The most significant accomplishment for any human being is to become fully human.
That may sound redundant to some, and like a downgrade to others, but those who are most in touch with the human adventure have long insisted that we are still a long way from the evolutionary ideal of our species. And they’ve been saying this for a few thousand years.
By evolutionary ideal they mean something akin to what the philosopher Aristotle named “entelechy,” the intrinsic aim of development which is evident in all living things. With every species of life above the microbes, an individual’s development advances to maturity through formal stages and transitional phases of growth. Reaching maturity involves more than just getting bigger, of course, as numerous capacities for survival, self-control, reproduction, intelligence, creativity, and self-awareness gradually awaken and come “online.”
Our human “growth chart” tracks four distinct kinds of intelligence:
- a visceral intelligence (VQ) that regulates the internal state and health of our body
- an emotional intelligence (EQ) that manages our engagement with the changing situations of life
- a rational intelligence (RQ) that constructs and regularly refreshes our model of reality, and
- a spiritual intelligence (SQ) that orients us within the unity of existence and grounds us in being
That last one, our spiritual intelligence, is also the last to come online in a fully conscious way – if it comes online at all. Its awakening depends on the successful development of the others, for they are needed to provide the steady platform of a self-conscious identity (ego), from which we might leap into the unity of existence or drop into the ground of being.
The tragedy of our human experience, then, is tightly bound to the question of how well-established we are as self-conscious (and self-aware) individuals.
My diagram illustrates the dual-yet-complementary trajectories of successful development, in the self-actualization of our human nature and our self-transcendence into the higher wholeness of things: fulfillment and wellbeing. According to the special “language” of our soul (SQ), this duality is paradoxical – both/and, yin and yang, not separate things coming together but an essential polarity manifesting “the Tao that cannot be named” (Lao Tzu).
Whether we are speaking of the actualization or transcendence of self, a healthy formation of ego is critical to our spiritual fulfillment and wellbeing.
Let’s follow this dual trajectory without consideration of any complications, impediments, or failures it will ordinarily confront along the way. Only with such an abstract and depersonalized picture in mind, can we see with accuracy what unfolds inevitably for all of us.
Consciousness begins life fully immersed in the visceral intelligence of our animal nature. The urgencies of survival (breathing, ingesting, excreting, sleeping) are all that matters. Even into the first months and years of life, our primary concern – although this is almost entirely unconscious – is with getting what we need to stay alive and safe. Attentive and provident caretakers enabled our nervous system to settle into a baseline default mode called security: We have what we need to live, to love, and to grow.
This baseline security served as the “solid ground,” emotionally speaking, from which we could reach out, explore, and connect to the reality outside our skin. A literally sensational realm of delights and dangers quickly synced up with our primal sensitivities to pleasure and pain, shaping our behavior along a path of general good feeling, or happiness.
At this stage of development our emotional intelligence was forming memories and making connections that supported a positive sense of self and an optimistic outlook on life.
With a neurotically stable (VQ) and emotionally balanced (EQ) identity-in-formation, we were enabled to construct a mental model of reality that would further support our intellectual need for orientation and meaning. Our rational intelligence (RQ) is free to do this all-important and uniquely human work of making meaning only by virtue of the emotional balance provided from below. And with all three of these distinct threads of intelligence fully aligned, the beliefs we hold and the world they compose can be flexible, reality-oriented, and always open to update.
A truly meaningful world is one that encourages forays into the present mystery of reality, which is by defintion beyond belief and perfectly meaningless.
Such positive and healthy development, whether aided or impeded by the temporal conditions of our unique family history and social situation, is impelled by the “entelechy” of our evolutionary ideal as a human being. Much in the way we might say that an apple tree, by its nature, intends to produce apples, there is a similar intention in our own nature towards fulfillment and wellbeing, to actualize our full potential and transcend ourselves for a higher wholeness.
Each of us should be able to put a pin on the growth chart identifying where we are along this dual trajectory of human evolution. Just before we do that, however, let’s do a reality check. I earlier acknowledged that things don’t always go so well.
To be honest, I think we need to admit that they never go without a hitch – and that’s true of anyone who has ever lived.
While our visceral intelligence drives us to seek security, where we have enough of what we need to be safe, healthy, and strong, our taller powers and family environment might have been far from provident. Instead of a default state of security, our nervous system was calibrated to these unfavorable conditions in what we know as anxiety. Relaxing into our life just wasn’t an option. A chronic vigilance, nervous tension, and a deep distrust in reality became our basic mode of consciousness.
When anxiety (VQ) is taken up with us to the level of relationships and social interactions, we try desperately to manipulate others into making us feel secure. We latch on and grip down emotionally (EQ), begging or warning them not to leave us or let us down. Whereas our emotional intelligence ought to be connecting us in healthy bonds of intimacy and affiliation, instead it gets entangled in neurotic attachment.
For all the manipulation it requires, and with the unavoidable conflict it generates, any relationship forged around insecure attachment simply cannot support the happiness we seek.
And to the degree we are locked inside dysfunctional relationships, hanging on with our last hope, the beliefs we hold about ourselves, others, and the world around us are correspondingly small, rigid, and unrealistic. When a belief we may once have held comes instead to take our mind hostage, it becomes a conviction. It is now the “only way” of seeing something, the absolute and unquestionable truth of the matter. Our rational intelligence (RQ), which would normally build and routinely revise its model of reality, has been made a prisoner (a convict) of its own invention.
If we happen to be caught in that self-reinforcing conspiracy of anxiety, attachment, and conviction – which, if you’ve been with me so far, can rightly be named the “spiritual pathology” of our species – there is one place it will predictably lead: depression.
On the way there, we are likely to cause or contribute to all kinds of damage, suffering, and violence; but that is where we are headed. Very aptly described, depression (a condition of being “pressed down” or made low) is where the human spirit languishes and may eventually die.
In that low place we feel hapless (“this is happening to me”), helpless (“there is nothing I can do”), and hopeless (“there’s no way out or through”).
But of course there is a way through, and it begins as we get grounded again and find our center.
