ad infinitum. As more discoveries push the limits of knowledge farther out, our world grows in size. And while that is true, the threshold at the boundary of our world is not the limit of what we know against what we don’t know yet.

Beyond our world, according to Sophia Perennis, is not just larger possible worlds but the Consilient Unity of all beings. Also called the Web of Life and the living Universe, this ethical dimension is the higher wholeness of our interconnected existence, the harmony of the Whole.

As consilience refers to a “leaping together” of centered individuals, the emphasis is on the unique contribution of each to the universal order. This synergistic effect plays across the Web of relationships in an exponential fashion, amplifying and unifying the myriad elements into a dynamic complexity. The Web is a vibratory, living, sentient, self-conscious, and transpersonal Whole.

Our intentional participation in the Consilient Unity of existence is only possible to the degree we are able to “see through” our personal world to Ultimate Reality, pulling aside its veil of meaning, getting over ourselves, and joining the harmony of the Whole.

The difference between Sophia Perennis and the religions on the matter of salvation couldn’t be more stark. While the religions prescribe a rescue mission for the self out of its world, the perennial tradition of wisdom spirituality teaches the principles and practices for dropping into the deeper oneness of Being and celebrating our place in the higher wholeness of all beings.

Sages, prophets, and mystics through the ages have been saying that what we seek is already within us and all around us. We just need to open our eyes and really see.

Endangered Species

It’s weird to think that humans are still on the journey to actualizing our full potential as a species. All other species, as far as we can tell, reach fulfillment in each generation, where the young develop to maturity as the adults nurture them along. For the most part, genetic codes and the drives of instinct ensure that each individual actualizes the inner aim (entelechy) of the species.

We use the designation “endangered” for those species that are at risk of falling into extinction due to climate conditions, loss of habitat, over-predation by other species, critically low birth rates, or devastating disease. The human species is certainly not endangered in any of those senses, although our own ambition, ingenuity, and ignórance (willful ignorance) will someday – probably sooner than later – bring about our self-destruction, if we continue on our present course.

But modern humans are indeed an endangered species, if we think of it in terms of falling short of our ideal, of what a human being is intended by nature to become. To understand the dynamic in play, we need to acknowledge a factor in human evolution and development that isn’t present in other species: self-consciousness and its executive center of identity named ego (Latin for “I”).

This wildcard factor of ego is both the leading indicator of human progress and the “Achilles’ heel” that threatens to bring us down.

Joseph Campbell discovered “the hero with a thousand faces” throughout world mythology, and he believed that the Hero’s Journey is really what the stories are all about. Whether a particular myth is focused on the adventures of a hero or heroine, or instead throws the horizon of wonder out to the larger cosmos and the acts of a god, its power as story is anchored to the center of self-conscious experience in the mythmaker and his or her audience.

We might think of the mythos or plotline of these stories as tapestry upon a frame constructed of the dynamic principles and dimensions of our self-conscious (egocentric) experience. The illustration above diagrams these dimensions on a vertical axis with the terms communion, existence, community, and dissociation. Moving across horizontally is the arc of development that tracks the progress and perils of ego’s heroic adventure.*

Communion refers to the deeper oneness of body and soul, the outward and inward orientations, respectively, of our animate consciousness as human beings. “Human” and “being” distinguish these complementary orientations in a way that can also be read as the human (manifestation of) being.

Human, then, names our animal nature and species as homo sapiens: the genotype, biology, physiology and neuroanatomy that identify us among the classifications across the web of life on Earth. This is the expression or manifestation of being that we recognize as ourselves.

Being refers to the generative power-to-be evident (or manifested) in the astonishing diversity of beings: molecular beings, rock beings, tree beings, bird beings, cloud beings, star beings … and human beings. Each of us is a communion of human and being, outer and inner, body and soul.

It is out of this communion that ego begins its journey into existence, referring literally to the act or process of “stepping or standing out” (ex + sistere) from the deeper oneness of body and soul. To be conscious of ourselves, a portion of consciousness must detach from communion in order to secure an external vantage-point from which these can be appropriated as “my body” and “my soul” – that is, as belonging to “me,” the self-conscious “I” (ego).

But of course, our essential nature as human manifestations of being is not property of the ego, which makes its claim delusional and its perception of the body and soul as separate an illusion.

This is where many religions veer away from the perennial wisdom tradition (Sophia Perennis), affirming and embellishing on ego’s delusion of independence and ownership rather than acknowledging the illusion of separateness – from the position of egoic consciousness – and then finding ways to “part the veil” to Reality and the liberated life.

Typically, a religion will either condemn the ego as something to be subdued, or glorify it as something to be saved. According to Sophia Perennis, whether the strategy involves renouncing or rescuing the ego, our focus (on the ego) is fundamentally misplaced. The assumption of its substantiality comes along with the certainty of its separate existence – which is the illusion we need to get beyond.

Developmentally speaking, ego formation is intended for the purpose of facilitating human progress into community. This refers not only to our relationships with other ego-centered persons, but with all of life and the even the cosmos itself, at which scale is named the Universe (“turning as one”). While communion is the deeper (undifferentiated) oneness of body and soul in the grounding mystery of Being, community is the higher (diversified) wholeness of all things, together as One.

The long process of individual development and of our evolution as a species is about focusing consciousness through the lens of ego where the Universe becomes aware of itself in, and as, us. Through us, the Universe feels what it is to be human, sees itself through human eyes, and is able to act in the freedom of will and with the bigger picture in mind.

Sophia Perennis (often personified in the myths as a woman) stands at the threshold with the veil of illusion pulled aside, inviting us to the Infinite Life outside our cocoon.

Our experience of, and inclusion within, the higher wholeness of community and the greater Universe can be overwhelming if we happen to be bound by insecurity to our ego and desperately trying to hold our own. The orange-colored spiral in the illustration above depicts this tightening loop of anxiety, frustration, and depression that pulls the ego off its intended course and into a state of dissociation.

In religious mythology, this state or condition of dissociation is represented metaphorically in the experiences of possession (loss of self), captivity (loss of freedom), and exile (loss of belonging).

It is not our destiny as humans to succumb to dissociation from Reality. And yet, the centripetal pull of dissociation into more extreme states of anxiety, frustration, and depression works to separate us not just from Reality, but also from our own common sense. We are in danger of reaching a point where nothing makes sense, nothing really matters, and any hope of getting out and finding our way back is utterly lost.

We might as well take each other and everything else down with us.

*The diagram above charts a typical human lifespan, advancing through the life stages of the Child (birth to age 10), Youth (ages 11-25 years), Adult (ages 26-60), and Elder (age 61 to death). At midlife (around age 40), an individual will typically undergo what’s known as a “midlife crisis,” where the dynamics of existence and dissociation can throw the ego’s hero journey profoundly – in some cases catastrophically – off course.

The Vocational Clarity Table of Elements

Just imagine what it would be like if 100 percent of college students completed their programs and found their way into careers doing work they love.

A lofty goal, no doubt.

Obviously that would be a remarkable improvement over today’s 50 percent completion rate. For the preconditions of this (what should be alarming) dropout from college, we are confronted by the fact that 80 percent of college students change their majors multiple times.

Not knowing why they are in college or where they are going is not really the fault of the students themselves. A majority of them are fresh out of high school and just now crossing the developmental threshold from childhood to adulthood. For thirteen years (K-12 grades) they were pushed from behind by taller powers who directed them to the next assignment, the next assessment, the next grade.

With a high school diploma in hand, they now stand on college campuses disoriented, waiting for somebody to tell them what to do and where to go now.

A bewildering array of programs urges some pretty major decisions right from the start: A two- or four-year degree? An academic path to a higher credential, or a workforce path to a job? Maybe a certificate or occupation skills award instead of a degree? Make your choice. Pick a major. Get to class! It’s no wonder that persistence and completion rates are so low in colleges and universities across the country.

Now throw in the fact that your average human brain doesn’t come fully online with its capacity for grasping the big picture and long view on life until the mid twenties, and suddenly those stubborn confusion and dropout rates start to make sense.

Does college come too early, then, or should colleges take a different approach in the support they offer to students? At the moment, due to the high risk of failure for students, colleges are directing more money and effort into interventions designed to keep students on the path to completion. They’ve been at it for decades now, for exactly as long as students have been confused and dropping out of college.

Coincidence?

If the principal goal and concern of college is to get students to graduation, then the cost of interventions can be justified and more intervention initiatives will be devised and funded – until the institution itself goes bankrupt.

But what if vocational clarity were the priority – not instead of program completion and graduation, but as first and highest among a college’s institutional commitments? Vocational clarity can be defined as “a clear understanding of one’s calling (Latin vocare), purpose, and direction in life” – big picture and long view stuff. It’s about much more than picking from a catalog of degrees, majors, and courses and then showing up to class.

The major obstacle confronting a commitment to vocational clarity in higher education is the very paradigm of intervention currently in place. Its focus on risk and the use of preventative support to lower the probability of failure also carries an implicit assumption that students are deficient in what they need to succeed.

From the K-12 “push from behind” to post-secondary “stop the bleed” measures, education has become something that is done to students rather than with them.

And you’d better believe that students can feel the difference.

A priority on vocational clarity requires a paradigm shift in education from intervention to empowerment. Its focus is on student potential, not deficiency. Instead of lowering the risk of failure by stepping in with what students are presumed to be missing, empowerment is designed to awaken and ignite what they already have inside themselves. Let’s be bold and name it the human spirit.

The graphic above offers a framework for understanding vocational clarity as comprised of certain essential “elements” arranged according to a catalytic process that begins with the discovery of natural talents or gifts, and culminates in the mastery of skills that enable students to do – perform, achieve, create, and produce meaningful results. My “table of elements” consists in a vertical set that correlates to the student’s inner potential, and a horizontal set that channels this potential outward to the adult world of life and work.

As a method of empowerment, the vocational clarity process begins not with the job market but instead with an assessment of a student’s natural talents, intelligence, and interests. The concept of “interest” is based in the research and career development theory of John L. Holland (1919-2008) who understood it as strategically positioned between an individual’s natural gifts (talent) and the specialized performance tasks of work (skill).

Importantly different from the fleeting focus of attention (squirrel!), interest refers to stable and enduring traits of the personality.

Inwardly, interest is also correlated to individual intelligence – not how smart someone is, but how they are smart (c.f., Ken Robinson). For example, creative talent underlies aesthetic intelligence and can be assessed as “artistic” interest (one of Holland’s six types). It should go without saying that someone with a strong aesthetic intelligence, but who may not measure up to an academic standard of what admission boards consider (logico-mathematically) intelligent, is just smart in a different way.

Holland’s interest codes and assessment tool provide for more than a useful method of matching students to relevant occupations and career paths (interest » activity » skill). It also gives insight into a student’s inner potential – into their unique endowment of the human spirit (interest » intelligence » talent).

By indicating their interest on a scale of values (more or less) in various tasks described in the assessment – not whether they currently have the skills to perform each task or would like to do it professionally someday – the student’s preference for different types of activity is gradually clarified and measured. (This distinction between a specific example and its general type is critically important to keep in mind while completing the interest assessment to ensure the accuracy of its results.)

John Holland realized that the countless job tasks across the more than 1,000 distinct occupations in the world of work can be distributed under just six types of activity, with each occupation centering 2-3 of these types of activity in the day-to-day responsibilities of work.

These six types of activity correlate directly, according to his theory, to six “workplace personalities”: realistic DOERS, investigative THINKERS, artistic CREATORS, social HELPERS, enterprising PERSUADERS, and conventional ORGANIZERS.

Once students have the “depth reading” of their inner potential, they can proceed with focused research into the more relevant occupations matching their interests, learn about the credentials that may be needed in preparation, where to find those credentials, and how to get started in the best direction.

Now they’re not just going to college but going through college, eventually into careers doing work they will love. And because they have an inspiring big picture and long view ahead of them, the college program of courses become stepping stones on the path bringing them closer to the life they really want.

These students are much more likely to keep their major and complete their program – because they have a clear understanding of where it leads. When colleges offer strategic support in the form of interest assessments, vocational guidance, and career counseling, failure and dropout rates are dramatically reduced.

It’s not rocket science.

The Reality in Your Hand

They are delicious – or can be. I’m sure you’ve had one before. Snow cones are perhaps the most popular and biggest rip-off treats at amusement parks and county fairs. Pack some shaved ice into a paper cone and drizzle your favorite sugary syrup on top.

Three bucks, please.

But have you ever looked more closely at a snow cone? What you’ll see is a model of Reality – right there in your hand.

The sphere of shaved ice arching above the rim of your paper cone represents the expansive System of existence, where everything is connected, included, and incorporated into a universal order.

Rather than a mere collection of countless elements, however, the System of Reality is a consilience – literally a “jumping together” of simpler forms into a higher pattern.

A synergistic dynamic of 1+1=3 catches the individual forms and incorporates them into this higher wholeness, not canceling their unique contributions but instead building on their diversity.

At this systemic level, Reality is not something else or a mere aggregate of things, but All of it together as One.

In its systemic nature, Reality is a “nested” affair where the cosmos includes systems of galaxies, galaxies include solar systems, solar systems include planetary systems, planetary systems include ecosystems, metabolic systems, social systems, and nervous systems. All of it together turns as One: a uni-verse.

That’s pretty cool, right?

Now, turn your attention to the paper cone in which the spherical System of Reality is supported. What’s inside is hidden from view, and yet without it the System would lack stability and substance (referring to what “stands under”). In our model of Reality, this internal dimension of depth is the Ground, the underlying essence (Greek esse = being) that generates everything into existence (Latin existere = to stand out).

Don’t think of what’s inside the cone as just “more shaved ice and syrup” – more individual forms like what you see in the visible overarching System. Deep down and inside Reality is a grounding mystery that has no tangible form, no distinct features, not even a definite location.

Ground is the “withinness” of things: the ineffable and undifferentiated power of being-itself.

Using the snow cone as our model of Reality can easily mislead us to believe that the Ground is underneath and separate from the individual forms themselves, when it is really the essence of all things – the deep down withinness of everything.

Yet another dimension of Reality is represented by the line, or transverse plane, slicing across the top of the paper cone, separating the System from the Ground – but again, only in the illustration. In Reality, System and Ground are not separate sections but complementary dimensions of existence: the higher wholeness (consilience) and deeper oneness (essence) of all things.

This third dimension is the Field where individual forms stand in proximity to each other and interact in various ways.

Interaction is the critical dynamic of the Field, where the cómponent nature of Reality is such that every individual form is a consilient System of smaller elements, but also constitutes the Ground or essence of higher and larger scales of organization.

Cómponence is a newly coined word for naming this structural principle where wholes are “made of” parts which are themselves wholes to still smaller parts. Although the term itself is not widely used, it best describes the paradigm of modern science: particles in various patterns of interaction.

Interactions in the Field occur between and among individual forms (e.g., particles) that emerge by a process of differentiation out of the Ground. Matter differentiates from energy, life differentiates from matter, consciousness differentiates from life, and self-consciousness (ego) differentiates from consciousness: At each stage in this evolutionary process, the Ground manifests in distinct forms that also separate from and engage with one another. Separation is the “space” where interactions in the Field occur.

At a certain point in the interaction of individual forms, a synergy begins to lift their engagement into a higher frequency called participation.

They are no longer just connecting or colliding with each other; an “attractor” above them starts to guide and coordinate their interactions into a pattern of higher wholeness. With this move of transcendence (literally “going beyond”), Reality pulls the interactions between and among separate forms into its System.

Eventually, as in the case of self-conscious forms known as human egos, these creative affiliations give rise to intentional communities of trust, compassion, generosity, and goodwill. The worldwide wisdom tradition of Sophia Perennis regards this up-shift from mere personal (i.e., egocentric) interests and concerns to the transpersonal dimension of shared interests and communal concerns as the critical threshold in human transformation.

So far, only rarely has our species successfully gained liberation from the bonds of egoism to enjoy the larger vision and expansive freedom of transpersonal awareness. And whenever it has happened, it’s just a matter of time before ego ambitions drag the Enlightenment Project back down the dark spiral of “What’s in it for me?”

Alas, the Enlightenment Project itself is a long journey fraught with setbacks and drop-offs that threaten to end human history in an apocalypse of mutual self-destruction.

As the shared record of spiritual wisdom – the DNA of the Enlightenment Project – Sophia Perennis has been discovering, developing, and preserving both the aspiration and the understanding of what human nature has in its potential to become.

Every generation has the opportunity to cultivate this wisdom from seeds inherited from previous generations, along with the responsibility of imparting its fruits to the generations still to come.

So you see, that snow cone in your hand is a lot more than just shaved ice and syrup in a paper cup.

Other posts on the “snow cone” theme:

A Renaissance in Our Time

As a proponent of the type of religion known as post-theism, I have devoted a large number of posts in this blog to its proper definition. We shouldn’t think of post-theism as either Atheism or Theism 2.0, since its principal concern is not with the objective existence of god but rather the liberated life “after” (post-), or on the other side of, god.

Post-theism affirms god’s central position through the middle stages in the sequence of faith development (from the research of James Fowler, these are the stages of mythic-literal, synthetic-conventional, and individuative-reflective faith). But it regards this god as a mythopoetic metaphor of the Present Mystery of Reality, of the Ground of Being or being-itself, and not a being separate and apart from us.

This seeming denial of god’s objective existence has gotten post-theism labeled and dismissed as just another updated (2.0) version of atheism, when it is really unconcerned with the question of god’s existence but seeks rather to interpret the meaning of god in relation to the evolution of spirituality and faith development.

In fact, an insistence on the priority of god’s metaphorical meaning over god’s objective existence is not a denial but a necessary realignment of god as symbol.

Ever since the first mythmakers, humans have known that God (uppercase G: the Present Mystery) is within us – as well as between, among, all around, and beyond us. The gods (lowercase g: mythopoetic metaphors of God) were intended and understood as imaginated, personified, and fictional representations of this essential-universal Mystery.

No human ever encountered these beings in the real world (i.e., Reality) – nor did they expect to. That is, until theism lost its focus and styled itself the defender of god’s existence against the rising wave of empirical science and secular humanism.

Regardless, a direct encounter with god has remained only an expectation, conveniently postponed until after death when the believer anticipates seeing god on his throne in heaven.

From that moment onwards, theistic religion became increasingly regressive, otherworldly, and irrelevant. The focus of piety shifted more to repetition compulsions like cross-referencing Bible studies, reciting creeds with the standing congregation, and participating in ritual commemorations of biblical scenes from long ago.

Post-theism comes about either by the normal course of faith development, or through crisis and confusion generated inside the insulated echo chamber of theism. It is fully accepting of the prospect of living in the theistic environment of symbols, stories, sacraments, and sanctuaries – as long as these are appreciated for their transparency to the Mystery within, between, among, around and beyond, and not allowed to become idols in its place.

As I see it, post-theism would ideally find a hospitable and symbol-rich habitat in theism, serving to keep its role-play game honest and properly grounded.

My own experience as a professional pastor in a conservative mainline Protestant tradition of Christian theism for 15 years confirmed a general openness to the Mystery, with a correlated interest in looking through god to the Present Mystery (or real Presence) of God, beyond names and forms.

Unfortunately, while I enjoyed some freedom to explore this Mystery with members of my congregation, our denomination was already closing down around its confessional standards of orthodoxy and against the larger environmental forces of pluralism, secularism, and globalism which had been challenging the tradition for decades to meet this new reality with a relevant spirituality and faith.

This helped me appreciate post-theism in a new light: as not just another stage in the development of religion, but as a renaissance-in-waiting inside theism for the time when conditions are right for it to awaken.

As long as theism maintains its protected membership of believers, the insights of a post-theistic spirituality may surface only intermittently in private devotion and small group discussions. Theistic ideology can sample and digest only small doses at a time, however, which allows it to recover its orthodox composure between such excursions into the Present Mystery.

When the number of waking post-theists reaches critical mass, a more formal censure and discipline may be in order. And when that conspiracy of pluralism, secularism, and globalism outside the doors confronts the tribal morality with its diversity of values, views, and ways of life, conditions are primed for a major transformation.

This very concurrent crisis of internal breakthroughs and external break-ins has erupted in episodes of post-theistic renaissance throughout the history of higher culture.

Jeremiah, Siddhartha, Mencius, Jesus, al-Ḥallāj, Johannes (“Meister”) Eckhart, Martin Luther, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Paul Tillich, and Martin Luther King, Jr. (among many others) charted new frontiers in post-theistic spirituality. Whether by the mystical-inward or ethical-outward path, each challenged his fellow believers and an entire generation to drop beneath or go beyond their tribal gods for an experience of the Present Mystery of Reality.

All of them refused to take the gods of their traditions literally, but instead they broke with tradition – or rather sought to break their traditions open – to a deeper (mystical) and larger (ethical) concept of God.

For the Second Temple Jewish tradition of early Roman times, it was Jesus who challenged his contemporary Jews to find God – what he called the power or kingdom of God – outside both the Temple precincts and their Hebrew lineage, as well as in the reality under their very feet, like a buried treasure (cf Matthew 13:44).

Because the entire Temple structure was designed on the idea that God (imaginated in the Hebrew god, Yahweh) stands apart from humans and must be satisfied with sacrifices before he can forgive sins, Jesus’ gospel (“good news”) of God’s unconditional forgiveness and radical inclusion of all people in holy community was rightfully regarded as a threat to Jewish identity and religion.

The early Christian movement was born out of this post-theistic vision of Jesus, picking up his insight to the point of identifying love as the very heart and essence of God (1 John 4:16). Although it was the ecclesiastical organization and political mission of the institutionalized Church that would soon enough spread Christianity so effectively around the globe, it was this post-theistic renaissance ignited by the life, message, and ministry of Jesus that got the whole thing going.

But just that quickly, Jesus’ vision faded from the Christian religion, behind the shutters and locks of a protected membership.

Many Christians today who are post-theistic in their spirituality, mystically grounded and ethically committed to the work of genuine community, have left the Church or were excommunicated because their faith (Fowler: conjunctive and universalizing) didn’t fit inside the boxes of Christian orthodoxy.

Others remain inside, finding their theology enriched by a fresh infusion of Mystery, nurturing the growth and progress of faith in their fellow believers as opportunities arise.

They are looking for, finding, or forming their own communities – I call them “Wisdom Circles” – where the Mystery of God and the meaning of god, the liberated life and a more perfect union, are explored in creative dialogue together.

Stuck in the Moral Frame

Do you remember when as a child you believed that god watched over you from the ceiling and monsters waited under your bed? When garden fairies enchanted the backyard and goblins lurked in the basement? These invisible beings “imaginated” your generalized intuition of Reality as imbued with conscious personality, agency, and intention.

It didn’t matter that you never encountered such phantasmagoria in the so-called real world, since that wasn’t where they were centered anyway.

They were magical forms conjured in your imagination as a more or less spontaneous reflex of your sense of living in a web of communion with all things. The vibrational sympathy in your body with everything going on around you welled up to the surface of your conscious awareness in these imaginary beings – watching over you, waiting for you, activating wonder and warning you away from dangerous places.

The god who looked down from your bedroom ceiling was not the construct of theological orthodoxy. Later on, if you happened to grow up in a household of religiously affiliated taller powers, this animistic notion of god would be incorporated into the orthodox-theistic doctrine of the deity worshipped in a tradition of true believers.

In the course of your faith development, that orthodox costume of god would gradually be slipped over the imaginated power from early childhood and come to life.

This forward shift in faith development corresponds to the progress of religious sensibility from animism to theism, from a body-centered and nature-based spirituality to one that is ego-centered and based in the society of your tribe – referring to the protected membership of a shared social identity. An important part of this shared identity is the deity, as a common focus of authority, inspiration, and worship.

Concerns of this stage in faith development are largely understood inside a moral frame that defines a “good person” and “right action.” The deity of theism plays the roles of law-giver, arbitrator of right and wrong, and final judge who metes out rewards and punishments not just at the end of life but all along the way.

The stories by this time have scaled-out from backyard garden fairytales to folk legends and epic myths centering the tribe in a creation history of god’s design.

To say that tribal life and its theistic orientation are ego-centered simply means that your lived experience is now firmly stationed in the moral frame and its focus on personal identity – your own, that of others, those who have departed (departure itself is a newer concept central in many theistic salvation stories), and of the deity upon whom Freud fashioned his notion of the superego.

To be ego-centered is simply to be conscious of yourself, recognized by others as belonging to a tribe of like-minded persons.

If you came up in a religiously affiliated household of taller powers, your background conditioning served to situate your identity in the moral frame of your tribe, instilled with the desire to be good and belong (notice the halo above your ego in my diagram).

A closely guarded secret among the tribal leadership acknowledges its god as a metaphor and not a being at large in the real world. Some have forgotten, it is true, or were never let in on the secret to begin with. (At a time of biblical literalism, many seminary graduates today are reinforced in the belief that god is out there, up there – somewhere.) The great disservice to theism and faith development lies in their dogmatic insistence on god’s objective existence.

Under their oppressive influence, tribal members come to adopt the same unfounded (and experientially disassociated) belief. Thanks to them, your own intuition of god as an imaginated form representing the deeper communion and intention of Reality likely died inside the orthodox costume of your tribe’s patron deity.

To understand (a lowercase) god as a mythopoetic metaphor of (the uppercase) God – as an imaginated form of the present Mystery – is the insight that carries faith development across the distinct frames of religion: from animism, through theism, and into a post-theistic spirituality.

Sadly, however, many (many) theistic true believers today are stuck in the moral frame, closed off to the Mystery and clutching their idols in an unsettled state of doubt and fear, overcompensating with an aggressive conviction and ambitious plans to convert the rest of the world to their “truth.”

Something inside them knows they are clutching a counterfeit, but what else can they do?

You may be one of the millions who have elected to save faith by leaving their religion. As our current era moves more fully into a socially diverse, morally pluralistic, and globally connected way of life, the squeezing pressure of a moral frame that will not accommodate such a diversity of views, values, and lifestyles soon becomes intolerable.

The choice becomes either one of a fundamentalist regression to a set of practically irrelevant convictions, as in contemporary Evangelical Christianity and radical Islamism, or a courageous (if somewhat desperate) exodus from moral and intellectual bondage to spiritual freedom.

The frame of religion that awaits the refugee from dogmatic theism is named ‘post-theism’ for its conscious and communal cultivation of faith “after god” – that is to say, after taking leave of the lowercase god and its protected membership of true believers.

Of course, this advancing shift from theism to post-theism can be fairly trouble-free – as it naturally would be if theism could honor and contemplate its god as a (and not the only) mythopoetic metaphor of the present Mystery of Reality (i.e., the uppercase God) and help its members through the moral frame to a more liberated life.

A post-theistic faith and spirituality is properly identified as mystical for its acknowledgement of the present Mystery as beyond name and form.

You are invited from an ego-centered to a soul-centered experience.

The present Mystery’s ineffability is such that no conceptual labels can stick to it and no doctrinal boxes can contain it. True to the term “mystery,” its experience has the effect of evoking wonder, astonishment, tranquility, and awed silence (muein = to close the mouth) – all at once.

Post-theistic faith and spirituality is not merely an “inner” experience, however. With an awareness – very likely a dim memory from your early childhood with the backyard garden fairies – of the deeper oneness in all things, the liberated mind is drawn farther out and upward into a higher wholeness where All is One and We’re All in This Together (two universal principles of spiritual wisdom).

Moral values of tribal life break open to the ethical ideals of genuine community. In some cases, a guilty conscience is intentionally transcended for “conscientious guilt,” when you know deepest down that welcoming the stranger and loving your enemy are truly the right thing to do, even though it violates the morality of your tribe and puts you at risk of getting kicked out of the club.

In the diagram above, the arc of a human lifespan is divided into unequal trimesters, with childhood ending at age 10, a subsequent fifty years (or so) of adulthood ending at age 60, consummated by a period of elderhood or the “age of wisdom.”

Life in the Egg

Do you know why you’re here? Granted, ‘why’ questions can be notoriously difficult to answer, so let’s start even more basic: Do you know how you got here?

Even that question assumes some understanding of what ‘you’ – or more properly “I” (Ego) – and ‘here’ refer to.

For goodness sake, is there any point in going further?

Actually, the perennial wisdom tradition of human spirituality known as Sophia Perennis insists that getting to the bottom of this apparent riddle is the very way to salvation.

Salvation here does not refer to an escape or deliverance from this life, but rather to the fulfillment of your human nature in a life that is wise, loving, fearless and free.

So, the question of why you are here is asking something very profound indeed.

Let’s begin with where you probably think you are, which is in the world. The diagram above depicts your world as egg-shaped and labels it your “quality world.” William Glasser coined the term to name not what we sometimes call the real world or Reality, but rather the personalized intangible environment of values, memories, ideas, beliefs, dreams, meanings and semantic associations that forms around your identity in the process of becoming somebody special.

Your quality world is egg-shaped to help you understand it as a kind of enclosure that contains and separates your self-conscious identity, or Ego, from Reality.

The consciousness generated from the vitality of your body is wide open to Reality. But to become aware of itself, or self-conscious, consciousness must be looped back upon itself, reflected in the hall of mirrors called your quality world.

There are other persons in your quality world, but they have their own quality worlds, so it’s more accurate to picture you by yourself inside your egg. Early on, these others, particularly the taller powers of your parents, teachers, coaches, and other adults, assisted in the construction of your personal identity by blocking, coaxing, training, and rewarding the gradual domestication of your body’s vital intelligence and animal instincts.

Your taller powers provided and assigned Roles for you to play on the social performance stage. The Roles (think of the costumes and masks worn by theater actors) that you most fully identified with became your identity – who you are on stage and in the company of other actors. A Role is designed to satisfy two essential needs of Ego identity, for recognition and belonging.

Others identify who you are and what part you play (recognition); you are included in the role-play and its quality world (belonging).

A Role is really nothing more than a convention, a put-on, a social construct of identity. Back in the early days of Greek and Roman theater it was called a persona, referring to the character mask through which (per) an actor spoke (sona) his or her part in the play.

This is likely what informed your quick answer at the beginning, to the question of why you’re here. You immediately reported to your quality world and the Roles that define who you are and where you belong. Of course, you didn’t realize how much of it is not even real – not Reality.

The self-conscious actor of your Ego and the personas it inhabits on the social performance stage inside your quality world – it’s all an illusion. And to the degree you believe the illusion is real, it quickly becomes a delusion.

If you have heard this notion before, that the world is an illusion, it’s important to understand that “the world” is your quality world and not Reality or the so-called real world. This semantic confusion between world and Reality has too often prevented the deeper insight from breaking the egg, as it were, for genuine enlightenment.

Reality is real, your world is not. This is why these terms are further distinguished in the diagram as ultimate reality (or Reality, the really real) and your quality world.

Following upon this moment of critical disillusionment, of seeing through the illusion of personal identity, Sophia Perennis goes on to address dimensions of Being that had been concealed behind the (illusory) walls of your quality world.

In the above illustration, the self-conscious actor of your Ego is transected by a vertical axis of arrows, with one arrow breaking upward to ultimate reality through the boundary of your quality world. Another arrow breaks downward through the body and into the grounding mystery (or Ground) of Being.

Ultimate reality (or Reality) is the really real beyond your labels, concepts, beliefs, stories, and theories. It’s not quite accurate to say that Reality is beyond your mind, since it includes your mind and all that you are. Truth is the degree of transparency in those various forms of meaning (labels, concepts, beliefs, etc.), focusing your mind through meaning on the Reality beyond.

A loan word from Sophia Perennis and used in the physical sciences is “universe”: the unified totality of existence. The universe is not, for it cannot be, an object of study since there is no objective distance between your mind and Reality that might lock it down and put it in perspective. It is an intuition of your spiritual intelligence, which, at the upper end of the vertical axis, is named Spirit.

In myth and poetry, Spirit is frequently depicted in metaphors of freedom, flight (e.g., birds and butterflies), fire, light, and wind (also breath). Its distinguishing feature is transcendence: always reaching out, moving through, and going beyond the limits of your world.

In every culture we can find the fascinating mythic motif of apocalypse, where the world (exactly in the sense of a quality world) breaks down and is burned away to reveal the Eternal Reality beyond – named God (with the uppercase ‘G’) and role-played in the myths by the various gods of religion.

Breaking below your separate center of self-conscious personal identity, a second arrow traces the descending path of consciousness deeper into your Body’s lifeforce and the grounding mystery of Being.

If the upward path of Spirit transcends and includes, this inner path of Soul releases and dissolves away the distinctions in the differences that separate things and thoughts, until all that remains is a quiet, boundless, present awareness. Soul is not “inside” or separate from the Body, but rather rests at the inner wellspring of consciousness itself.

In the etymological sense of the word, the ground of Being and the Soul are mysteries, which means “to close the mouth” in awed silence before something that cannot be named or known. They are ineffable, and yet, the universe itself and all that you see is a manifestation of this mystery.

The human spirit knows the way through. Maybe you can relax a little. Set aside your mistaken identity and just be what you are.

Our Longing for Perfect Love

One of the deep and universal principles of spiritual wisdom states that the wellbeing and fulfillment we seek in life cannot, and will never, be found in this world. Many religions misunderstand this principle to mean that our salvation lies elsewhere or awaits us in the afterlife, in another world beyond this one.

Any interpretation that advises us to renounce the world and fix our devotion on supernatural, heavenly, or otherworldly things is a contradiction of wisdom’s vision. Tragically, although most religions originated in this vision and its profound insights into the nature of Reality and our human promise, too many of them, and too soon, lost its compass and got distracted from the path into deathtraps of dogmatism, conviction, and power politics.

The grand vision of the spiritual wisdom tradition, better known as the Perennial Philosophy or Sophia Perennis, honors the human spirit in each of us as a force of creative freedom that seeks, desires, and drives our quest for wellbeing and fulfillment. This quest is frequently frustrated by the lesser ambitions of our ego, the unique and separate “I” who is busy being somebody special and chasing after happiness.

Spiritual wisdom invites and challenges us neither to renounce nor glorify the ego, but to reach out from its personal center for a more genuine connection with others.

Our Longing for Perfect Love

Love has been a human fascination probably for as long as we’ve been reflecting on things that matter most in life. The early Christian movement was so bold as to even identify it with God – not in terms of a god who is loving, but as the supreme Reality behind, within, and beyond everything (“God IS love,” 1 John 4:8).

In its subsequent history, the Christian Church would abandon this profound insight into the divine nature of love for a realpolitik that could justify its ambitions for world domination. Perhaps it is in the very design dynamics of organized religion, that the love of power in hierarchical authority should take the upper hand to the power of love in basic human fellow-feeling.

Jesus himself lived in devotion to the power of love. In the end, however, it was the love of power at work in the political ideology and religious orthodoxy of those who resisted his message that put him away, launching the early messianic movement in his name.

In other posts I refer to this ideal power of love in human relationships as “genuine” love, with its connotations of authentic and real, distinguishing bona fide love from cheap knockoffs and sugary substitutes. Here I am using the adjective “perfect,” but not in the sense of something absolute, transcendent, or meticulously airbrushed of every imperfection.

The word “perfect” has surprisingly little to nothing in its original meaning of the flawless ideal, but rather refers to what is finished or brought to completion. Perfect love, then, is love that has been cultivated into the full flower of relational harmony and communal wholeness. It is decidedly not the “perfect partner” contemplated in mythology, conjured in our dreams, and pursued on dating apps.

There is no perfect partner; and yet, perfect love can be nurtured between and among very imperfect persons.

Once again, the principal difference in these competing concepts of love has to do with whether our perspective is centered in the (personal) ego or the (human) spirit. Our longing for perfect love is an aspiration of the human spirit, anchored by an intuition of essential oneness in the depths of Being itself. This deeper oneness is axiomatic in the spiritual wisdom tradition of Sophia Perennis.

All things originated and are presently rooted in this grounding mystery of Being. Which also means that everything is connected, not just externally by the logistics of cause and effect, but internally through the more subtle vibrational field of communion.

In fact, communion has been our experience from the beginning, far below and prior to self-conscious awareness.

With the rise into ego consciousness, this intuition of communion was lost – symbolized in the myths as a fall or exile from an original paradisal state. Rather than interpreting the tethered detachment of self-consciousness from the deeper animate consciousness of the body as a move in the wrong direction, however, we can appreciate it as the necessary precondition of just about everything uniquely and profoundly human.

Ego provides the position from whence conscious awareness can drop into inner peace, rise to higher purpose, probe for deeper meaning, and connect in perfect love.

Ego formation opens up the frontier of interpersonal relationships – which, it should be obvious, are not possible without egoic personalities – and it is here that the human spirit’s longing for perfect love can find fulfillment.

Perfect (complete, finished, and fully actualized) love is where the communion of deeper oneness is refracted though individual persons and across the divide of what makes one unique and different from another, transforming it into the distinct frequencies of compassion, kindness, generosity, goodwill, trust, fidelity and forgiveness.

Such a flourishing of perfect love remains only a spiritual longing if it happens that the egos on stage are neurotically insecure, codependently attached, and consequently incapable of transcending their individual fixations for the higher wholeness of genuine community. It’s here that we find all those counterfeit forms of love, so many lures on the hook of self-indulgence.

The spiritual mystery is this process whereby the deeper oneness of communion transforms into the higher wholeness of community, facilitated by the “conductor” of a stable, centered, balanced and self-transcending ego.

The perfect love of community is only possible to the degree we can get over ourselves.

Other Posts in This Series: