#55. "All we have to do..."

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We take care of what we value. That's the main point of the very different thinkers, Jakob Wolf and Heather Eaton, whose ideas I described in my two most recent posts.

This post is a followup. It's about the importance of personal experience in taking care of the Earth in this time of environmental crisis. From their distinctive perspectives and in very different languages these two thinkers agree that neither western science, with its intentionally rationalist thought, nor the western religious tradition, with its disdain for the Earth, can help much.

As I described in post #53 (Bridging the Gap), from a philosophical point of view, Professor Jakob Wolf of the University of Copenhagen says we need a third thing. He calls it the "phenomenological apprehension of intelligent design in nature."

He makes clear why science can't provide us with a sense of what's important to us. That's simply not what science is about. It's neither what science was invented for, back in the time of the ancient Greeks, nor what science has been doing for the last five centuries.

As I described in post #54 (We Take Care of What We Value), Dr. Heather Eaton of St. Paul University in Ottawa comes from another starting point, but she too agrees that neither science nor religion are sufficient in themselves.

"The ecological crisis has not made much of a dent in the western religious consciousness," says Dr. Eaton. "The Christian tradition has not been able to deal effectively with evolution." The insight that the earth is our home is "an enormous challenge to our ecologically dysfunctional patriarchal religious traditions."

What's needed in this time of environmental crisis, Dr. Eaton says, is the coming together of humanity's ancient religious traditions with the much more recent evolutionary cosmology of 20th-century science. It's their convergence that we need.

Why? Because "we take care of what we value" and what leads us to ethical responsibility is personal experience.

Whether we call it "the apprehension of intelligent design" or "the experience of the sacred"-- or use more familiar words like "reverence," "mysticism," or "contemplation"-- it's that experience that we need if we are to contribute to the healing of the Earth.

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Probably most of us don't respond positively to Professor Wolf's term, the "phenomenological apprehension of intelligent design"-- even though he makes very clear that it's nothing more than a philosophical name for the personal experience of nature's intelligibility.

It's difficult to relate to the idea well, as he says, because the term has been "compromised" by Christian fundamentalists in the USA who use it in support of their creationist views.

For many of us, Dr. Eaton's words speak more strongly when she says that to heal the Earth we need to recover the age-old basis of all religious experience "in the experience of the sacred."

But most of us aren't much more comfortable with a term like "the sacred"-- or even with the traditional religious words such as "contemplation" and "mysticism"-- than we are with Dr. Wolf's "phenomenological apprehension of nature's intelligibility."

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What about "wonder and awe"?

Those are good words. I think we need to hold on to them; they may be the best we have to talk about the experience of the sacred.

But even "wonder and awe" has been compromised in our day by the similar-sounding phrase "shock and awe" used by America's political and military leaders to describe what they hoped would happen when they invaded Iraq.

When it comes to "awe," our only everyday use is the exclamation even my five-year-old grandson says often, "Awesome!" And while we know what the experience of "wonder" is, we also know that it's not what we mean when we describe something as "wonderful."

"Sacred" is the one word we still use to describe things that are important to us. When we hear something mocked or treated more lightly than it should be, for example, we tend to say (or maybe just think quietly to ourselves), "Is nothing sacred?"

Clearly, we use "sacred" to refer to things that are of value to us. So our experience of the Earth-- as sacred-- is important for its healing simply because, as both Dr. Eaton and Dr. Wolf each in their own way say, "we take care of what we value."

In this time of environmental crisis, their point is a very practical one.

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A major problem, however, is that in our culture the experience of wonder and awe is usually considered a purely personal matter. It is "acceptable as a private experience," says Dr. Eaton, "yet it is often belittled, ignored or dismissed as socially relevant."

Obviously it's not a purely personal matter, however-- not if dealing well with the environmental crisis depends on it. Dr. Eaton points this out even in the very title of her paper: sacred awe and wonder is at the nexus of religion, ecology and politics.

As I mentioned in the previous post, her paper, "This Sacred Earth: At the Nexus of Religion, Ecology and Politics," isn't readily available in print form, but she gave me an OK to share it with friends. If you would like a copy, send me a note: sam@macspeno.com.

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One of the main reasons why the experience of the sacred isn't readily understood in our culture is because, as Dr. Eaton says, "the primary mode of knowing in Western societies is analytic" and, as a way of being aware of reality, "analysis has its limits."

The experience of awe and wonder is a different kind of awareness.

The fact that there are different kind of conscious awareness is something I've talked about in many previous posts. Because there are four distinct kinds of conscious knowing, this perspective is often referred to as a quaternary or mandalic understanding. I described it in detail in post #29 (The Four-fold Mind).

I've made use of it (in post #30) to talk about the traditional ways of being religious, in a half-dozen posts (#40 through #45) to describe the Sophia/Wisdom perspectives at the heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and (in posts #35 and #36) to help make sense of the many aspects of the Immense Transition we are presently experiencing.

These four functions of the conscious mind were spelled out explicitly early in the 20th century by Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung. Today they are known to almost everyone in terms of the Myers-Briggs personality typology. It's even on Facebook. (You can find "What's Your Myers-Briggs Personality Type?" on the Facebook Apps page-- along with "Which Teletubbie Are You?")

Long before C. G. Jung, Myers-Briggs and Facebook, however, the fact that we have a four-fold mind was known to the people of many earlier cultures.

On the Native American Medicine Wheel, for example, each of the mind's functions is pictured by an animal and associated with one of the four directions, the four seasons and the four times of day. I've made use of that imagery in many posts. I think it's one of the best tools we have for our self-understanding.

It is especially helpful in understanding wonder and awe.

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Our ability to experience the sacred via awe and wonder is pictured on the Medicine Wheel as a shamanic Black Bear. It's an image of the same function of the conscious mind which C. G. Jung calls "Intuition," the famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant refers to as "archetypal intuition," and Jakob Wolf calls "phenomenological apprehension."

Black Bear is located on the west on the Medicine Wheel, directly opposite the Gold Eagle of the east. It's this Gold Eagle awareness-- Jung calls it simply our "Thinking function"-- which deals with the rational cause-and-effect workings of patterns in nature and is the very essence of scientific analysis.

It's because "the primary mode of knowing in Western societies is analytic," as Dr. Eaton says, that the experience of the sacred via our Black Bear (Intuition) ability isn't readily understood in our culture. We need to balance our Gold Eagle (Thinking) ability with our Black Bear (Intuition) capacity if we are to heal our home, the sacred Earth.

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Jung calls Black Bear (Intuition) "the religious function" because it doesn't make distinctions as Gold Eagle (Thinking) awareness does. It makes connections. Native Americans express this experience of the sacred with the phrase "All my relations!"

One of the most helpful understandings I know of the mind's Black Bear (Intuition) ability comes, rather surprisingly, from the eminent 20th-century German Jesuit theologian, Karl Rahner. He calls this capacity we have to experience awe and wonder "self-transcendence."

As a conscious person in the material cosmos, says Rahner, each of us experiences ourselves at a deep level as being utterly open to all things. We don't have any limits; we are connected with everything that exists; we simply do not exist apart from the infinite unbounded reality underlying the whole universe. I've described this more fully in post #34 (Talking About Us).

Obviously, many people in Western culture are not at ease with such an understanding of themselves. But it's much more familiar to people in Asian cultures, and it is one of the reasons why westerners, in this time of Immense Transition, are turning to the religious traditions and spiritual practices of the East.

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So, this is not only a time of Immense Transition due to the discovery of the new scientific cosmology, it is also a time of Great Turning for the world's religions themselves. We live in nothing less, says Dr. Eaton, than a "new religious moment" in the history of the world.

And because of the environmental crisis, says Dr. Eaton, "it is pressing for all religious traditions to reclaim their roots in the natural world."

She notes that, East and West, "Each tradition has an awareness that the natural world is a primary place of revelation and religious experience" and that "it is only in recent history that this has not been so."

With regard to the West, for example, she says that the Christian faith in its recent history "has belittled the earth as a religious reality." And that this "diminished Christian awareness of a sacred indwelling presence in the natural world" is "one of the central causes of the ecological crisis and the excessive domination and exploitation of the earth."

Christians are "faced with the task of allowing their theological understanding to be transformed," and as Dr. Eaton notes, this task is "an enormous challenge to our ecologically dysfunctional patriarchal religious traditions."

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But it's not the western religious tradition alone that's being challenged by the environmental crisis. All the world religions , she says, "need to reclaim their heritage"-- to rediscover their roots in the world of awe and wonder.

If we are to heal the Earth, we have to "reacquaint ourselves with the divine presence revealed within the natural world." Because we take care of what we value, "to encounter the sacred in the natural world moves us to resist its destruction."

The question, then, is a very practical one: How do we "reacquaint ourselves with the divine presence revealed within the natural world." How are we to "encounter the sacred"?

Dr. Eaton says simply, "Awareness of the power of wonder and awe is available to anyone who spends time in the natural world."

Is it as simple as that?

I think it is.

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The experience of the sacred isn't considered socially acceptable but, as Dr. Eaton says, "the capacity for awe remains omnipresent." Awe and wonder is a normal aspect of human experience. It's in our hearts. It's part of our DNA.

C. G. Jung says it. Native Americans say it. Karl Rahner says it.

There's one catch. In Dr. Eaton's words: "To marvel at the natural world requires a transcendence of our superficial worldviews and beliefs."

We may be potentially open to everything, as Rahner says, but we'll never actually experience awe and wonder if we don't literally spend time with nature. We need to "phenomenologically apprehend, " as Jakob Wolf would say, the intelligible patterns operating in the natural world.

Dr. Eaton quotes the famous Jewish theologian who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Selma in 1965, Abraham Heschel, about the difference between what happens to us when we do, and don't, spend time in nature.

"Away from the immense," says Rabbi Heschel, "cloistered in our own concepts, we may scorn and revile everything. But standing between earth and sky, we are silenced by the sight. We can never sneer at the stars, mock the dawn or scoff at the totality of being."

When we spend time in the world of nature and find ourselves aware of our connectedness to everything-- when we experience that all things are "our relations"-- we simply cannot sneer, or mock, or scoff at our own experience. We just need to let the experience happen.

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For many years, my wife Anne and I have included on our Christmas cards a few words from Teilhard de Chardin's essay "In Expectation of the Parousia" found at the conclusion of his early work, The Divine Milieu.

Teilhard's words are his way of expressing the profound idea that Heather Eaton and Jakob Wolf are trying to spell out for us.

His words may sound simplistic. But in terms of taking care of what we value, they are profound.

How do we experience the Earth as sacred?

Teilhard says, "All we have to do is let the heart of the earth beat within us."

sam@macspeno.com

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#5. Alternative to "Human Nature Redux"

#4. The "Biogenetic" Perspective

#3. High School 50th-Anniversary Report

#2. Spirituality Research Symposium

#1. On Recent Developments in Science and Religion

#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