No Such Thing as “Christian” Nationalism

Ever since the emperor Constantine (306-367 CE) declared Christianity the Roman State religion, and especially after his successor to the throne, Theodosius I (379-395 CE), made Christianity the only true religion of the empire, Christians themselves have been enthusiastically taking on the role of Antichrist.

Of course, most of them accuse other elements of society of being enemies of Christ and his religion. In America it’s been immigrants, liberals, secular (this-worldly) humanists, LGBTQ and people of color that have been opposed and condemned by the Christians. From the time the first Puritans landed in the New World (as immigrants!), their delusion of being a Christian nation has persisted.

Just recently it has metastasized throughout the American body politic.

The “Christian” identity of these nationalists is based on a profound contradiction, however, representing a complete and total rejection of just about everything Jesus taught and stood for.

This contrast is only stark to the degree that our portrait and understanding of Jesus and his gospel (his message of “good news”) can be saved from the orthodoxy of Christendom. What he eventually became in the doctrinal system of official Christianity was something diametrically opposite to who he was in real life.

Ironically, in real life Jesus was a harsh and unrelenting critic of religious nationalism – of the idea popular among contemporary Jews that God, truth, and salvation belonged to them as a nation, and to them alone. All others would need to either convert and join the fold, or stay outside and stand condemned.

This same exclusionary politico-religious ideology would later under the theocracy of Constantine’s empire, the Romano-Euro-American evolutionary line of Christian nationalism, forge its condemnation into active persecution, organized crusades (ostensibly “for Christ”), and political legislation against The Other.

Any identification of God with a temple or throne – or with even our mental constructs (or gods) of the Mystery that is within, among, throughout and encompassing all things – was held in suspicion by Jesus.

The danger is ever-present that such institutional placeholders and representations might become idols, mechanisms of control and oppression. A caste system inevitably forms, granting privilege for those at the center and top to impose their agendas on everyone else at the bottom and farther out.

Just that quickly a genuine spiritual insight can become a belief presuming to contain it, then a conviction that locks it in, and finally a deadly delusion that kills the curiosity which had discovered it in the first place. The very articulation of experience in dogmatic formulations takes us out and away from the present Mystery of reality, into the embroidery of meanings we drape over it.

If God is that present Mystery – and Jesus said as much – then all our beliefs, doctrines, and ideologies are at best only veils that obscure, but which often turn into walls that keep God (the Mystery) out in defense of our “truth” (i.e., our gods).

Because God is the Mystery within, among, throughout and encompassing all things, no single individual, sacred tradition, or holy nation can ever lay claim to it. It doesn’t belong to anyone. We can live closer or farther in awareness from this Mystery, a proximity that can be measured in terms of how authentic, inclusive, and unconditional our love for others happens to be.

Jesus was committed to living in the presence of Mystery and inviting all others to join him, and it was this very audacious spirit of love that convinced his opponents that their god wanted him dead.

With a refreshed portrait of Jesus now before us, it should be obvious how contrary his self-transcending and inclusive ethic of love is to the dark spirit of so-called Christian Nationalism. Those today trying to advance its program of ethnic cleansing, moral repression, the legal disenfranchisement of minorities, and a one-party democracy (i.e., an autocratic dictatorship) are decidedly not Christian, if that title refers to one who is committed to the same principles, values, and aims that inspired Jesus and informed his gospel.

Christian Nationalism of some sort has been the going game since the late Roman Empire, so we will be wise not to treat it as some kind of superficial rash on the surface of American society. It is in fact deep in the cultural DNA of Christendom, a code implanted nearly two thousand years ago when kings, bishops, and politicians saw the strategic utility in fusing religious conviction and political ambition to an orthodoxy-induced amnesia regarding Jesus and his erstwhile Way of Love.

The Great Reversal in the history of Christian orthodoxy was in how it took an itinerant preacher-activist of the all-inclusive and liberating power of love in human affairs, and made him into a liege lord of divine vengeance against outsiders and enemies of the Church.

The only effective treatment for the pathology of Christian Nationalism involves showing its proponents how different, how opposite, they are to the life, teachings, and spirit of Jesus the Christ. If the denomination they use in identifying themselves – Christian means “a disciple of Christ” and his Way of Love – they need to either reject the anti-Christian values of Nationalism, or continue as nationalists and admit they are not Christian, that they don’t know much about Jesus or even really care.

Frankly, the Way of Love that Jesus proclaimed evokes fear and trembling in those who cling with increasing desperation to shrinking identities. As the world’s diversity of colors, cultures, customs, and creeds grows to the doorstep of their convictions, any call to open the door and embrace the reality of it all is just too much to ask.

Most -isms are reactions of withdrawal and defense against some encroaching reality that threatens to mix things up and change the rules.

If the rules are rigged in your favor, then you don’t want things to change. If the demographic and moral real estate of your nation is shifting away from the tidy categories you’re used to and have staked your identity on, you want things back the way they were.

American nationalism can fight Jesus’ ethic of inclusion, or paste his name and hang his cross on their own brand of realpolitik. Either way, there really is no such thing as Christian Nationalism.

Life on the Ladder … and Beyond

Spiritual wisdom traditions of East and West have distinct accents in their respective characterizations of what awaits the individual who is finally ready to break past the constraints of personal identity and a conventional life. Conventional refers to the system of assumptions, habits, values, and agreements that define the worldview and way of life for members of a society.

Invariably, conventional systems are theistic by design. Taller powers (parents and other adults) supervise, manage, and direct the experience of children, as higher powers (deities and other imaginary immortals) govern the grownups. The whole thing is designed around the central project of constructing personal identity and ensuring its compliance with convention.

Personal identities and their resident egos are not products of natural evolution but rather constructs of social engineering.

An individual must be domesticated and shaped to the conventional worldview and way of life. Their animal nature has to be trained, disciplined, and instructed away from its primal instincts and redirected along new (conventional) channels of moral obedience.

Gradually, if all goes according to plan these goads and brakes of morality will be internalized as the individual’s conscience (i.e., the inner parent and voice of god). Its promptings and judgments will henceforth serve to keep the individual in line with what society deems right behavior of a good person. For the righteous – defined as a right-behaving good person – await the rewards of social approval and honor in this life, everlasting beatitude and glory in the next.

And this is where they can stay, safe in the fold and looking forward to their time in greener pastures.

Conventional society works as long as everything goes according to plan. Raise up the children, facilitate their adoption (formal confession) as children of god, assign the roles and enforce the rules of god’s will as they work and raise up children of their own to add to the righteous fold.

Sure, you’ll have deviants and apostates along the way, but they can be dealt with by such moral mechanisms as shame, chastisement, excommunication, punishment and damnation.

For thousands of years it worked like this, until a certain kind of deviant started showing up more frequently across noncontiguous conventional societies. In both East and West of the early first millennium BCE these outliers began thinking and talking differently about personal identity, conventional life, human potential, and the nature of ultimate reality.

Personal identity consists basically of an actor (ego: “I”) wearing a mask (persona: “I am   “) that identifies them to an audience of other actors (society). It’s important to underscore the point that this ego-and-mask (or suit) ensemble is not something an individual is born with. Indeed, its construction requires that a center be established apart from the body, upon which a self-conscious vantage can be gained.

Such a developmental achievement requires social scaffolding to motivate and support the individual’s ascending progress in personal power: beginning with impulse control and advancing through emotional stability, cognitive flexibility, performance integrity (staying true to character), and moral commitment to social values and expectations.

The goal for the individual, now having become somebody, is to fit in and do their part for the good of all – “all” referring more or less exclusively to the in-group of fellow actors.

To capture this idea of identity as social construction, the illustration above depicts a ladder upon which the ego is making its climb – or perhaps it has gotten stuck on one of the rungs mentioned in the previous paragraph. In that case, the individual may be hung up in the complications of dysfunctional power: low self-control, imbalanced affect, closed-minded conviction, role confusion, or a weak conscience.

Getting stuck on the ladder of personal identity is a main reason why societies collapse, divide, and disintegrate.

Individuals who lack ego strength combine their neurotic insecurities for an exponential effect that can amplify across society and cause its destruction. Before the city gates close and its streets go silent, however, individuals will fall into chronic episodes of anxiety and depression, meaninglessness and despair, until all hope is lost and the human spirit within them goes dark.

Let’s be clear: it is not inevitable that the construction of personal identity should get tangled up in the complications of dysfunctional power. It’s also possible – especially in conventional societies with theistic structures that are more enlightened, provident, liberal and nurturing – that this whole enterprise of becoming somebody in conventional society serves to prepare the individual for a breakthrough to the liberated life.

This is where those distinct accents of East and West come into the picture. From ego’s centered position on the ladder of personal identity, the individual can release and descend into the deeper registers of consciousness: down through the attachments of identity, past the mirrors of self-conscious reflection, dropping along the vital rhythms of the body and into the quiet clearing of mystical presence and inner peace we call soul.

This deeper oneness is nondual, as the Eastern traditions maintain, far below ego in the grounding mystery of Being where there is no this-and-that, but only This: the nameless, formless, boundless, ineffable Mystery.

From that same position on the ladder of identity an individual might otherwise choose to connect and ascend into the higher registers of consciousness: up through the attachments of identity, past the oppositional categories of self and other, insider and outsider, rising along the unifying currents of love and into the inclusive fellowship of communal life we call spirit.

This higher wholeness is transpersonal, as the Western traditions maintain, high above ego but also including our individual differences in mutual respect, open dialogue, and unconditional acceptance.

These nondual-mystical and transpersonal-communal pathways are the Yin and Yang of a post-theistic spirituality. It is our hope for becoming fully human and finally free.

The Crux

All lifeforms on Earth are limited to lifetimes, some longer than others and some shorter. A few last only days, while a few others stretch into centuries. You’re about average, with a life expectancy of 80 years or so. Does that upset you?

Nature has equipped all forms of life with a developmental aim and “maturity clocks” that mark thresholds when it’s time to grow and stop growing, to reproduce and quit bearing young, to strive for existence and eventually succumb to extinction.

It seems that for all species but our own, these maturity clocks work instinctually to ensure that individuals actualize their natural potential and bring new generations to life in time.

An evolutionary breakthrough occurred millions of years ago when microorganisms called mitochondria were enveloped by other cells. Rather than assimilating these captives, however, the mitochondria were incorporated into cell biology as energy factories, thus catapulting the evolution of life to a whole new level of symbiotic complexity.

Several thousand years ago came another breakthrough, this time in our human lineage. With advances in social differentiation and cooperation, humans began to adopt identities that would allow them to participate in rather complex social role-plays.

By putting on these roles and masks (the Latin word is persona, from which our word person is derived), humans created conditions for the rise of self-conscious awareness.

Their careful attention to social cues in others, confirming varying degrees of recognition, deference, and respect, individuals became acutely aware of themselves as actors. This acting center of social identity is what we call the ego (Latin for “I”), and it wasn’t long before this separate center of self-conscious personal identity had insinuated itself in every human society across the planet.

Given ego’s place in the continuing evolution of humans toward ever more complex systems of social organization, we can appreciate this new arrangement of the social actor in a human body as the cultural equivalent of the much earlier mitochondrion revolution in cell biology and the evolution of Life on Earth.

Along with this remarkable and unprecedented advance into a separate center of self-conscious personal identity, however, came the awareness of the body’s mortality. Despite the intensely engaging carnival atmosphere of the social stage, in putting on and taking off the roles and masks of identity, a self-conscious individual was inescapably tethered to a biological lifeform that would one day die.

And this was terrifying.

One way of dealing with this new death anxiety was to get so completely distracted into the social role-play and identity management that it could be sufficiently ignored. At any rate, death could be imagined as a still long-distant future event, not requiring any further thought – for now.

But it wouldn’t entirely go away.

It was the innovation of a few storytellers, likely at midlife, who conceived the meme – referring to a self-replicating idea that quickly spreads through a society’s collective consciousness – of personal immortality. Capitalizing on the obvious fact of ego’s transcendent position with respect to the body, they first imagined and then believed that an individual’s center of personality might – no, must! – survive death.

Soon enough, elaborate departure narratives were devised to assure individuals of their postmortem continuation in life on the other side of death.

In the following centuries, these departure narratives would grow increasingly sophisticated and fanciful, depicting alternative destinations of heaven and hell, to be assigned according to the individual’s obedience to religious authority in this life, each with its own rings and levels of reward or punishment.

The great irony here is in how the emergence of a self-conscious center of personal identity, which signaled an advance in human social evolution, ended up generating profound anxiety and making individuals vulnerable to the schemes of one immortality project or another.

If these schemes provided a kind of shelter of distractions, they also had the effect of closing the human spirit inside and sedating its evolutionary impetus.

In the diagram above, a body’s mortal timeline is overarched by the adventure of ego. A separate center of self-conscious personal identity takes its rise sometime in early childhood, and returns to the body in late adulthood, just as the lures of social recognition start to lose their luster. Contrary to the promise of religion’s departure narratives, however, the personality goes with the body.

That is to say, it will go out like a candle.

If this sounds sacrilegious and depressing, it is only because the meme of personal immortality has insinuated itself so deep into our collective unconscious that anything less than everlasting life for the ego just feels offensive and wrong. When the body dies our light goes out? Anyone suggesting as much must be a heretic and a sinner – at the very least misguided, and perilously so.

This is where we have to reframe the whole point and trajectory of ego consciousness.

Our challenge is not to save ego from the body’s inevitable end, but rather to clarify its evolutionary aim in the larger picture of human destiny. This evolutionary aim according to the spiritual wisdom tradition of Sophia Perennis, which has been contemplating the matter for as long as humans have been wrestling with the question of what we are and where we are going, is only penultimately about social role-plays and managing an identity.

Ultimately – that is to say, in the final analysis and at the highest level of consideration – humans are destined for the liberated life in a planetary community of compassion, goodwill, justice and inclusion.

To his theistic audience, Jesus envisioned this ethically enlightened human destiny and called it the “kingdom of God.” It wasn’t up in heaven or in some post-apocalyptic future, but right here and now, coming up from within us and taking root among us, uniting us all in a Spirit of freedom and love.

As illustrated in my diagram, the elevated position of ego, transcendent of the body but not independent from it, provides a location from which consciousness can release and descend into the grounding mystery of Being itself. The dashes and subtraction sign (-) in and near the vertical arrow dropping from ego are making the point that this descending path involves a surrender of all the ideologies, memberships, ambitions, attachments, roles, and masks that define identity.

From the same location of ego’s position, consciousness can also connect with other persons and ascend together with them into the higher wholeness of transpersonal community. A solid upward arrow and addition sign (+) indicate that this higher realm of community takes up and includes each person’s uniqueness and the diversity represented in their differences.

Here we are not locked to our roles but can use them to contribute, add value, and participate with each other in the creative ways of a higher purpose.

So we can see that ego consciousness did not evolve just to be rescued to another world and a life everlasting, but instead to open pathways to the depths of Mystery within us and the conspiracy of love lifting us together as One.

It’s here that we become fully human.

Your Inner Family

In True Self in the Real World I analyzed the social construction of identity in order to show that the person we play on stage and the stage itself are neither true (self) nor real (world). True Self and the Real World are, in fact, screened from our awareness by a conditioned preference for becoming somebody special.

It’s more accurate to say “becoming” rather than being somebody special, given how the fulfillment of our ambition is constantly eluding us. We can always be more special – recognized, accepted, approved, and admired by more people, or by more important people.

And in our pursuit of this impossible goal, we end up pushing down and hiding away parts of our true Self that others aren’t ready to see or don’t want to.

Putting on suits (roles) and playing to the expectations of society, all the while sticking more of our light inside the closet so as not to risk being judged, ridiculed, or rejected: this is where we can spend our one brief lifetime, never coming into contact with our soul-centered identity (true Self) or the Reality beyond our beliefs (real World).

In the present post we will go deeper inside this delusion, to a particular interaction on stage that, more than any other, is the cause behind the felt need to hide our light. I’m talking, of course, about the Family Triad of Mother, Child, and Father, which is the most primitive and universally constant theme in world mythology, where they are appreciated as archetypes (“first forms” or original patterns) that most powerfully shape our human experience.

To prove this point, I will refine our focus for the following meditation, from a general reflection on the universal human experience to the experience you are having and where you are on the journey right now. Admittedly, what follows also applies to me and to everyone else, which is what makes this dynamic universal.

The objective, however, is for us to understand it at the general level so we might convert these insights into intentions for living a more liberated and luminous life.

“Once upon a time” (so begins your personal myth) you were a Child. Using the standard archetypal configuration of the Family Triad, you were born of a mother and to a father, coming out of one and taken in by the other. Likely with little awareness that they were local incarnations of the Mother and Father archetypes, your actual mother and father stepped instinctively into their respective roles.

As archetype, Mother is the Source, Ground, and Womb of life. She is the power of unconditional love and abundant generosity. In Her you found security, comfort, and nourishment, a safe place to surrender completely and relax into being. After forgetting your lines in the school play or falling off your bicycle, She welcomed you into Her embrace with the assurance that “It’s okay. Just relax and let it go.”

As Her counterpart, Yang to Her Yin, Father is the archetypal Other, the mysterious Outsider, a Beyond-in-the-midst, the One who confronted you from His transcendent center of otherness. He is the lure, the love of benevolent power. From Him you felt challenged and encouraged to try new things, to step into the proving circle and test your abilities, demonstrate new skills, and exercise your will. After forgetting your lines in the school play or falling off your bicycle, He exhorted you to “Brush it off. Face your fear and try again.”

Now, it’s not highly likely that your actual mother and father channeled their archetypes with consistent perfection. There’s a decent chance, in fact, that they fell short more times than not, partly because archetypes are ideals designed to attract and focus aspiration, not goals to be achieved.

The other reason your actual parents “missed the mark” (the definition of an ancient archery term, sin) was that they were dealing with, and compulsively playing out, the consequences of having had parents of their own who were sinners – and on up the generational line to the original mythic couple, El the Sky Father and Eden the Garden Mother (see Genesis 2:7ff), who didn’t get it quite right with their children either.

Our purpose here is not to place blame, but rather to understand how the degree in which your actual parents embodied or obscured the archetypal Mother and Father had the effect of motivating you to let your light shine, or else hide it in the closet.

If your parents were distant, demanding, hard to please or abusive, then you learned how to stay out of sight and keep the parts of you they would not accept off-stage and packed away.

That was your adaptive strategy in childhood – again, individualized to some extent given the unique history and special circumstances of every actual family. Now as an adult and living your own life, you still are not free and clear, for the child you once were is now your Inner Child.

Those same strategies for gaining acceptance, earning approval, winning praise, and staying vigilant to reduce the risk of losing any of those things, are what I call neurotic styles: episodes where your Inner Child rants, rages, whines, sulks or shuts down when you don’t get your way.

When that happens, it’s because another pole in this bipolar personality dynamic, called your Inner Parent, gets activated and goes to work issuing judgments, threats, and accusations against your Inner Child. Instead of self-compassion you hear self-criticism. Instead of self-encouragement you hear self-recrimination. You’re no good. You’re not worthy. You are unacceptable. You have nothing important to contribute, so keep silent.

Remember, you are saying these things to yourself by a socially programmed habit which follows a script that is likely many generations old.

Your actual mother and father were also agents, in a way, of their own generation’s philosophy of parenting and its views on discipline, family roles, and identity. It was inevitable that you would internalize your early experience as this inner dialogue between a part of you that takes the role of Parent and another part that takes the role of Child.

At some point you open the closet, snap the threads of threat-and-fear, accusation-and-shame, judgment-and-doubt that weave the heavy shroud of your shadow, and take back the light it has held for so long. In a Spirit of renewal and wholeness, you rise into your Higher Self and begin to live a more liberated life.

It is time.

True Self in the Real World

It sounds a bit odd, but even though you’ve been around for a while, it’s possible that you are just now waking up. To use one of my favorite metaphors, it takes some time asleep inside its cocoon before the butterfly is ready to emerge.

I’ve placed you there in my diagram, right at the center … I was going to say “where you belong,” but you don’t really belong there.

This just happens to be where you are waking up, after years of working diligently – if often confusedly – on becoming somebody special. It’s critically important to understand that your ego, this separate center of self-conscious personal identity, is not all that you are.

It’s not even your true Self.

In other posts I have gotten down into the dirty details of how an individual’s separate center of self-conscious personal identity is formed, but this one will stay at the level of an overview. There are forces and dynamics that fade out of the picture when we poke and dig into the nitty-gritty.

True enough, our successful navigation of those finer points is essential to our liberation from where we happen to be stuck. All those deeper elements comprise larger patterns, however, and sometimes we need to zoom out to really appreciate and understand how it all works – and why occasionally, or perhaps chronically, it doesn’t work so well.

So we will begin by making a clear distinction between the separate center of self-conscious personal identity that you are currently managing on the social stage, and your true or authentic Self.

As you will see, this conditioned and domesticated self (lowercase ‘s’), which we will label “ego” (Latin for “I”), has a corresponding habitat in a world – the domicile or “house of meaning” where its domestication is facilitated and a personal identity is installed.

Therefore, just as we must distinguish between your conditioned self and your authentic or true Self (uppercase ‘S’), the spiritual wisdom tradition also distinguishes between your personal world (lowercase ‘w’) and the real World (uppercase ‘W’), or Reality for short.

Both your conditioned self and your personal world are social constructs, made up and put together for the purpose of providing you an identity and the orientation you need to make it in this world – referring once again to the lowercase ‘w’ world that you share in common with other members of your tribe.

This conventional world is equally a social construct, even though in ordinary language we often confuse it with the real World (i.e., Reality).

To help organize these important ideas, my diagram illustrates the distinctions just introduced, presented as a dynamic pattern of polarities. A horizontal line or axis identifies the primary dualism at work in the formation of your conditioned self and personal world. The vertical axis is not a straightforward intersection with this self-world, but rather follows a zigzag pattern, zigging down to the contemplative pole and zagging up to the transpersonal pole of your authentic Self.

This will make more sense as we step through it together. Let’s return to the horizontal axis and give attention to your ego there in the middle of everything.

As already mentioned, your separate center of self-conscious personal identity is a social construct designed for the purpose of managing an identity inside a world of personal and shared meaning. In other words, your conditioned self did not come into existence at conception or birth, but instead formed gradually over time under the considerable influence of your local tribe.

A principal function of a personal identity is to connect and coordinate your interactions with other tribal members in the social role-play. To the right of ego in my diagram is a full-length mirror holding the reflection of somebody special. See the halo? That’s you being a good boy or a nice girl, a star athlete, a stunning beauty, or a Fortune 500 CEO of the Year.

Congratulations.

All of these identities are in italic text to remind us that the categories, definitions, and values are social conventions. “Good” and “nice” (etc.) are shared standards of a society, qualified by its moral frame and conserved from one generation to the next through parental discipline and cultural education.

One society’s moral frame is different from the moral frame of another society, sometimes in significant ways. Additionally, the same social tradition will move through different moral frames over its history, although these changes tend to be less revolutionary and more incremental.

There are exceptions, of course, and our present period seems to be one where the inherited moral frame is undergoing either a radical remodel or a complete collapse. Something new will emerge, but at this point it’s difficult to envision what it will be.

Anyway, back to you.

Associated with that full-length mirror and its image of somebody special looking back at you is the suit that identifies you to others in the social role-play. It might help to think of culture as the theater, society as the stage, and the various role-plays as tribal and interpersonal scenarios that transpire in the local settings of daily life.

Everyone has a role and plays a part – even the bystander, dropout, and outcaste who is shunned or ignored by the other actors. Each of them wears a suit that identifies them with a particular or more general role-play.

As you were zipped into suits assigned to you by your tribe, or maybe tried on some styles as a way of experimenting with identities, others recognized you by your role, and their reaction came back to you like a reflection in the mirror. In this mirror reflection of social responses to your role and how well you played it, you picked up clues to help you make adjustments, change tack, or maybe give up trying.

The reinforcement you were looking for were signs of recognition, acceptance, approval – and ideally admiration, but this is typically harder to win. “Accepted and expected” summarize the set, referring to the domestication objectives of fitting in (what’s accepted) and stepping up (what’s expected).

Your conditioned self is designed with a compulsive need to belong, to be “one of us.”

Depending on how nurturing, generous, inclusive, and forgiving your tribe was, your experiments with identity and gradual improvements in performance resulted in what self psychology calls “ego strength” – a centered and balanced personality with demonstrated integrity and resilience across a wide range of social situations.

Even though this isn’t your true or authentic Self, ego strength in your conditioned self is a critical achievement of development on your longer human journey.

If, on the other hand, your tribe wasn’t so nurturing, generous, inclusive and forgiving, the work of fitting in and stepping up was more challenging. In order to win the acceptance and approval of others in various social role-plays, the mirror reflection in their reactions made it clear that certain “energies,” talents, inclinations, preferences, and behaviors did not comply with the moral frame.

If you wanted to belong, then ironically you would need to keep those things off-stage and consequently leave some of yourself out of the role-play.

Better yet, locked behind a door.

That image of a door to the left of ego represents the closetful of things in your temperament and personality that had to be denied, censored, and suppressed in the interest of being somebody special on the social stage.

Along with a few animal impulses and morally deviant fantasies, included among these rejected (and eventually forgotten) parts of yourself are talents and other natural gifts that were either too unique or too threatening to the status quo for others to recognize and accept.

So you threw them on a pile and locked them behind the door, where the whole collection became what self psychology names your shadow.

The fact that the “shadow principle” is regarded in society and conventional religion as an antisocial, malevolent, and diabolical force (e.g., personified in the Devil) is really the function of a preceding fact, which is that every society tends to demonize what it fears, can’t accept, or is unwilling to include.

Interestingly, our conventional names for the personified shadow principle – Lucifer and Satan – carry a mythological insight into its dual character: (1) as the depository and keeper of your rejected light (Lucifer means “Light-bearer”); and (2) as a force that can destroy you from inside if you insist on pushing it behind the door (Satan means “Adversary,” or one who turns against).

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas, 70

As you can see, your conditioned self is in a very interesting space – a kind of existential dilemma, really – with its irrepressible need to belong and be somebody special (mirror and suit), while compulsively cramming your light into a closet (door and shadow) – or using a related metaphor from the teachings of Jesus, hiding your light under a bushel basket.

The spiritual wisdom tradition teaches that the way to your authentic Self, or soul, leads through your shadow and deeper into the grounding mystery of Being. You need to take back your light and use it to illumine the contemplative path, “zigging” inward to a Peace that eludes definition – or “surpasses all understanding,” in the words of the apostle Paul in his letter to the Christians in Philippi (Philippians 4:7).

In your soul or inmost Self there is no drive or interest in becoming somebody special, for you are perfectly content in just being.

Your authentic Self also invites you to “zag” upward, above and beyond the role-play stage and your personal world. The real World (or Reality) is not divided into insiders and outsiders, parties and castes, colors and creeds. Up there, everything is connected and All is One. Such divisions are merely social conventions, constructs of language, ideological fictions – and ultimately deadly delusions.

Your authentic Self, as spirit, breaks through this cocoon of identity and meaning, gliding above personal attachments and interpersonal conflicts on the wings of a transpersonal freedom.

Ascending the Cosmic Mountain

The illustration above captures in a single image a grand view of the Whole Shebang. It is the dialogical product of our two traditionally complementary systems, science and spirituality.

Unfortunately, the metasystem of religion which historically served to hold these two in coordinated balance and mutual support, made the fateful mistake of defending a literal reading of its myths against what it regarded as threats from both sides.

Scientific observers and empiricists were making discoveries that would eventually replace the three-layered cosmos of earlier times with an expanding universe of unimaginable dimensions. At the same time, spiritual contemplatives and mystics were exploring new depths of the inner life and finding there a grounding mystery more present and real than the gods themselves.

In its defense, religious clerics and scholars began locking religion down to an orthodoxy and liturgy that effectively closed off external Reality and the inner Ground from believers. The consequence was a centuries-long “dark age” as science and spirituality continued on their paths to enlightenment and liberation, but religion succumbed to intellectual hypoxia (starved of fresh air) and spiritual sclerosis (becoming rigid and dysfunctional).

Today, with conventional religion on a dramatic decline in membership and attendance, we are seeing a renewed dialogue between science and spirituality. The modern veering-away of science into reductionist materialism and of spirituality into esoteric metaphysics, absent the counterbalancing support and correction that healthy religion might have provided, has resulted in decreasing enrollments on both sides as well.

A new type of religion is now gaining a worldwide following, one that is Earth-based, life-centered, human-focused, and community-oriented. This religion – and the term is justified in recognition of its conscious intention of “linking back” or connecting (Latin religare) us to one another, each of us to our inner Ground, and the community to our home planet – doesn’t have a priesthood, a ritual system, an institutional structure, or even a credo.

This religion can even flourish in traditions that have not cut themselves off from science or spirituality, that embrace their role in nurturing a faith which can finally see through and beyond its preferred concepts of God.

It is therefore, and by definition, ‘post-theistic’.

A grand view of the whole shebang, as illustrated above, is the dialogical product of science and spirituality, finally rescued from their respective quagmires of reductionist and metaphysical distraction, reconciled at last in a contemporary post-theistic paradigm.

The cone image also has the semblance of a mountain, with various ridges having formed in its upward thrust to an illuminated peak. This idea of ‘formation’ nicely captures the spatial and temporal dimensions we need in order to appreciate the universe as not merely the product of cosmic events but as an ongoing evolution in time, a single-turning event of the largest scale (uni-verse).

The bottom regions of the cone, or cosmic mountain, represent the earliest events and deepest forces in the universe. A primordial “flaring-forth” (big bang) of quantum energy began the process of crystallization which produced the basic structures of matter. As the material realm expanded and cooled, these elements combined into new molecular configurations and further condensed into the compounds of planets with their local environments and atmospheres.

On our own planet of Earth, material conditions gave rise to organic properties and gradually to organisms with the capability of capturing, converting, and storing energy for their own special use. Soon – over many millions of years! – organisms would develop powers to restore, repair, reproduce and replace themselves with new generations of life.

As these primitive forms of life connected in symbiotic networks for resources and protection, the emerging webs of differentiation shifted the living realm into higher, more complex systems, creating the need and capacity for self-regulation, sensorimotor intelligence, and ambient awareness – thus giving rise to the realm of mind (i.e., sentient life).

Countless species of plant and animal life multiplied and filled the earth.

In one particular animal species, our own human lineage, mind further differentiated for the work of regulating the interior body, reacting and adapting to its environment, and orienting the individual inside its own projected dome of concerns, preferences, values, and meaning.

To effectively get around and flourish inside this world-projection, the individual required a center of personal identity and affiliation that could keep it connected to the tribe. The external monitoring, guidance, and motivation provided by the group was gradually transferred inside the individual and established as the ego (Latin for “I”) of a personality, referring to a collection of “masks” (personas) and roles it uses to engage in the various role-plays and interpersonal transactions of social life.

This activation of a subjective center for self-monitoring, self-guidance, and self-motivation gave rise to a game-changing but chronically tormented mode of self-conscious experience.

Ego formation brought our human journey into the steep and treacherous mindscape of profound insecurities, neurotic disorders, self-destructive behaviors, conflicting beliefs and worldviews, spiraling self-obsession, as well as debilitating cycles of anxiety and depression.

We are starting to understand that, just as the principles of differentiation, individuation, and participation in the earlier stages and deeper regions of the cosmic mountain conspire(d) to create conditions for the emergence of higher complexity, so is our self-conscious ego and personal identity (i.e., our individuated self) just the precursor to a transpersonal leap of participation in something higher still.

In the past, this is where science would shake its head and walk out on the dialogue with spirituality. It’s important to note once again, however, that it was the mythological literalism of a religion which refused to evolve, that turned the metaphor of breath or wind (Latin spiritus: spirit) into an independent divine being, rather than a word-image for the dynamic flow of creative freedom and genuine love between and among self-transcending egos.

Spirit is a communal metaphor of connectedness, reciprocity, fellowship, solidarity, and inclusion.

It is community.

It is tempting to see spirit as always and already deepest within the cosmic mountain, just waiting for its time to emerge. Science can’t go along with that, and for good reason: Spirit isn’t some thing, but rather the participative unity of individual egos in transpersonal fellowship. We can observe it scientifically and even measure its effects, but we will never isolate it in a laboratory or find it wandering about on its own.

To say that …

  • energy “gave rise” to matter, or that matter “emerged” from energy;
  • matter “gave rise” to life, or that life “emerged” from matter;
  • life “gave rise” to mind, or that mind “emerged” from life;
  • mind “gave rise” to ego, or that ego “emerged” from mind;
  • ego “gave rise” to spirit, or that spirit “emerged” from ego (or better, that it emerged from the transpersonal fellowship of egos)

… in each case we are referencing conditions which are favorable and conducive in generating a synergy that “bumps” things into a higher order of complexity and creative transformation.

What we bring individually to the spiritual phenomenon of community is a grounded faith, a centered presence, a welcoming attitude, a compassionate interest and unconditional generosity.

We draw from the wellspring of soul within and give ourselves to the dance, to the work of forming an ever more perfect union.

The Anatomy of Belief

We rightly give attention to scrutinizing a belief’s claim and its object, i.e., what it asserts (or claims) about something or other (its object). As a perspective on its object, we should be able to check reality for evidence to determine whether the object is well-grounded. Once confirmed, we can then move on to consider the claim it is making regarding the object.

That’s how things could go.

Oftentimes, however, we get caught up in the argument and forget to reality-check the claim our belief is making. This happens frequently in religion. For example, virtually the entire edifice of Christian orthodoxy is a construction of claims about objects whose existence cannot be checked against reality.

The obligation to “believe it anyway” is built into the construction project itself, since doubting or denying any part of it will bring down the whole assembly. It all hangs together in the air, as it were, and falls into a heap when any part of its suspension system is cut.

What we tend not to understand when it comes to belief is how much of its power in our lives is less about truth – evidence and reason – than in how it orients us in the world, connects or separates us from others, and gives us something to live and die for.

I’m not talking about a belief’s object and claim here, but something else. Well, not actually something else, but rather the intrinsic structure of belief itself, what I’ll call its anatomy. There’s what a belief asserts and the object of its assertion, but there’s also its essential design as a mechanism of conversion whereby human consciousness is filtered, focused, and directed into the concerns of daily life.

As far as we know, humans are the only animal species on Earth that has evolved beyond a reliance on sensory intelligence, inherited instincts, and the learned habits of our local group.

The subsequent weakening of these channels, concentrated as they are in the zone of urgency where our immediate circumstances and the concerns of daily living are dominant, made humans both existentially vulnerable and highly motivated to construct new shelters of security, orientation, identity and meaning – “worlds,” as we have come to know them.

Beliefs are the building blocks of worlds, and there are as many worlds as human egos who need them.

Following the scientific principle of “cómponence” – a word I coined for the idea that things are made up of other (smaller) things, and in turn join with more things to make up other (larger) things, with our Universe being the largest order of cómponence – we can see that the beliefs making up our worlds are themselves made of more elementary components.

In this post I will analyze these components with the purpose of “cracking the code” of how and why we humans hang on to our beliefs, even (maybe especially?) when they lack certain evidence, rational coherence, and practical application to our existential situation.

My illustration above depicts the internal building blocks of belief, itself a building block in the larger construction of a world (principle of cómponence). The vertical stack is not to suggest that each “block” in the “building” of belief is essentially identical to the others. In fact, what I aim to show is that each block in the anatomy of belief is unique unto itself and adds a distinct energy to the stack.

All together, they make belief the most influential force in human experience, across human cultures, and consequently on planet Earth.

While the impact of belief is most impressive in the way it makes humans behave, our analysis will begin at the other end of the stack – up “in the air,” as it were, in the busyness of thinking.

This is where most of the debate regarding the truth of belief, its focal object and claim, has been preoccupied and is frequently frustrated. In the activity of thinking is where ideas are formed or planted, fusing into schemas and stories that eventually spread across the mind like viral memes across the internet to form an enveloping perspective on reality – our worldview or simply our world.

Our storied world serves as a narrative context providing the security, orientation, identity, and meaning we humans need. As my earlier example of religion shows, it’s not so important that our world is grounded in reality or even that it’s all that rational, since its principal function is to envelop our vulnerability and satisfy those emergent human needs.

The endurance of evidence-free and irrational beliefs in many religious worldviews only reinforces the point that truth isn’t what ultimately matters.

Our thinking activity, its narrative products and the perspective they provide, has a “downward influence” in the way they affect how we feel and shape our more persistent attitudes in life. At this level in the anatomy of belief we have moved from what is often called “objective truth” (evident + rational) to “subjective truth,” in how it makes us feel.

Once the power of belief has taken root here, arguments seeking to expose its lack of grounding or logical coherence can actually have the opposite effect of strengthening its hold on believers.

A believer’s emotional commitment to the subjective truth of a belief is amplified to the same degree it is threatened.

By this time, the question of objective truth is a needless distraction and the “truth” in how it makes us feel takes over. Attitude is an emotional position we take with respect to something, real or imagined, and it links even deeper into the nervous system to engage our motivation toward, against, or away from the object at the center of our attention (i.e., what we’re thinking about).

Wanting is another word for desire, and desire is the motivational drive operating in our cells, our organs, and in the animal nature of our body itself.

Returning a final time to religion, it’s this anchoring of even the least provable and most irrational of beliefs to the believer’s desire for everlasting life that keeps them ever relevant – even if they have no practical application whatsoever to the concerns of daily life.

The drive in our cells, organs, and nervous system is compulsive and unconscious, and when belief finds roots here, it is almost guaranteed tenure.

Finally we arrive at the element in belief where it crosses the threshold from inside our psychophysiology and into the reality outside our skin. This is where our “talk” becomes our “walk,” where our faith gets to work.

If the question of objective truth (evidence + rationality) is about checking our belief against reality before we let it settle into our mind or keep residence there, this outgoing gate is where our behavior might be checked against the rights and interests of others, as well as by the ethical standards of communal and planetary wellbeing.

We might wish that everyone could just keep their beliefs to themselves, but then we wouldn’t really be dealing with belief. Regardless of what we think we believe or how we feel about it, our behavior is the most convincing evidence of what we actually believe.

Hypocrisy is the most glaring “sin” of our day and age.

How we live on the earth, how we treat one another, how we protect, cultivate, and advance the human aspirations that will continue to shape the worlds of our collective future – that is where belief really does its work.

The Spiral Path

Many teachings on wisdom spirituality assume that their audience is comprised of individuals who are ready for a revelation or breakthrough.

In fact, many are only interested in home improvement and not an entirely new living situation.

In a sense, conventional religion is something of a compromise in this regard. Somewhere in there are golden nuggets of potentially transformative insight, but which have been toned down and domesticated for mass consumption.

For the decade and a half that I was in professional Christian ministry, this domestication of Jesus’ original gospel – his “good news” of human liberation – became increasingly difficult for me to accept.

My tradition had long ago taken the protein and spice out of Jesus’ recipe for what he called New Life by the Power of God. Boiled soft and diluted with sugar water to make it more palatable, Christian orthodoxy is now a weak stew of doctrines that preserves hardly a hint of his real life and revolutionary message.

To understand how this change came about in Christianity, we need to recognize that something like it has happened – and will continue to happen – in all forms of conventional religion, as the inevitable effect of packaging and marketing truth so as to not disrupt the status quo.

Jesus and others like him were not interested in “home improvement” – that is to say, in making conventional life a little easier or adding a touch of fresh paint to the same old walls.

Conventional life is all about the roles, rules, and routines that keep everyone in their place and the social role-play rolling along its safe and familiar grooves. The rewards for doing your part and staying in line, moving up in the ranks of righteousness and then moving on to heaven when you die, are enough to make people believe they are doing their best.

Let’s take a moment to develop this picture more fully. The point I want to make is not that conventional religion is corrupt and either needs to be tossed out or replaced by something else. Instead it’s that everything conventional – religion, morality, business, and daily life – is by definition formed on the beliefs, agreements, and habits that constitute the shared world of a people.

The wisdom tradition of Sophia Perennis, where Jesus numbers among the “faculty,” is focused on the path that leads out of this Great Delusion and into a more grounded, authentic, liberated and fulfilling life. What are the basic framework and design features of a conventional existence – the Great Delusion, as I’m calling it?

The key dynamic of conventional life takes hold early as a family and its larger tribe begin the process of grooming, shaping, and instructing the animal nature of their youngster with the moral rules and cultural codes for becoming a well-behaved member of society.

The primal consciousness of our body doesn’t have a natural interest in using the toilet, putting our plate in the dishwasher, or waiting our turn. Such behavior had to be conditioned into us – along with countless other examples of what a “civil order” may require.

Central to this task of domesticating an animal nature is a process called personation, referring to the gradual adoption of roles and masks (personas) that identify us to our tribe, but also identify us with specific segments of the population – with the beliefs, values, preferences, and ways of life that differentiate one subgroup from another.

This can get very specific, down to clothing and hair styles, membership and status symbols, to the esoteric credenda and rituals of secret societies.

Once this process is complete and we are fully personated, primal consciousness – or really just a very small portion of it, like dipping your bucket in a fast-flowing stream – has been coaxed, sequestered, and installed inside the suits of tribal identity, as the “I” (ego) who has this name, that address, these responsibilities, those friends and enemies.

In conventional society, from the general role-play to those exclusive groups, cults, and denominations where identity is smaller, more tightly defined and heavily guarded, it can feel as if our journey is complete.

Find your place in society and do your part. That’s it. Do a good job and you will be remembered well. Maybe you’ll be rewarded with a gold star in heaven when it’s all over.

As illustrated in the diagram above, however, our domestication to conventional society and managing an identity are just part of a larger and longer journey – a fuller human journey.

What the wisdom teachers see is what most of us suffer to learn, which is that the very formation of identity separates us from the depths of consciousness, life, and being itself. That bucket of water pulled from the living stream was isolated for the purpose of filling a suit and serving a role.

But it came at a price. Our ego is inherently insecure and vulnerable to feelings of exposure, shame, loneliness, anxiety and depression.

Now, conventional religion can help with that, with its shelter of belonging, its program of moral direction and support, the assurance that comes in believing that we know the Truth and are among the chosen saved.

It shouldn’t surprise us that conventional religion is consistently the most vocal, even violent, enemy of human enlightenment and liberation. Its job is to keep us safely inside and sufficiently preoccupied with the promises and complications of membership, not even thinking to look outside the window – or even realizing there is a window onto Something More beyond.

So, while the priests, pastors, imams and other custodians of tradition are committed to keeping us inside and in line, the wisdom teachers invite us to “get out of the house” and discover Reality.

Of course, we can work together to build a bigger house, one with vaulted sky lights and a larger floor plan to welcome (and make members of) others whom we had been excluding, neglecting, or ignoring.

The fact remains, however, that a “megachurch” is still a church, and every church is its own kind of conventional society.

Progress on our journey to enlightenment, liberation, and fulfillment does not necessarily lead outside the house as much as underneath it. Not digging through the floor, but by dropping from the center of identity (ego), into the primal consciousness of the body, and deeper still to the grounding mystery named soul.

Not “my” soul, for this mystery is not something ego owns or can ever hope to manage.

Body and soul are together the expressive and essential dimensions of our authentic Self. One is a biogenic converter of the primal lifeforce into the metabolic energy electrifying our cells, fueling our instincts, and powering our mind, connecting us to the Web of Life all around us. The other is a centripetal attractor drawing consciousness inward to its own depths and generative ground.

This inner drop from our social anchor of identity up on stage is the mystical path to communion, where body and soul are experienced as complementary aspects of the same mystery – not the warring dualism envisioned in some religions, or the crap bag and alien light as taught in others.

The communion of body and soul – or we should say, the realization and intentional cultivation of this communion on our inner journey of liberation – brings awareness into our deeper centers of sentience, life, and being, each of which corresponds to a larger horizon of participation: all sentient creatures, all living things, Mother Earth and the universal cosmic environment itself.

We might compare this path to communion with the emergence of a butterfly from its cocoon: watch as it gently unfurls, slowly exercises, and gradually finds the balance of its new wings. Perhaps we can think of body and soul as the two wings which we must learn to use in coordination: the “soul wing” finding deeper centers within ourselves, the “body wing” reaching to larger horizons of wholeness beyond us.

When we compare this fully grounded and far-reaching authentic Self to the conventional identity we once inhabited – what is often named the conditioned self, the differences are so dramatically evident as to make a comparison almost impossible.

An obedient and true-believing conformist has transformed into a courageous and truth-seeking creator. A person who daily struggled to manage life on the stage has become a free spirit, fully human and finally divine.

In the full circuit of this Spiral Path, we return home with boons for the community: the Sword of Truth, the Balm of Compassion, and the Lamp of Wisdom. Perhaps we can inspire others to get out of the house and share a bit of what we discovered on the Way.

Breaking Through

The diagram to the right is an abstract illustration of Reality. That horizontal line of different-colored spheres at the center represents the plane of individual existence. Each sphere is a distinct being.

Pick a color: that’s a rock being. Across the way is a tree being. Next to them are a dog being, a bird being, a cloud being, a star being.

Get the idea?

Obviously, this is an extremely simplified and abstract depiction of Reality. Its usefulness is not about realism or descriptive accuracy, but only in the way it sets the stage for a deeper contemplation of Existence, particularly of your existence as a human being.

We’ll get there shortly.

Keep in mind that every individual being is represented on the horizontal line or plane at the center. We can also regard it as a threshold and take a step upward, lifting our attention to that arching dome above the line. From our original plane of orientation, this move takes us outward from the individual being and into a realm of connectedness, relationship, and participation.

Each being is connected, directly or indirectly, to all other beings in Existence.

Our common word for this universal Web of connectedness is Universe, referring literally to the “single turning” (uni-verse) totality of Existence. Outward and all around each individual being, the Universe isn’t something else or something other than the participative unity of all beings.

Now let’s drop below the threshold plane of rock beings, dog beings, star beings and the rest, where we can see more lines descending vertically from each individual being. This move takes us inward to the essential Ground of each being, to the power of be-ing, the power-to-be that generates and supports it from within.

If we’re not careful, lazy distinctions among the words we are using can lead to confusion, which has produced profound fallacies in many traditions of spirituality. What we are naming the essential Ground is not something else, just as the Universe is not something outside or other than the participative unity of all beings.

In this case, though, we are not moving outward across the Web of connectedness and relationship, but rather inward to the grounding mystery and power of be-ing, which manifests here as a rock or there as a dog. Ground is the within-ness or essence of each existing being, not another being separate from it and from the plane of existing beings.

You won’t find a being’s Ground by going outside to the external reality underneath it, like the physical ground beneath your feet. That’s the Universe again. The essential Ground is always and only within.

With that general picture in place, let’s sharpen our focus on your unique nature as a “human” being.

You also, of course, have the same dual orientation as all other beings – out-and-around to the universal Web of connectedness with all things, down-and-within to the essential Ground of being itself.

For this next stage in our contemplation of Existence, we have zoomed in on you as one being on the plane of existing beings. In your case, however, that horizontal threshold between what’s around you and what’s within you has been split lengthwise and wedged apart by the insertion of a larger sphere centered on the smaller one of your basic nature as a human being.

Altogether, the whole ensemble has the appearance of an eye, with the pupil of your ego (your “I”) looking directly back at us.

You have been endowed by Nature with the neuroanatomical equipment and corresponding capacity for self-conscious awareness. This means that not only are you conscious of your sentient experience, of what’s coming through your senses, but you are also aware of yourself as the subject having this experience.

From this new center of orientation, you piece together and project around yourself a mental map of Reality as it concerns you. Known as your worldview or simply your “world,” its outer boundary is what interfaces with but also squeezes to the margin that universal Web of connectedness, or Universe – which is quite factually all around you and includes you.

And yet, if something in the Universe isn’t mentally tagged as relevant to your concerns, it can be screened out of your awareness altogether.

So let’s make a few more fine distinctions. While the Universe is external to your consciousness (i.e., outside your mind), your world is a mental object of your consciousness (i.e., inside your mind). The character of your objective world is drawn from your personal experiences, from what you were taught growing up, from today’s news, from the creative power of your imagination, as well as from your anxieties, hopes, and expectations.

Your anxieties, particularly, are the product and symptom of an existential insecurity associated with standing on your own separate center of personal identity, inside a world that closes you off from what’s really real (i.e., from Reality).

All of that business of creating a world in your mind, projecting it around yourself as a theater of meaning, constructing an identity to inhabit your world, and striving to become somebody special – that is the Great Delusion.

It might be easy to confuse or equate your subjective self with the essential Ground of your being, or your objective world with the universal Web of Reality, but such equations only conspire to trap you inside the Great Delusion.

Personal identity is centered in your subjective self, which must be surrendered and released for a descent into the deeper oneness of your essential Ground. This is a breakthrough to inner peace and the Power within.

Correspondingly, personal meaning is bounded by your objective world and must be surpassed, pulled aside like a veil and transcended on your way to reunion with the universal Web and its higher wholeness. This is a breakthrough to communal joy and the Truth beyond.

Now, if you are ready for the most wonderful paradox in this entire meditation, here it is:

These breakthroughs in consciousness are predicated on your prior captivity to the Great Delusion.

Without a centered self, there is nothing to drop away from and go within. Without a bounded world, there is nothing to break past and get beyond. You have to become somebody before you can get over yourself.

The liberated life is on the other side of what defines and confines you.

A New Vision for Education

Higher education has been struggling to address some chronic issues for a while now, but it just can’t seem to find effective solutions. Here are the statistics: 50 percent of degree-seeking college students don’t make it to graduation or transfer, and 75 percent of those that do, end up getting jobs outside their degrees.*

On a statistical basis alone, these numbers are good grounds for an argument against the value of a college education.

Why would anyone waste time, effort, and money on something that doesn’t get them where they want to go? When I visit classrooms, I do my best to talk students out of wasting their time and money on college.

That’s right.

If students enroll in college but don’t have a clear sense of why they are there and where it’s leading, they’re wasting time and money and might better choose to drop out – or get help, which most don’t.

Many of them stumble into college out of high school by the momentum of parental or social expectations. Having completed a K-12 compulsory education where taller powers had decided and managed their progress through the system, they now find themselves in a place where education is voluntary. Taller powers are still standing by, but now more for advising and intervention than prescribing what’s now and what’s next.

So, the new college student takes a look around, reviews the available programs and course catalog, and chooses a degree. On the basis of what criteria? Quite often their choice is motivated by such factors as what other students are doing, the advice (or ultimatums) of their parents, what degrees are broad enough to feel safe, what industries are currently growing, or what jobs pay the higher salaries.

After all, you go to college to get a job, and you go to your job to make money – right?

At some point these students are required to declare a major field of study, which is supposed to set their focus and ensure they are taking the requisite courses for their degree. While the college is glad to take their tuition, it also needs them to finish a program and thereby add to its success data.

Retention, persistence, completion, graduation – such statistics are what accreditation agencies and external funders look at to determine whether a college is meeting standards and doing its job.

Needless to say, when 50 percent of degree-seeking students don’t complete a program, and when 75 percent of those that do complete a program end up getting jobs outside the degrees they just spent a significant amount of time, effort, and money to obtain, the numbers are both exasperating and embarrassing to college administrators.

A third persistent statistic would shed some light on what’s going on, if colleges hadn’t long ago thrown up their hands in resignation. Year after year, on nearly every college campus in the country, 80 percent of students change their major – multiple times.

It’s just what students do, runs the common response of educators.

They choose one major, discover things about the program curriculum they don’t like or find intimidating, learn more about the job prospects after graduation, start second-guessing their choice, come across information about other degrees and careers, and decide to change their major.

Not just once or twice, but multiple times.

Educators essentially put the blame on the students: That’s just what students do. They change their majors. We can’t change that (as they think inside the paradigm of intervention).

The next step for many students – somewhere in that 50 percent who don’t make it to graduation or transfer – is out of college altogether.

There’s also a good chance that those who do make it to graduation but end up getting jobs outside their degrees just came to their disillusionment on a delayed schedule. Their degree and major terminated in a career that didn’t really interest them after all, and so they found their way into something else. That’s nearly three-quarters of graduates. Seventy-five percent.

My experience in higher education has led me to take a new look at these statistics and what they really mean. Those 75-percent stats on either side of graduation are driven, I have come to believe, by something hidden in plain sight, behind that third statistic about students changing their majors.

It’s not “just what students do.” They are doing it, to be sure, and it may seem as if it’s inevitable. But it’s not.

The phenomenon of changing majors should be anticipated to some extent as students learn more about college programs, more about themselves, and more about the dynamic world of work. My observation, however, supporting students as a manager of career services on a college campus, is that a large number of them don’t have a clear understanding of themselves.

We can present students with all kinds of external options and incentives, but if they lack a clear and centered self-understanding, the choices they make are not likely to stick.

  • Changing majors multiple times is a likely symptom of confusion, which is itself a mental and emotional state that every human experiences from time to time.
  • Confusion can quickly generate anxiety, a feeling that things are about to go terribly wrong unless something is done very soon.
  • But urgency-driven action is often frantic and sporadic, producing unwanted results or bad outcomes and adding frustration to the anxiety.
  • If this goes on for long enough, exhaustion and discouragement will set in, perhaps eventuating in disengagement and dropout.

As a student’s doubt over their current choice of major begins to rise, so does their confusion, which in turn generates anxiety. It’s their drive to relieve this anxiety that motivates many students to pick a different major. They are suddenly certain that this is the answer, and their certainty saves them – or so they feel – from the suffering of doubt and anxiety.

The critical distinction here is that the student’s hastened certainty is more a therapeutic escape from anxiety than the clarity of direction they really need.

Clarity of direction, or vocational clarity, is what college students need most. Without it, that cascade of negative states and its futile escape measure are bound to repeat and persist – until the more drastic decision to drop out is made.

With a clear sense of their calling (vocare), purpose, and direction in life, students (really, every human) can hold a bigger picture and take the longer view on their lives. With that larger context in mind, they are able to make better choices and commit themselves with greater confidence to paths of higher purpose and deeper meaning.

This implies, of course, that students are giving careful consideration to their own interests, talents, intelligence, curiosity and passion, and then making relevant lines of connection to potential careers and college programs that offer the most promising pathways for their ongoing learning, discovery, and development.

In my experience working with students, the most effective way of reaching vocational clarity is by means of an interest assessment and career exploration process.

By clarifying their interests and exploring careers where their top interests are centered in the work environment and professional responsibilities, students can begin visualizing viable futures that excite them.

Ideally, the interest assessment and career exploration process would be administered already in high school. Even earlier, and the profile of each student’s interests could be used to differentiate instruction and empower their unique talents and intelligence – focusing pedagogy not on how smart they are, but on how they are smart.

By the time they exit the K-12 program of compulsory education and step onto a college campus, the student’s growing vocational clarity would guide them in choosing the right program, picking the right major, securing internships, staying engaged and doing their best all the way through.

We can also confidently predict that after graduation they would enjoy work in fulfilling careers. Colleges would be doing their job, so students can find theirs.

*Individual college or university data will vary, falling slightly or farther on either side of this nationwide average in each case.