#41. Four-fold Wisdom

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This post is the latest in my attempts to share thoughts about the Judeo-Christian tradition in the context of cosmic, biological and cultural evolution. It's the first of five (hopefully short) posts offering an introduction to the four-fold aspects of Divine Wisdom, with a separate post on each.

In posts #38 (Exodus) and #39 (Hebrew Thought) I made the point that the Exodus event, the Great Escape from Egypt, marked the beginning of the western world's evolutionary worldview and that we owe our modern dynamic-evolutionary perspective to Hebrew thought. As the French philosopher Claude Tresmontant whom I mentioned in several recent posts observed, the realization of the Hebrew sages that it is the nature of whatever exists to be continually evolving was as significant in human history as the discovery of fire.

Post #40 (Wisdom/Sophia) deals with an additional aspect of Hebrew thought especially important to the Immense Transition humanity is currently undergoing: our movement away from the patriarchal worldview which we inherited from ancient classical culture. The Bible's wisdom literature offers help in moving our understanding of God beyond the older image of a harsh patriarchal divinity.

The accumulated insights of the Hebrew scriptures with regard to Divine Wisdom are especially important at this time in history because they are at the core of the Judeo-Christian tradition and thus of western society. While the wisdom perspective was lost after the Dark Ages, and so seems unfamiliar to us in our still-rationalist and patriarchal situation, it is in fact nothing less than the religious source of the western evolutionary view of cosmos and life on Earth, and so is of tremendous relevance to our continued cultural development at this crisis time in our history.

So far, Western culture has shied away from dealing with the meaning and purpose of our existence in a non-static and non-patriarchal context. But the wisdom literature provides us with just what we need: an in-depth understanding of the significance of our lives in an evolutionary perspective.

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While many religious traditions have a feminine divinity dating back to Neolithic times, in the Judeo-Christian tradition the image of Divine Wisdom seems to have emerged first among the Diaspora Jews living in Alexandria, Egypt, several centuries before the Common Era. It apparently emerged as a way of tempering the more rigid and harsh aspects of the distant and transcendent-only divinity of earlier Judaism. It is an important part of the evolution of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and more generally of western culture's understanding of God.

Jesus and the early Christians understood themselves in the wisdom context, but patriarchal perspectives within Christianity have kept it submerged for many centuries. It has appeared spontaneously, however, many times throughout Christian history. Byzantine art and architecture in the earlier Christian centuries are good examples. Other examples include the famous Lutheran shoemaker Jacob Boehm, the French Catholic saint Louis de Montfort, and the early 19th-century German Romanticist philosopher Frederick von Schelling.

An especially significant example of the spontaneous appearance of Divine Wisdom is the 20th-century religious thought of Russian Orthodoxy. Russian Orthodox thinkers led the way from the mid-1800s right up until the end of World War II. Some of their names may be familiar: Feodor Bukharev, Vladimir Soloviev and, especially, Sergius Bulgakov.

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The wisdom perspective is emerging once again in our day, as we move-- ever so slowly-- beyond the values and attitudes of patriarchy. It is especially relevant to the insights and perspectives of the New Cosmology because this dynamic religious understanding converges with the scientific-evolutionary view. It allows us to bring together our contemporary concerns for peace, social justice and environmental integrity into a non-static, non-dualistic, and non-patriarchal perspective.

As Tresmontant observed, violence and war are a distortion of the cosmic process. A recovery of the wisdom perspective which lies at the heart of our western culture can bring us back to valuing human life, individual persons and our relatedness to the Earth. In the wisdom literature, Divine Wisdom not only helps to fashion the world but also delights in it. "How happy I was with God's earth and its people," says Sophia in The Book of Proverbs.

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The loss of the wisdom perspective is especially clear in the variety of names and words we need to express these ideas. We're not yet comfortable with either the words or the insights presently available to us. Wisdom is called hochma in Hebrew, sophia in Greek, for example, but referred to as logos by the gospel writers.

In the old-fashioned language of the King James Bible, The Book of the Wisdom of Solomon says: "Wisdom reacheth from one end to another mightily: and sweetly doth she order all things." ("Sweetly" here has the old meaning of "skillfully" or "proficiently." We still have this meaning today, although it sounds to us like slang, as in "He has a sweet golf swing.")

When Wisdom herself speaks in Ecclesiasticus (also called The Book of Sirach), she says: "Then the creator of all things commanded [and he that made me, rested in my tabernacle. And he said to me]: Let thy dwelling be in Jacob, and thy inheritance in Israel, and take root in my elect."

It's not easy to connect that sentence with the words from the Prologue of the Gospel of John which say: "The logos pitched its tent (his tabernacle) among us." (That's the literal translation of the familiar words, "the Word became flesh and dwelled among us.")

So the archaic words and the old languages don't help as much as they might. One thing that can help us a lot, as I see it, is our contemporary quaternary understanding of human consciousness which I wrote about in post #29 (The Four-fold Mind). The quaternary perspective can help us to a far richer understanding of that Divine Wisdom which pitched its tent among us.

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Because of my long-time interest in the fact that our minds function in four different ways, I was delighted to find references to it in the work of Brad Blanton which I described in post #27 (Radical Honesty: The "How-to" of Ontogenesis). I found Blanton's work a help in understanding the Biogenetic Structuralist view of the stages of human development which I described in three earlier posts on ontogenesis, #23, #24 & #25.

As I said in post #29, "We may not know exactly what the mind is, but we do know that it's not something static: it's not so much a thing as a dynamic process. We also know-- although it's less commonly understood-- that it operates in four distinct ways."

As I also said in that post, "The basic idea of the four-fold mind comes from the human sciences, specifically psychology and cultural anthropology." In the Immense Transition we are undergoing-- from the static worldviews of rationalist science and dualistic religion to the dynamic, evolutionary and unitive perspectives of the New Cosmology-- the quaternary perspective is invaluable for our self-understanding.

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Both the Jungian view of the four-fold mind and the teachings connected with the Native American Medicine Wheel insist that, if we are to be complete persons with an integrated rather than lopsided consciousness, all four functions are needed. It is the lopsidedness of western culture which accounts for the great damage that patriarchal attitudes inflict on women, children and the environment, and is the cause of much of our racial and religious conflict.

So what I'm hoping to do in the next four posts is to bring together the various quaternary perspectives of Jung and the four directions of the Native American tradition with the wisdom of the wisdom literature of the Hebrews. I also want to link those views with the four traditional ways of being religious that I described in post #30 (Ways of Being Religious) and with German theologian Karl Rahner's existential analysis of human experience as self-presence, freedom, transcendence and grace that I described in post #34 (Talking About Us).

In Rahner's language we experience ourselves as aware, open, free and given; but those four words can only hint at the depth of Rahner's understanding, just as C. G. Jung's names-- Thinking, Feeling, Intuition and Sensation-- for the four functions of consciousness can only give us tags for the concepts and insights Jung provides. In contrast to these ideas and concepts, the Bible's wisdom literature provides us with images of Divine Wisdom, just as the Medicine Wheel teachings provide us with images of ways of being human.

And images touch us at a very deep level.

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As I mentioned above, I described the Biogenetic Structuralist understanding of the ontogenetic process in posts #23-25. It is a scientific understanding of the growth and development of human consciousness as it takes place in the context of a culture's cosmology; it happens via the three stages of belief, experience and participation. That participatory phase of conscious development is also referred to by the term "contemplation" and, perhaps surprisingly, it has the same meaning there that it does in a religious context.

In post #26 (Help from Uncle Louie), I described some of Thomas Merton's especially helpful ideas about religious experience available to us via images. He says, among other things, that it is "the result of personal experience at a deeper than rational level" and he calls it "the highest form of cognition." It brings us, he says, "into living participation with an experience of basic and universal human values."

While ideas provide us with understanding, something else results from images: communion. Images, says Merton, "put us in communion with our deepest selves." They "deepen our communion with the concrete" and they put us in communion with the real world: images "bring us to an awareness of our place in the scheme of things."

And they empower us to participate in the cosmic process: "images bring us into harmony with world and its energies," says Uncle Louie. In contrast to concepts, images give "a privileged status as a conscious participant in communion with the energies of the cosmos."

That's what the biblical images of Divine Wisdom can do for us. And they are especially valuable because they come from the same Hebrew source that provides us with humanity's initial insights about evolutionary development and creative newness.

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Back in post #34 (Talking About Us), I mentioned the work of a contemporary pioneer in matter-mind studies in the realm of the psychotherapy, Jungian analyst Michael Conforti. He observes in his book Field, Form, and Fate: Patterns in Mind, Nature, & Psyche that "The patterns of reality are continually being incarnate in space and time." I noted there that this insight sounds a lot like Karl Rahner's analysis that we experience ourselves as the "embodiment" of an "incomprehensible source." And it sounds a lot like the Russian theologian Sergius Bulgakov's phrase that we are "actualizations of the divine potentialities."

In chapter 9 of Conforti's book he notes that "every nation and culture has recognized the presence" of the archetypal energies of the cosmos (in the form of gods, spirits, powers) and that "we too need to find some way for including again in our notions of consciousness the relationship between the personal and the non-personally acquired transpersonal."

As he says, "In this way, we create the opportunity to reconnect to the generative matrix of human and global experience" and this "capacity to recognize and understand the meaning of archetypal fields offers important opportunities for resolving conflicts on the personal and collective, or global, levels."

"Clearly," says Conforti, "the time is ripe to apply our understanding of archetypal dynamics to global concerns." As I see it, the biblical images of wisdom at the heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition provide western culture the opportunity to do just that.

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The Bible's images of Divine Wisdom fall into four main groupings. They correspond, as I've said, with Jung's four-fold functions of consciousness, with the four traditional ways of being religious, with Rahner's analysis of human experience, and with the images of the Native American Medicine Wheel. My plan is to spell out one of these four groups of correspondences in each of the next four posts. (I'm well-aware that this is an ambitious project!)

If you're also feeling ambitious, there are innumerable web sites dealing with Sophia from every imaginable slant-- New Age, Feminist, Christian, Gnostic, Sophiological-- except, as far as I know, the quaternary perspective. Meanwhile, I want to mention three especially good books about Wisdom which you might like to know about.

For a strong academic perspective on the history of wisdom, there's Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza's In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (Herder & Herder, 1994). Fiorenza is a feminist Catholic theologian and Professor at Harvard Divinity School.

In terms of depth, breadth and vision, the best book I know of is The Future of Wisdom: Toward a Rebirth of Sapiential Christianity (Continuum, 2007) by Bruno Barnhart. Bruno is a monk at the Camaldolese Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur, California. I visited him there in the spring of 2002. [Bruno and his fellow monks were evacuated from their monastery during the recent fires in June-July 2008. So were the monks of the near-by Buddhist monastery at Tassajara. Both sets of buildings were still standing, last I heard. (Update: As of 22 July, the evacuations were lifted for both monasteries.)]

And for a wonderful collection of texts from the Bible's wisdom literature, with lots of practical down-to-earth ideas for making use of them, see Hal Taussig's Wisdom's Feast: Sophia in Study and Celebration (Harpercollins, 1989). It's coauthored with Susan Cole, Marian Ronan and Susan Cady. Taussig is a New Testament scholar, Near East historian and Methodist pastor. I heard him speak at few years ago at a Jungian gathering in Media, Pennsylvania. It's a sign of the times that he's been interviewed on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

In the Byzantine churches, before the scriptures are read aloud the deacon cries out, "Wisdom! Let us attend!" Bruno notes in The Future of Wisdom that it's as if the Earth itself is ripening in our time. "The time is ripe," Michael Conforti says. Indeed! Let us attend!

sam@macspeno.com

#29. The Four-fold Mind

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We may not know exactly what the mind is, but we do know that it's not something static: it's not so much a thing as a dynamic process. We also know-- although it's less commonly understood-- that it operates in four distinct ways.

This post is an expansion on the first of the three "snapshots" I presented in the previous post (#28 "Where I'm At") about the three different directions I want to move in next-- all, alas, at the same time! That first snapshot is a follow-up to post #27 where I used Brad Blanton's ideas about radical honesty to help in an understanding of the stages of personal development.

In that posting I said that "If you are familiar with the Jungian idea of the four-fold functions of consciousness or with the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator, you may have noticed that the progression in the levels of honesty goes from Sensing (in the belief stage) to the judgment functions of Thinking and Feeling (in the ego-experience stage) and to the image-making Intuitive function (in the most mature stage)."

For many years I've been interested in the fact that the mind functions in four different ways and I was delighted to find references to it in Blanton's work. The basic idea of the four-fold mind comes from the human sciences, specifically psychology and cultural anthropology, and is invaluable for our self-understanding.

A problem we have is that there are so many names for the mystery of personal self-awareness that it's difficult to express these ideas about the four-fold mind easily. But no matter what words we use to name the mystery which we are (self, soul, mind, gnosis, psyche), the basic idea is that consciousness is quaternary.

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In an evolutionary context, we can put this concept in the form of a question: What is the universe doing when it expresses itself via the workings of the human brain-- the most complex arrangement of living matter we know-- which it doesn't do when it takes the form of animals, plants and non-living things?

In her comments (which are found at the end of post #25), reader "Mollie" describes what she calls "some things I continue to wonder about." One has to do with the question, What is consciousness? The quaternary perspective goes a long way to answering that question. 

Certainly it doesn't provide any final answers to the mystery of our personal self-awareness, but understanding the fact that consciousness is four-fold helps a lot.

If it's unfamiliar to you, the idea that we have a four-fold mind may sound a bit gimmicky at first, but it's not. In fact, there are innumerable implications for our self-understanding offered by the idea that consciousness is quaternary. And they are especially helpful in our contemporary situation, in the Immense Transition we are undergoing from the static worldviews of rationalist science and dualistic religion to the dynamic, evolutionary and unitive perspectives of the New Cosmology.

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The famous Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung spelled out the functions of consciousness in the earliest years of the 20th century. It's often said that if he had done nothing else he would still have a significant place in the history of psychology. (Needless to say, with his discoveries of the place of symbols and archetypes in the unconscious psyche and his efforts in bringing those previously disdained aspects of human nature into the realm of science, he did a lot more.)

Jung's ideas about the four-fold mind have come into common use specifically in terms of the suitability of various personality types for job placement, but the emphasis there is on which one or two of the four functions is strongest in an individual.

While knowing what our strengths are and making use of them in our personal life and in earning a living are of tremendous practical importance, that emphasis for the most part misses the idea that all four functions are needed throughout our life-time if we are to be complete persons with an integrated rather than lopsided consciousness.

And it's that lopsidedness which in western culture accounts for the great damage that the patriarchal mind inflicts on women, children and the environment and is the cause of much of our racial and religious conflict.

I'm aware that that's a big claim; I hope to talk about it later in this post and in several future postings. My main point here is that, in the Immense Transition currently taking place as a result of the new Universe Story of contemporary science, becoming aware of quaternary consciousness is of major significance not just for individuals but for all western society and for humanity as a whole.

As is often the case, however, it's not a matter of discovering something new so much as re-claiming something which has been part of all humanity's ancient cultural traditions.

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Jung, in fact, didn't discover something which had been previously unknown outside of western culture. An understanding of the mind as four-fold can be found in many ancient traditions; an especially interesting and useful example is the teachings connected with the Native American Medicine Wheel.

One reason the Native American teachings are especially helpful is because Jung used German names for the four functions and, while they have become a standard part of the jargon of contemporary psychology, they don't translate well into easily understood English. 

None of the Jungian terms for the four functions of the mind-- Sensation, Thinking, Feeling and Intuition-- means quite what those English words usually mean.

In contrast, the Medicine Wheel teachings use animal imagery. And they relate the four ways our mind works to space and time: the four directions, the seasons of the year, the times of day and even the flow of time, past, present and future. It's a very different perspective.

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An especially important emphasis in the teachings of the Medicine Wheel is that they offer a better perspective on the understanding of our need for integrating the four functions than does the modern use of personality types for job placement.

On the other hand, the Medicine Wheel teachings lack something which is more clear in Jungian presentations: a recognition that the four functions actually are two pairs of opposite mental activities. One pair has to do with our perception of the world and the other pair has to do with making judgments about what we have perceived. Sensation and Intuition are forms of perception, while Thinking and Feeling are evaluative activities.

In the broadest sense, perception is the answer the conscious mind gets when we ask the question, "What's there?" And judgment is our response to what we perceive to be there: "Are we accurate? And how does what's there-- or our perception of what's there-- affect us?"

If these thoughts remind you of my many references in previous postings to the Biogenetic Structuralist terms operational environment and cognized environment, you're right. But expanding on those connections would be much too distracting just now; I hope to do it in a future post. What I want to do here is to spell out-- with help from the Native American imagery-- what I'd like to think of as the ABCs of the Jungian functions of consciousness.

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Perception functions. When we try to perceive the environment outside ourselves we can look either at the details or at the whole picture. But we can't do both at once. It's the familiar distinction between seeing the forest or seeing the trees. Jung named seeing the trees (the details) "Sensation" and seeing the forest (the whole picture) "Intuition."

The White Buffalo of the North. Native American imagery puts the Sensation function at the north of the Medicine Wheel, evoking the cold of winter and the darkness of midnight. Its image is the White Buffalo. 

For the Plains tribes, the buffalo was the main source of food and tools needed for survival, just as the focus of the Sensation function is the here and now details of our existence, whatever is needed for our safety and survival. A good example of strong "white buffalo" personalities are medical people who, often more than the rest of us, can handle the immediate details of life and death situations efficiently. 

But any persons devoted to the service to others on behalf of life are good examples.

The Black Bear of the West. The Medicine Wheel puts the Intuitive function in the west, evoking autumn and evening. Its image is the Black Bear, the traditional native image for shamanic persons, those concerned with the future and its possibilities and for the meaning of our existence. The contrast between the White Buffalo and Black Bear functions is great: strong Intuitive types tend easily to get lost in details while strong Sensation types, on the other hand, hardly understand the meaning of "meaning."

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Judgment functions. In contrast to the perception functions, the other pair of consciousness functions is evaluative. Once we have consciously perceived something as present in our environment, we make a judgment about either the correctness of that perception or about its value. And again, we can't do both at once. Jung named judging our perceptions for accuracy "Thinking" and judging whether what we think we perceive is good or bad for us "Feeling." (That's "good or bad" not in an ethical sense but in terms of our safety and survival; what's being evaluated is whether the perceived situation is dangerous and to be avoided or useful or helpful and thus to be pursued. Again, it's much like the idea that the cognized environment is an evolutionary survival mechanism, as I spelled out in post #13.)

The Gold Eagle of the East. On the Medicine Wheel, the Thinking function is located in the East, evoking springtime and morning, new beginnings and the sharp piercing rays of the rising sun. Its image is the Golden Eagle, who flies high in the sky and is able to see over large areas. Thinking types love that long view of spatial areas and the sequential flow of time from past to present and future.

The Green Mouse of the South. The Medicine Wheel locates the Feeling function in the south, evoking the warmth of summer and midday. Its image is the Green Mouse who, living close to the earth, can't see very far but loves to hold on to everything from the past. As packrats, green mouse personalities have a tough time letting go of things, but they value relationships and the connectedness. And again, the contrast is great. Strong Thinking types like to operate from a distance while strong Feeling types can hardly get enough of "togetherness."

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That's the ABCs of my thoughts about the four-fold mind. I am well aware that neither Jungians nor caretakers of the Medicine Wheel would approve of it. (It's as superficial as saying that "Hamlet is a story about a guy who goes crazy and kills a lot of people." Needless to say, there's a lot more to it.) But those ABCs are a start. They provide me with helpful tools for talking about the convergence of science and religion from a significant, if unfamiliar, slant.

If these ideas are new to you and you're wondering what your own strengths might be, there are many personality type inventories available free on-line. A good site is Personality Pathways. Jung's own presentation is found in Volume 6 of his collected works, published separately as Psychological Types (Princeton University Press, 1976). 
And one of my favorite books containing Medicine Wheel teachings is Seven Arrows by Hyemeyohsts Storm (Harper & Row, 1972). 

References both to Jung's work and to the Medicine Wheel teachings abound on the internet.

Native American teachings are only one example of humanity's cultural traditions where images are used to express the functions of the four-fold mind. We can see them depicted in many places: two less familiar examples are the fierce gods and spirits pictured in Tibetan mandalas and the spirit-powers known as the Guardians of the Gates evoked by the practitioners of Wicca at the start of their ceremonies. An interesting fact is that once we become tuned-in to the idea of the four-fold functions of consciousness we begin to find expressions of them everywhere; after a while we start seeing everything in terms of fours-- an experience which one religious thinker I especially like, Bruno Barnhart, refers to jokingly as the "mandalic affliction."

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One of the main reasons I see an awareness of quaternary consciousness as being so valuable in the contemporary transition to the New Cosmology is that it greatly enriches our understanding of how personal consciousness is linked to the physical cosmos.

Jung thought, for example, that the four-fold nature of the mind may have its origins in the structure of the carbon atom, the element on which all life on Earth is based. The main chemical components of living cells (such as proteins, fats and nucleic acids) are all large carbon-based molecules whose structures are possible because of the carbon atom's unique four-fold bonding capacity.

Even if Jung's hunch about the carbon atom's four-fold bonding structure isn't accurate, it's on the right track in the sense that that the quaternary structure of the conscious mind is an expression at the third level of physical complexity of the cosmic process.

Neurological research since Jung's time makes the matter-mind link much more definite. The brain's four main lobes (the Frontal Lobe, the Parietal Lobe, the Occipital Lobe and the Temporal Lobe) each have somewhat different activities which correlate with Jung's perception and judgment functions. I'm still in "Neurology 101" with regard to expressing clearly the complicated details involved but I hope to be able to spell them out in a future post.

A neurological understanding of functions of the four main brain areas has many religious implications; especially important among them are why our consciousness seems to need to attribute the existence of things to a creative source and why we feel the need for a purpose to our personal existence.

I see these neurological findings as one of the most important understandings of contemporary science which can help us move beyond the dead-end limits of religious dualism and scientific rationalism.

They also help us to understand the connection between ourselves as individuals and the relational or communal aspect of our personal consciousness-- to what I've called in previous posts "the other half of person." Having a good sense of the scientific basis for our communal nature is especially important for dealing successfully with pressing contemporary problems such as social justice, environmental awareness and cultural conflicts.

For many centuries, Scholastic Philosophy was called "the handmaid of theology." I think nowadays it's scientific research-- especially in areas such as neurological studies and cultural anthropology-- which is becoming the "handmaid" of a more informed religious understanding of the human situation. I see the quaternary worldview as a major tool in the contemporary convergence of religion and science.

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One of the most significant things the quaternary perspective allows us to see is that in both its religious and scientific forms, the Western mind is inherently lopsided.

Patriarchal consciousness, whether in the form of scientific rationalism or religious dualism, chooses Thinking over Feeling and Sensation over Intuition. At the same time, it ignores the Feeling function, denies-- when it can-- the very existence of the Intuitive function, and dismisses both as "feminine."

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I think those two sentences make up a mini-summary of western culture's major problems!

So even though the concept of a four-fold mind may seem a bit odd at first, it quickly becomes clear, at least to some of us, that we need to understand the quaternary nature of consciousness if we are to become whole as individuals and as a global community.

It's obvious that none of the four functions is better than the others and that both functions in each pair are necessary if we are to be whole and complete, and not lopsided persons.

It's because the Western world got stuck-- in the Sensation function's focus on details and the Thinking function's delight in distinctions-- that Western culture is having such a tough time moving beyond the rational-only perspectives of early science and a thousand years of dualistic religion.

Western-patriarchal culture misses out on the Black Bear's perception of wholeness and on the Green Mouse's valuing of relatedness; in our lopsided ego-centric cultural situation, this makes the communal-social nature of our selves-- on which social justice and ecological sensitivity depend-- difficult to grasp.

But as I've said-- and it's my main point here-- an understanding of the quaternary nature of consciousness, based on Jung's work and on pre-scientific expressions of those same ideas, such as the Medicine Wheel teachings, can help us to link our understanding of ourselves as individuals and as social-communal persons with the dynamic evolution of the universe.

Understanding that we have a four-fold mind not only roots us in the Earth. It also allows us to see that our personal creative participation in the Earth's cultural development is nothing less than the on-going activity of the cosmic evolutionary process.

And that, as I understand it, is the basis for any viable contemporary spirituality.

sam@macspeno.com

#27. Radical Honesty: The How-to of Ontogenesis

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A Quick Review: My previous four postings have been about ontogenesis, a technical word for our personal growth and development as it is understood from the neurological and anthropological perspectives of Biogenetic Structuralism. The emphasis has been on what I call in post #22 the "other half of person": the social, communal and relational aspects of the mystery of our personal consciousness. 

This is in contrast to a dozen or so of my earlier posts which deal with the physical connection between person and cosmos; that is, with the link between the matter of the universe and ourselves as persons.

Entry #23 offers an overview of the Biogenetic Structuralist understanding of personal development as it takes place in the communal-social context, and next three posts (#24, #25 and #26) spell out its three main stages-- both from the perspectives of the human sciences and from an essentially religious view "with help from Uncle Louie."

One of my primary concerns has been to show that myth, ritual and symbol are understood in both perspectives to be the means or tools by which we are empowered-- in the highest phase of our conscious development-- to participate in the activity of the universe. Although long dismissed conventionally because of Western culture's "disenchantment of the world," myth, ritual and symbol are critically relevant to the emerging New Cosmology.

Along with the evolutionary worldview, myth, ritual and symbol have been of life-long personal interest and I hope to share further thoughts about them in future posts. But that's not the topic here. In this post I want to talk about something more fundamental: how we grow through the earlier stages of ontogenetic development to reach that mature stage of personal growth where participation in the cosmic process via myth, ritual and symbol is the norm.

Biogenetic Structuralists (as I described in post #25) and Thomas Merton (as I described in post #26) both refer to the third phase of ontogenesis as "contemplative experience" and "the highest form of cognition." Both also understand it to be nothing less than the mature stage of our personal development where we become creative contributors to the evolution of the universe.

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As I said in post #25, the static worldview of previous centuries has been so strong and so persistent that we're simply not used to thinking about our personal growth in any context, let alone trying to make sense of it in terms of ideas such as "cosmology" and "ontogenesis."

But at the same time, the desire for personal growth and development is one of our most basic human experiences: even two and three-year olds talk about "When I get big" and "When I grow up." Ontogenetic development is in our genes; it's one of the primal forces of the cosmic process which we embody.

So the question is: If everything about us wants to grow, what holds us back? What prevents us from achieving the highest and most mature form of personal consciousness?

In the most basic sense, our personal participation in the cosmic evolutionary process begins when our neuro-gnostic conscious awareness first dawns in the embryonic bundle of nerve tissue when we are still in our mother's womb. It continues beyond birth through the stages of acquired beliefs in childhood and our ego-experiences in adolescence and young adulthood, to the full blooming of our personal mystery in the third, contemplative, phase of ontogenetic development.

At least it can do that. Obviously not all of us make it to that most mature stage of personal development which many spiritual traditions call "wisdom consciousness."

What prevents us? What holds us back?

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If we can compare our development to the growth of a seed, it's clear that a seedling doesn't just sit there; it has to do something internally to continue its development into a healthy plant and to eventually reach its full-blooming mature stage. We, too, can't just sit back waiting for growth in awareness to occur; it doesn't happen automatically. As conscious beings, we have to consciously contribute to our conscious growth. It is, in fact, a major part of our essential human dignity that we have a role to play in our own personal development. "We make ourselves," as the famous anthropologist and archeologist V. Gordon Childe expressed it back in the 1930s.

This is one of the places where the biblical idea found Luke 19:26 makes good practical sense: "Those who have much will receive more, and those who have little will lose even that."

Not much growth in consciousness can happen if we're clueless. So it's important that we understand clearly what it is we have to do in order to continue to grow beyond the stages of embryonic awareness and childhood beliefs to the more mature ego-experience of adolescence and to the fully mature stage of personal participation in the cosmic process.

The question isn't just, "What holds us back?" It's also, "What do we personally need to contribute to our development?"

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The best answer I know to that question comes, not surprisingly, from the human sciences: in this case from the world of psychotherapy. It's spelled out especially well in the writings of Washington DC psychotherapist Brad Blanton, specifically in his book Radical Honesty (Starhawk Publications, 2005).

I discovered Blanton's work while reading a newsletter of Rowe Center, a human potential conference center in Western Massachusetts with ties to the Unitarian Church. The description of a weekend workshop he was offering caught my attention, so I got a copy from my local library of his Radical Honesty and recognized, to my delight, that among other things it is a practical "how-to" book for moving through the developmental stages of belief, experience and participation.

Blanton doesn't mention Biogenetic Structuralism, but many of his ideas fit well with its evolutionary and anthropological perspectives. He emphasizes, for example, that "unity is in the nature of things" and "we are each creators of the universe out of our own being"-- an especially good way to express the neurological jargon phase "cognized environment." And he describes his work as "social psychotherapy," stressing that personal development takes place in a social-political context-- an especially good way to express what anthropology means by a culture's "cosmology."

Blanton even uses the same odd term ("the being"), just as Biogenetic Structuralism does, for "person" or "consciousness." It's an odd usage which takes some getting used to; but if you have been reading my previous four blog posts, you're already used to it. You are, at least, familiar with the term "ontogenesis," which literally means "the development of the being." My point here is that Blanton's work offers some very clear ideas about what each of us must contribute to our personal ontogenesis.

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Blanton trained with Gestalt Therapy founder Fritz Pearls and started the first training program in Gestalt Therapy in 1971 in the Washington DC area, where he has been a psychotherapist in private practice for many years. He has written a half-dozen books, some translated into several languages, and he offers weekend workshops and eight-day conferences in the United States, Europe, Canada and Mexico. As a social reformer he has occasionally been arrested and spent time in jail due to his anti-war activities, all of which he says contributes to his ongoing education.

Blanton's central idea is that the primary cause of stress, depression and anger is "living in a story and lying to maintain it." Lying wears us out; and anxiety and burn-out can result in the severest kinds of psychological illness. What we have to do in order to move through the stages of our personal development is to tell the truth: we have to speak honestly about ourselves.

It sounds too easy, even simplistic, but when we hear what he's saying he is in fact providing the details for what might be called "the practice of ontogenesis." He's talking about what holds us back from personal development and what we need to do if our growth toward maturity is to continue rather than come to a premature dead end.

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Blanton's basic understanding is that what holds us back is shame, guilt and embarrassment.

We feel guilty, for example, that we frequently and consistently violate the moral principles which have been imposed on us in the belief stage of personal development. And because we attempt to hide that fact, the result is stress: everything from mild anxiety to crippling, even suicidal, depression.

Blanton's main point is quite simple: via the imposition of cultural norms, the neurognostic self is made to feel guilty for being adventurous and creative, and the only healing possible is to acknowledge what we have avoided and kept hidden. We become free-- from the stress imposed by cultural beliefs and personal ego-experiences and for more mature personal development-- simply by telling the truth. Being radically honest about ourselves is the only way to grow as a person.

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Obviously I can't do an adequate job in presenting Blanton's ideas here; I hope you might read Radical Honesty yourself. But I'm going to present a brief overview of some of his basic concepts, focusing on his understanding of what we need to do in order to move beyond the earlier stages of belief and ego-experience. This will provide, I hope, a sufficient context for an understanding of what he sees as the three levels of honesty, which I find remarkably parallel to the three stages of personal development that I've been writing about in recent blog entries. Blanton's three levels of honesty would seem to provide a kind of praxis-- a practical how-to-- for our ontogenetic development.

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Overview. For the sake of our life's survival, we need to make use of both the beliefs passed on to us in childhood and our personal ego-experiences in adolescence. We can't do without them. But due to insecurity, those childhood beliefs and adolescent ego-experiences can become a conventional routine of moralistic principles, rules and roles which lead to stress: suffocation, suffering and grief. It's especially difficult to get out of adolescence; we can easily end up living in an imaginary world-- what Blanton calls the "story"-- in which we hide and lie to make ourselves look good and to defend ourselves against shame and embarrassment. If we get stuck in adolescence, we become victims of our own mind, trapped in the prison of our own immaturity.

The only way out is grounding, says Blanton: managing our indoctrination by being honest.

Instead of living in an imaginary world, where we have to lie and hide to avoid the reality of our shame, guilt and embarrassment, we can make use of our image-making power to free ourselves from that mental jail. We have to go beyond first-stage beliefs and second-stage adolescent ego-experiences if we are not just to survive but also to thrive. Rather than being insecure, we can trust the world and ourselves; the alternative to insecurity is to trust our body and the material laws of the universe, so that we become grounded in the here and now.

This creative transformation leads to health, wholeness and meaningfulness: instead of being victims, trapped in a mental prison, we can use of our minds to become artists. But it's only radical honesty that can free us for a creative and self-reliant life.

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Level One. The first level of honesty is being honest about facts. With regard to the belief stage of our development, we need to be honest about the simple fact that we have not lived up to the ethical and moral principles passed on to us. It isn't so much our violation of those principles that is the problem; rather, what causes stress and anxiety is hiding that fact from others.

Blanton gives an example of a woman from a traditional religious family who secretly had an abortion at the age of 20. Guilt, shame and embarrassment prevented her from sharing that information with anyone for many years. She was in therapy for severe anxiety, and understood that she needed to stop hiding the fact of her past life from her parents. She tried many times to inform them, and only at the age of 35 was she finally able to do so.

Her father's reaction was, "Oh, thank God." He said, "We knew you had been wanting to tell us something for a long time; we thought that you must have a fatal illness." Note that the woman didn't need to tell anyone and everyone about the abortion, but only those from whom she had to work so hard to keep it a secret. It's the effort at lying, at hiding the data and living in a false story, that results in crippling stress, anxiety and grief.

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Level Two. The second level of honesty relates to adolescent ego-experience: it means being honest about our post-childhood thoughts and feelings.

"Thoughts and feelings" may sound trivial, and being honest about them may (again) seem simplistic, but we need to keep in mind that Blanton is talking about thoughts and feelings as conceptual judgments and emotional evaluations which have resulted from the ego-experiences of our adolescence. It's the effort it takes to hide our personal judgments and emotions that results in stress and even hatred-- just as does the effort to hide the facts about our past selves.

I don't need to give an example here; we all can provide numerous examples of overgrown adolescents who can't stop judging and criticizing themselves and for that reason have become super-critical and moralistic with regard to everyone else. Blanton says that the better we get at playing hide-and-seek during adolescence the harder it is to grow up, and that many end up trapped in perpetual adolescence.

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Level Three. At the third level of honesty we need to speak the truth not about the facts of the past or about our adolescent conceptions or emotional values but about our own self-images. If the first level of honesty looks to the past, this third level is more future-focused. Having a picture of ourselves-- as we are now, or as we want to be in the future-- isn't itself a problem; what is, is the effort needed when-- out of shame, guilt or embarrassment-- we try to keep that picture of ourselves hidden from others.

This may be the hardest level of honesty to understand. Most of us recognize that we need to grow up, to get over childhood. But in our contemporary adolescent culture, it's not easy even to see that we need to get out of adolescence. And Blanton says the odds are against us; the great majority never get beyond the stage of adolescent pretense because we use up our energies in hiding our self-image from others.

He gives an example of adolescent pretense that can be seen in cold weather at any street corner school bus stop: "Many teenagers would rather look cool, while freezing to death waiting for the school bus, than wear a warm jacket that is not as 'in' as the shirt they are wearing." We may laugh at that example, but we need to keep in mind that many people are still trying to look cool in their 30s, 40s and 50s. (If that seems like an exaggeration, just think of all the online ads that come in daily for replica watches and penis-enlargers.)

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Isn't it amazing that to get out of adolescence we have to share with others what most embarrasses us about ourselves! And that sharing our self-image-- in contrast to putting on a show-- is such hard work. Blanton says it "feels like dying."

I'm aware that my brief overview of these ideas is extremely superficial and I hope, as I said above, that you might read Blanton's book yourself. It's full of treasures. It contains, for example, the best description I've ever seen of the Buddhist understanding of annata (the no-self) and also the best description I know of what Christians call "grace" (as in Amazing Grace).

Another "treasure" is the quaternary perspective which shows up in Blanton's presentation of the three levels of honesty. If you are familiar with the Jungian idea of the four-fold functions of consciousness or with the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator, you may have noticed that the progression in the levels of honesty goes from Sensing (in the belief stage) to the judgment functions of Thinking and Feeling (in the ego-experience stage) and to the image-making Intuitive function (in the most mature stage). This quaternary perspective allows us a wholistic understanding of conscious awareness that is invaluable for our self-understanding. I hope talk about it in some detail in a future post.

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I have several additional thoughts about Blanton's work which I also want to share. They don't seem to fit elsewhere in my brief overview, but they seem important enough not to leave out.

One thought is that, as Blanton puts it, "freedom is a psychological achievement." He mentions in his Introduction that according to Hugh Thomas, author of A History of the World (Harpercollins, 1982), the greatest medical advance in history has been garbage collection!

And Blanton says that the greatest psychological advance in history (which he optimistically sees as "just around the corner") will involve a similar awareness of our need to clean up our communal world. (Never before has our global need been so obvious to achieve a cleaned-up environment and a cleaned-up psycho-social situation-- especially in terms of our political and religious leadership. Obvious, at least, to everyone beyond the belief stage of personal development. So Blanton's optimism may not be as unfounded as it first might seem.)

A second interesting point is the question that probably comes to each of us when we are thinking about the various levels of honesty: Where am I? Which level best describes "where I'm at" in terms of my growth and development? Blanton offers a clear criterion: "The sound of freedom is laughter."

A third interesting point is Blanton's comment that underlying all of our stress, depression and grief, there also may be found a layer of joy. Freedom, laughter and joy! Those words don't often appear in science writing-- even in the literature of the human sciences.

Finally, in sharing my thoughts via this blog about the convergence of science and religion, I have consistently tried to provide examples of how similar ideas, although usually expressed quite differently, can be found in the two very different perspectives of contemporary science and religion. For this posting on the "how-to" of personal development, a religious expression is readily available similar to the understanding from the human sciences of our need for radical honesty to grow and develop. Most likely it has already come to your mind.

"Don't be afraid. Speaking honestly will set you free." John 8:32

sam@macspeno.com