In Over Our Heads: Robert Kegan and Spiritual Development

Dr. Robert Kegan, the Meehan Professor of Adult Learning and Professional Development at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is a developmental psychologist interested in stages the development of adult structures of consciousness. He has identified six distinct stages. Three of these are important to any discussion of higher spiritual development. The stages of development reflect the ways in which people interpret their experience and construct the meaning of the experiences.

We pick up with the cognitive development of pre-teens. Typically just before adolescence, children have mastered what Piaget referred to as concrete operational thinking. They are able to identify specific instances of wide ranges of things (what Kegan refers to as the ability to recognize “durable categories”). They understand their roles and they tend to recognize enduring needs and have developed impulse control. This is all reflective of second order consciousness.

As people move into third order consciousness, they become able to think abstractly and recognize and intelligently interact with cross-categorical ideas. They are able to create maps of their ideas of how life should be lived and begin to conform their behavior to these maps. A large part of this process involves the socialization to adult structures necessary to get along in our culture. We become who our society expects us to be by interacting within the structures of that society. People begin to understand interpersonal realities, can identify their own inner states and recognize inter-subjective states of other people and groups. These skills allow people to function in the modern society and are essential to holding a job, parenting, partnering and simply getting along in life. According to Kegan, the vast majority of adults in American society function at this level of consciousness.

There are however, two orders that transcend and include these lower structures. The Fourth Order of Consciousness involves the ability to think in high level abstractions about the abstractions one has created in the Third Order. In our post-modern world, there is not one monolithic society – we are exposed to a wide range of possibilities and competing demands for time, money, loyalty, focus and so on. If these rise to a sufficiently complex level and we are paying attention, we make the leap to Fourth Order Consciousness. We are no longer pushed around by cultural forces but become “self-authoring”. Very few people reach this stage before the age of 40. When they do, they are no longer subject to the scripts of abstraction that they developed earlier in life but are able to chose between multiple abstractions and chose to operate out of meta-ethical frameworks. They are no longer bound by maps of behavior but have become autonomous individuals who are consciously picking and choosing the cognitive structures that they chose to operate within. They are rarely ideologically dogmatic and find they can adopt great plasticity in the ways they function and move within the world and various social groups. They are marching to their own drummer based on their own cognitive map of the world.

The Fifth Order of Consciousness starts getting very interesting from the point of view of spiritual development. According to Kegan, only a small fraction of people ever make this jump. This stage is referred to as the “self-transforming self”. It is brought on by the inherent limitations of self-authoring by coming face to face with the inconsistencies of created by the systems developed at the Fourth Order. The person recognizes that all of the ways of constructing meaning or making sense of experience are, in the end, wholly partial and incomplete. They leave things out. Their system, while very holistic and encompassing, is incapable of making any fundamental sense of their lives. The hallmark of this phase would be things like the "existential crisis" or the "dark night of the soul". This profound doubt - and sometimes downright ontological and epistemological despair - forces the self to move into dialectical transcendence of ideologies to the point where there is no longer an ego to support or defend. Reality becomes perceived as truly transpersonal and the notion of individuality looses any sense of ultimate meaning. The egoic self clearly still exists, but it exists solely as an object of observation. When this happens, life is seen holistically and what maps are useful are maps that tie disparate realities together and show the relationships between things that, on their surface appear contradictory.

Kegan has used Alan Watts’ comment that his baby was fully enlightened because he was one with his experience as a foil for discussing this stage. He says Watts got it absolutely wrong. According to Kegan, a baby is, developmentally, pure subject – the baby no distinct sense of distinct self as object of observation or experience. In all other stages, a portion of the self (from the lower order of consciousness) is seen as an object by the subject of the next stage. (Thus the Fourth Order clearly sees and understands the structures at work in the 3rd order but is oblivious to those structures of its present order – i.e. they are purely subjective). At the Fifth Order (and above), the individual becomes pure object – unlike the baby, there is no “subject”. This fundamental recognition of the contingency of self – its fundamentally illusory nature – is awfully close to the mystic realizations found in many world religions. It is not that self no longer exists but rather than self is pure object of a transcendent witness. This type of experience is deeply reminiscent of experiences spoken of by Sri Aurobindo, Ramana Maharshi, Nagarjuna, Meister Eckhart, and hundreds of other saints and sages from times past.

To my way of thinking, Kegan’s work points to the a human developmental model that both supports and gives structure to spiritual development. It provides a teleological understanding of the development of human psychology and grounds mystical experience in psychological development. That grounding is important in a number of ways, particularly people seek to live spiritual lives in a post modern world.

For those who are interested, two of Robert Kegan’s works are In Over Our Heads and The Evolving Self.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Meditations

Here are a few meditations that I have found particularly useful:

1. Who am I?

Look into yourself and peel away everything that is not "you". Start with your waking life. You almost certainly peel off your roles, your possessions, your mannerisms, your emotions, your thinking. Dismiss anything that is not "you" at the deepest level. When you are ready, move into examining who the "I" is who is dreaming and how that is different from your waking self. Finally, think about deep, dreamless sleep - is there an "I" there and, if so what form does that "I" take. Was there an "I" while you were in deep, dreamless sleep. If so, what was its nature?

2. What am I?

Think of the vast distance bewtween the nucleus of an atom and the first electron (I have heard that if the nucleus was the size of a ping-pong ball, the first electron shell woudl be 8 miles away). In that space is a quantum field of nothingness giving rise to pairs of subatomic particles popping into and out of existence. Now think of these vast spaces of emptiness/fullness within your own body - to what extent is there an inside of you and and outside of you? Where do "you" begin and end? Are you as "solid" as you think you are? Where do "you" physically begin and end?

3. When is my self in time?

Where does the past exist? Where does the future exist? What exists other than the present moment? If only the present moment exists, what does that do to your sense of self? How is your self different from the present moment?

4. Where is my self?

Be still and identify where in your body your sense of self abides. (For many Westerners, it is immediately behind the eyes, for most of the rest of us, it is in their heart.) In your mind's eye, move that sense of self to another part of your body (say your heart) and then back to where it came from. Next begin to expand the sense of self until it fills your entire body - allow it to inhabit, fully, your full physical frame. If possible, in your mind's eye extend your sense of self out of your body and begin to explore how far this goes.

5. The Still Lake

This is not, necessarily, a transcendental exercise but it is useful. Lie down and relax. If you have calming music with headphones you can listen to that (I used Pachabel's Canon). Create a lake in your mind's eye, notice if it is calm or filled with waves. Imagine those waves generally reflect the activity of your mind (worry, thoughts, joys, concerns and so on). As you listen to the music, slowly calm "your" lake to the point that it refelcts the sky perfectly - not a ripple on it. Repeat this daily.

6. Big Mind

Do Genpo Roshi's Big Mind meditation on You Tube - start at the beginning and watch all of them. Then start doing this on your own or with a partner.

What meditations have you found useful?

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

What are We Missing?

As we reflect on the spiritual marketplace in our modern, secularized world, there is no question that something is afoot. This week in Seattle an innovative trust and financial management company that serves families of extreme wealth rented the symphony hall to have alternative medicine expert Andrew Weil speak to its customers, potential customers, and their advisors on aging in one of its “Thought Forums”. Andrew Weil wasn't always so mainstream. In 1971 he first visited Esalen where he participated in then cutting edge seminars on health and human consciousness. His efforts and the efforts of other physicians and healthcare professionals and researchers who largely gathered under the initial aegis and leadership of Esalen brought alternative medicine to the United States and within a few short decades turned it into what is now referred to respectfully as "complimentary medicine."

The stuff that was on the very outer fringes of cultural acceptability only recently is becoming mainstream in some very important ways. Yet we as Unitarian Universalists are missing this cultural sea-change and dooming ourselves to fundamental and, I suspect, quite permanent, irrelevance. We sit back and dismiss these movements out of hand – this hunger people have for something of significance that feeds their souls. We see it as somehow too “woo-woo” or “New Age”. Yet in our complacency, the world is passing us by very, very quickly. The folks who consider themselves “spiritual but not religious”, some of whom are referred to as Cultural Creatives, constitute approximately 20% of our population and probably reflect an even larger percentage of the demographic in more hip, urban and liberal areas where many of our churches exist.

As sophisticated UUs, I have heard us scoff at those who race after chimeric “spiritual” fixes – like The Celestine Prophecy or The Secret or “What the Bleep Do We Know” – and yet people who are seeking comfort in these things, and other ideas that are even stranger, have a deep human longing to become more whole and more loving people whose lives are rooted in something deeper than the shallow materialism of our age. This “pop” spirituality speaks of something much more profound - a human tropism towards the spiritual. It speaks of something that is emerging in our culture that has profoundly ancient antecedents. It runs so deep that it might even be irreducibly embedded in structures of human consciousness or even the fabric of the universe itself. The problem is that these popular forms of spiritual expression are ill-formed, lack depth, and are concocted out of ideas that seem to us rational folk to be patently foolish, confused and magical. In short, a throw-back to pre-rational superstition.

And many of them are. And yet…

While this frothy spirituality oftentimes denies and condemns the deeper wisdom traditions, their ideas are the distant and sometimes barely recognizable relatives of the much deeper truths found in perennial philosophies and the paths of mystics in Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu traditions, among others. While the airy ideas of these facile trends lack depth and discipline, they can serve as gateways for literally millions of people to possibilities of real spiritual depth and profound experience. In talking with many UUs, the story is the same. Plenty of visitors, but few stick. Could part of the reason be because we are so very close to what they are looking for on paper, but fall short of embodying that promise in action, particularly with respect to spirituality?

As a faith that ostensibly draws on these well-grounded and respected traditions, we as Unitarian Universalists have the opportunity to deeply explore and live these truths and thereby offer to the world a path of depth, integrity and real meaning. But this way requires that we take our spiritual calling as seriously as we take our political one. It requires that we truly acknowledge the sources, not just with affirmation, but with incarnation. It requires discipline and study and devotion to spiritual practice.

Our denomination runs the risk of being swept into irrelevance. It continues to shrink in most appreciable ways and it is rapidly aging. We live in deadened humanism and narrow definitions of liberal political orthodoxy that have already been dismissed by our culture as fundamentally irrelevant. At this point, we have no voice that is resonating with those around us. Yet in our Sources we have latent depth and profound messages that, if taken seriously and coupled with spiritual practice, can not only revitalize our congregations but drive a new message of relevant political and social transformation.

Many leaders of cultural thinking point to emerging structures of consciousness that profoundly integrate the spiritual, the psychological, the intellectual and the ethical dimensions of life in ways that shape the soul. While this emerging consciousness is clearly not a panacea, and will raise its own problems, we are on the cusp of a revolution in the way ordinary people construct the meaning of their lives. It would be a shame to sit on the sidelines and only watch when we have the very real potential of dynamically participating in the emergence of a new order of human consciousness.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Ths I Believe - My Ethics

I believe that the universe, while having a natural order, has no inherent moral order. I believe that human nature can be seen as good or evil with ample evidence for either doctrine. I believe that there is no first principle that can be known, no God we can prove, no Platonic absolute forms which inform our soul or our ethics. We are, in one sense, alone in the universe - left adrift and without guidance. In the end, I believe that the soul of the universe is essentially amoral in any sort of human sense.

So in the end, without guidance, there is only existential choice...there is only the Sisyphean task of creating the meaning of our lives. Consequently, I believe that the dignity of human consciousness derives from our continued perseverance in endeavors for which the universe affords no foothold of encouragement. As human beings, our fundamental nature is to aspire - to create meaning where none exists apart from our efforts. These acts of aspiration are essential to our humanity.

We chose to take a moral stand when there is no reason given by the universe for us to do so.
By my very existence, I have no choice but to plant a stake in the ground - that is predestined from the moment I was born. But what is not predestined is my choice as to where to plant that stake. We all chose a morality that is not required of us and so, in the end, our moral self is an expression of our aspiration - built on the slenderest of threads.

Because I must plant my stake, I chose to believe certain things...not because I can prove them but because I aspire for them to be true. I believe in the inherent worth and dignity of all human beings. There is no compelling evidence to prove that my belief is rational. Just so, neither is there evidence to refute it. And if I chose to believe that all human life has value, then justice, equity and compassion become my watchwords and the values I aspire to live by. Because I believe in the inherent worth and dignity of human life, I also believe in the importance of community for the future of humanity. Salvation lies not solely in individual experience, but in the experience of the community B in the connections of human beings to one another and to the universe as a whole. All people are islands; while they are born from another, they die alone. Yet in community we breach the isolation of personal existence and have the opportunity to discover the inherent worth and dignity of the other. In this is love.

I believe that each person is responsible for finding truth and meaning, yet I believe that we have much to learn from those who have come before and those who we journey with today. Wise teachers -- Siddhartha Gautama, Hillel, Jesus, Mohammed, Lao-Tsu, Gandhi and others -- have all aspired, and by their aspirations, inform and inspire me. In this is hope.

I believe in the interconnected web of all existence of which we are a part. Morality does not exist. Yet we aspire to morality and in the human quest we aspire to give evidence to the divine we cannot prove in that mystery of the web of life. Here lies faith.

Finally, I believe that the universe is evolving and that we are at the tip of that process with respect to consciousness on our planet. While the universe is impersonal and fundamentally amoral, there is a development of ever increasing levels of complexity that are drawing humanity to deeper and more complex levels of consciousness. Along with those structures of consciousness there evolves increasing dimensions of care and concern. These dimensions are not moral imperatives in any classical sense, but rather are the epiphenomena of the very nature of human consciousness and he cultural structures it creates. Thus, while the universe offers no foothold of encouragement in our decision to act with deeper compassion, it is drawing humanity in that direction. This increase in the capacity for understanding, holding, being present to and loving the emergence is, it seems, close to the heart of humanity’s evolutionary imperative.

Faith, hope and love abide, but the greatest of these is love for it is in love that our aspirations become flesh.

I believe in these ethics, this morality, not by reason, but because in aspiring to them, I become part of the realization of that greater human endeavor. And in that sense we are not alone in the universe. I chose these ethics because of that distant human dream, that by our consciousness, we make a tiny corner of the universe a moral place after all and in that space god becomes real.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

This I Believe - My Metaphysics

“The Tao that can be differentiated is not the Tao” – Lau Tzu

The existence of God has radical implications for any metaphysical system, and so, it seems, a fundamental question any metaphysics must answer early on is the question of the existence of God.

The sages, philosophers and great traditions agree that any conception of God worthy of serious religious or scientific consideration requires that God not be bound by concepts of time or space. Thus, God cannot exist as a finite reality in the same way as a table or a chair or even a human exists. As we explore the term “existence”, we understand and use it in common and philosophic discourse, as fundamentally an Aristotelian attribute of a thing – something either exists in space and time or it does not. Yet to be true to the most nuanced conceptions of God that humanity has formulated to date, God must be beyond space, beyond time, beyond mere matter, beyond energy. God is therefore no thing in this space-time Universe. Being nothing, by definition, God does not exist. As Lau Tzu suggested, the Tao that can be spoken of is not the Tao. This quality of nothingness is essentially non-dual for it if was dual, it would be something in opposition to what it is not.

Ironically, Eastern and Western religious mythic traditions and recent scientific cosmology all suggest that all that is (Being) arises out of nothing. God as Nothing – in absolute non-dual non-existence, becomes the ground or field giving rise to Being and consequently space-time. The Beingness that arises from this nothing apparently quickly differentiates itself into Matter and Energy. At root matter and energy are different manifestations of one thing (i.e. Being or Such-ness). However, Matter and Energy appear or manifest as differentiated and qualitatively different (and thus a prime, fundamental duality arises). Matter and Energy came to arise from this Nothing and are bound together in a “sea” of Nothingness (or divinity).

I therefore believe in a trinity – Nothingness, Matter and Energy (mythological expressed in the West as Father–Son–Spirit, and in the East as Brahman–Maya–Atman).

In this field of nothing there is an endless collision of processes – of interactions of matter and energy. “Objects” in the Newtonian sense do not exist in the field of Being but are rather the way in which we mentally organize a continuum of events or processes. These events are not random. They are governed by the structure and nature of matter and energy themselves and by the nature of space-time. The universe is structured as it is because matter and energy, by the conditions of their existence in space-time, must interact in certain and predictable ways.

Collections of processes of energy and matter arise and coalesce and then return to the whole. Being continually reconfigures itself as collections of processes and interactions. Everything in the universe is therefore a manifestation of this great sea of Being comprised of matter and energy. Human beings are no exception. We come from dust and return to dust – to the great sea of Being that is not God but arises from God.

In that I believe reality is fundamentally random, but ordered by the rules governing the matter and energy, I am led to conclude that Being is, in some sense, teleological. There is directionality to existence, a “τέλος” (telos). Time moves forward, conditions beget effects, things arise, exist and then cease to exist. This directionality and self-organization is, for want of a better term inanimate “consciousness”. At least on this planet, this teleology gives rise to distinct evolutionary processes. Being flows from nothing, from that being come occasions of interactions of energy and matter to form inanimate things (first particles, then atoms, then molecules, then compounds, and so on). From some of this more complex matter comes Life which organizes in ever increasingly complex processes. From some Life comes sentience, and from some sentience comes animate consciousness. I leave open the question is open as to whether Life is a fundamentally different state of Being than Matter or Energy. Sentience seems an evolutionary development of Life (much as complex compounds are an evolutionary development of matter).

In humanity, animate consciousness is capable for complex self-reflection. We are Being reflecting on itself. This development suggests that there are more evolved stages of development and that we are inexorably moving towards those stages. The goal of this evolution cannot be known philosophically. The stages of development cannot be predicted with certainty. While we can examine the stages of development on this planet and the short experiment that is humanity to glean what we can of the higher reaches of this evolution, but we cannot predict what stages will evolve. Nor can we know whether Man represents progress on this evolutionary road or is soon to be discarded by the Universe as a failed attempt at higher consciousness.

There is, I believe as an article of pure faith, a hint of the τέλος or end-point of it all. Mystics and sages of all religious traditions - Western and Eastern - say that the goal is the eventual union of Being and Nothingness (the Atman with Brahman or the Soul with God). This is perhaps the ultimate spiritual destination of humanity as we arrive at ever higher reaches of consciousness. It may also be the ultimate end of the Universe as Being and Nothingness become undifferentiated.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Prolegomena to Metaphysics

I have debated about how personal to become in sharing my own deepest spiritual beliefs. Ulimately, however, to be honest with this blogging process it is important that you, dear reader, know the core of where my perspectives originate - what is the the central fountainhead of the pieces you see here. Before I do that, however, I have to provide some context.

The title of this blog - Prolegomena to Metaphysics - is an homage to Immanual Kant's "Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics". This work was a distillation of the conclusions of his most famous work "Critique of Pure Reason" written to gain wider readership of the main work. A prolegomena is short essay that precedes and explains the more substantive work.

The Great Traditions

Two great traditions have struggled with the issue of the nature of reality.

The ancient Greeks had the leisure to invent philosophy. In a span of less than 50 years, the fundamental substance that would form the core of the Western debates for next 2200 years was said. Aristotle and Aristocles (better known as Plato) defined the parameters of Western thought and indeed, some would argue, that all of Western intellectual history has been a footnote to these two intellectual giants. The significantly different perspectives of these two greats have been debated in different forms until the very recent past.

Scholars agree that Aristotle, that premier taxonomist, got it about right when he divided philosophy into four areas: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics. Respectively, these ask: What is the nature of reality? How do we know truth? What is the good? What is the beautiful? Every other philosophical question seems to lie in one of these four areas. To oversimplify a bit, but not much, the west has attempted to understand these realities by looking primarily at the outer world through the lens of reason.

While a simplification, Indian philosophy created six systems (darshanas) which seek to map human knowledge: Samkhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaiseshika, Mimamsa and Vedanta. Each of these schools addresses questions recognizable as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and aesthetics. To again oversimplify, the East attempted to answer these questions by looking primarily within through the lens of observation.

These questions - What is reality? How do we know the truth? What is the good? What is beautiful? - are the central questions of human existence. The West and East agree on this much. To ask these questions is what make us human – we are reflectively self-conscious.

In the area of metaphysics a number of issues emanated from the central question – what is reality – and these issues recur in Eastern and Western philosophy are the same. Mind and Matter, God and No God, Unity and Multiplicity, Identity and Change, Reality and Illusion, Will and Fate, Causation, and so on.

And both traditions spent thousands of years rehashing the same discussion, endlessly exploring nuance. In the West, reason refined the argument to the point where metaphysics died with Immanuel Kant. Kant who conclusively proved the limits of pure reason in determining the nature of reality as it was then understood. The East was less decisive. As people observed, they drifted into an endless array of sects and practices limited only by human experience with no rational metric to determine whether these beliefs bore relation to objective reality.

The Revolution in Human Perspective

And then a remarkable thing happened, again within the course of 50 years. In 1905, in his spare time over several months, Albert Einstein wrote four articles that fundamentally changed the course of human thought. During that same period, observations of very small particles lead to very strange conclusions about the very fabric of the nature of reality itself. Unfortunately, the two views were at odds with one another. Because these views fundamentally shifted the way the world is viewed for the first time since the ancient Greeks started thinking on these things, the implications of these theories on the nature of reality began to work their way through the world of philosophy in the West. Because these ideas had resonance with mystical insights form the East, the East began a process of grounding its philosophy in outward reality. These developments forced both traditions to question assumptions and recast their world view from more or less common ground. In other words, integration became possible and an integral world view based on multiple traditions could begin to emerge.

While many writers and thinkers could be chosen to discuss the emergence of this new level of human consciousness, the writings of two have had a most profound impact on me personally. These two seem somehow "essential" in that they articulate the core of what this revolution is about.

A. Whitehead

In 1927/1928 a brilliant mathematician, theoretical physicist and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, delivered the Gifford lecture series in what was eventually collected in the book Process and Reality. This book is very tough sledding, made even more so by the fact that Whitehead never bothered to polish his lecture notes. The process cosmology elaborated in these lectures proposes that the fundamental elements of the universe are in process as occasions of experience. According to this notion, what people commonly think of as concrete objects are actually processes. Occasions of experience can be collected into groupings; something complex such as a human being is thus a grouping (or nexus) of many smaller occasions of experience. According to Whitehead, everything in the universe is characterized by experience (which is not to be confused with consciousness); there is no mind-body duality under this system, because "mind" is simply seen as a very developed kind of experiencing while "body" is a lower order process. Whitehead's occasions of experience are interrelated with every other occasion of experience that precedes it in time. Inherent to Whitehead's conception is the notion of time’s directionality; all experiences are influenced by prior experiences, and will influence future experiences. An occasion of experience consists of a process of prehending other experiences, and then a reaction to it.

By application of his ideas, Whitehead is able to fundamentally reconcile a number of very difficult Western philosophical problems in unique and compelling ways. His solution – when stripped down, look profoundly Eastern – reality, as we perceive it, simply arises as processes – that being is a potential for becoming. Because of its density, this book has not seeped into popular conceptions, but it is the first and most profound attempt at a post-Kantian philosophic cosmology after Einstein. Whitehead essentially provides the intellectual freight needed to ground much of the intuitive insight expressed by the Continental existentialists and to a lesser extent the German Idealists, who were otherwise too easily dismissed by more rigorous approaches. It is not so easy to dismiss Whitehead.

B. Aurobindo

In India, between 1914 to 1949, a western educated Indian mystic and philosopher, Sri Aurobindo, wrote a series of articles that would eventually be collected into book – “The Life Divine”. He realized that Einstein and the developments of evolutionary biology pointed the way to a reconciliation of Eastern and Western thought and that it was possible for human beings to perceive the world in way that brought reason and subjective experience together. In his book The Life Divine, he posited that humans represent a apex of evolution to date and that they are uniquely situated to lead a spiritual life. By this he meant that Matter and Spirit are met in human consciousness. He posited that the purpose of existence is to discover the latent spirit in all things and release infuse and elevate all of life by application of higher forms of human and transpersonal consciousness. The importance of Aurobindo cannot be overstated. His influence in Western thought has been far reaching through the seminal work of Allan Watts, Aldous Huxley, the Beat Movement. Indeed, the entire gestalt of the 1960’s (and New Consciousness thinking) was fundamentally shaped by his work. Whether people recognize the lineage or not, most progressive thinking in the Western world since then has been significantly influenced by his work.

Based on these two pillars of early 20th Century thought, as well as some sother ignficiant writers, I have begun to develop a personal metaphysics.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

The Pace of the Posts

I have received a couple of queries regarding the drop off in the number of posts this month. I decided early on that that I could not keep up the pace of what I had been doing before (3 or 4 posts a week) and that it would make sense to post at a pace of about 1 or 2 posts per week. This will keep me fresh and engaged and is much more likely to make this project sustainable over the long haul. I the meantime, thanks for your encouragement.

Boomeritis

Ken Wilber and others have put their finger on a very real set of problems associated with late stage pluralism. Wilber calls this complex of issues “Boomeritis”. As I mentioned in my last entry, much of our church reflects a consciousness reflective of post-modern pluralism. We live in a world of diverse cultures, races, and religions and increasingly these coexist in close proximity. From that melting pot comes the intellectual capacity to appreciate differences, deconstruct perspectives, and form identities that are not derived solely from one’s family and traditions. For the first time in human history, entire generations are able to transform the ways that they view themselves and revolutionize their understanding beyond the narrow confines of provincial enculturation. What this has produced is a remarkable mix of political activism and intentional personal development. However, the latter has, in many ways, gotten us into trouble.

The Deeply Subjective Self

The postmodern self is a deeply subjective self. By rejecting traditional values and even recognizing the limits of scientific understanding, and by understanding intuitively that we construct reality as we go along, we are left with only our inner, subjective experience as authority. Our truth is relative. We cannot exercise judgment because there is no place to stand to determine validity. We reject the notion that anyone has anything of real value to say because we distrust both authority and hierarchy. And our feelings become the ultimate arbiters of good and bad, right and wrong.

In the end, we evade personal responsibility, because, after all, there are no true standards which can universally govern our behavior. We alternate between terminal “niceness” (because, after all, a person’s feelings are at the core of the truth of their being) to a rampant meanness (because I have a “right” to my opinion and a responsibility to assert myself to avoid giving in to my “victimhood” or to establish appropriate “boundaries”). This is the world of the sensitive self, the “Me” generation, self-righteous political correctness and cultural creativity.

When you strip all of this away, you are left with a very loud mantra: “Nobody tells me what to do!” This, in essence, is a deep form of narcissism and it is potentially quite dangerous. As Elizabeth Debold says in her article “Boomeritis and Me”:

[I]n the context of a world careening out of control precisely because we are so out of control, this is actually no joke. Narcissism is a force in us, built up over hundreds of thousands of years of human history, which must be renounced in order to make the evolutionary leap to a new way of being. It is a willful, and aggressive, denial of the creative force of the universe, whether we call it the Divine or God or what you will. This core motivation—Nobody tells me what to do!—sounds like the peevish rant of a two-year-old, which it is, but it is not harmless when it provides us with an excuse not to care beyond ourselves, destroys the true nobility of the spiritual quest and the imperative to reach for the highest in human potential, or justifies the rage of the innumerable sensitive selves who feel victimized in contemporary culture.

Boomeritis in the UU Church

I see this in myself and I see it everyday in our church. We UUs participate in this cultural complex without even thinking about it. We see it in our culture of criticism. We see it in our intolerance of conservatives. We see it in our stated commitment to liberal political action but failure to back up that commitment with sacrificial action. We see it in our token environmentalism and our claims to seek diversity (while our churches remain overwhelmingly homogenous). I am the first to admit to my own hypocracy in all of this. I am infected as well. However, for the good of the planet, I have to move on and I suspect we in the UU church have to do the same.

The trick, it seems to me, is to recognize that I am not here to have my way but to serve. I am here to contribute, not to take. I am here to lay my life down. I can no longer afford to say “Nobody can tell ME what to do!” but rather I must fundamentally say “My only hope lies in being of use in this world and what gets in the way of that is my self.” To my mind, that requires that I seek deeper spiritual truth -- that I learn and realize the true nature of my egoic self.

Jean Gebser, Don Beck, Chris Cowan, Ken Wilber and many others claim that we are on the threshold of a new level of consciousness. If we manage to negotiate that process, we open ourselves to new stages of human evolution in which we deeply see and understand the integrative nature of reality. Those perspectives hold promise for our solving some rather pernicious and dangerous problems. But those perspectives require that we let go of myopic understandings of who we really are and begin to understand that all that we think we are is merely a passing emergence in flow of infinite time and space.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Pluralism in UU Churches

On earlier blog posts, I took on humanism, arguing that it is a fundamentally played out moral view of the world resting on assumptions that were conclusively debunked in the late 1700s. I have taken the position that building a faith on a humanistic worldview is doomed to failure and that we, as a movement, have to look beyond mere humanism.

This article takes on the next step of development – post-modern pluralism. If our modern church was founded on humanist values, it is now dominated by post-modern pluralism.

Pluralism Defined.

What do I mean by pluralism? Specifically, pluralism refers to a post-modern understanding of the world that recognizes the relative nature of “truth” and the central reality of human experience. With the breakdown of epistemological certainty ushered in by Hume and later Kant, it became evident that what can be known is extremely limited if, indeed, it is possible to know anything at all with an appreciable level of confidence. As is often the case, it took awhile for humanity to catch up to the implications of these philosophic conclusions. However, by the early 20th Century, the philosophic schools of phenomenology, logical positivism, linguistic philosophy, semiotics, existentialism, structuralism and a few others reflected the full blown attempt to come to terms with the notion that “man” is not the measure of all things. By the 1960s, these intermediate ideas had penetrated the general culture and “post-modernism” in art, literature and social criticism. Representative intellectual apologists of this post modern movement include Thomas Kuhn, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Richard Roty and Jean Baudrillard.

While this is a diverse crowd and any generalizations are bound to oversimplify, for the sake of this blog, it seems the central theme is the general consensus of these schools of thought that our reality is, largely, constructed by human beings. There is no “objective” truth which is out there that we perceive. Rather, we attempt to make sense of a maelstrom of phenomena and in the process construct reality. Schools differ as to whether the primary drives of this construction lie in language, political structures, or cultures. On the positive side, this leads to recognition that no one has a corner on the truth. Truth can be found in all cultures and in all peoples and all cultures and value systems must be honored. This world-centric understanding is profoundly important on the level of political action.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Post-modern Pluralists, at their best, have a deep desire to act politically on behalf of oppressed peoples. being deeply sensitive to matters of race, sexual orientation, gender, poverty and marginalization. On a societal level, this postmodern worldview has accomplished much: the civil rights movement, feminism, environmental protection and ecological sensitivity, the beginnings of health care reform and an awareness of political marginalization in all manner of forms

However there is a very real downside to this world view. Postmodern pluralists share a common and fundamental mistrust of the spiritual, especially when experienced at the individual level. They are also thoroughgoing materialists. Given a lack of any basis for determining validity claims, and a radical mistrust of individual subjective experience coupled with a denial of the notion of transpersonal reality, they end up with a highly relativistic world-view. Because everything is constructed, there is no place to stand to evaluate value systems. You, in your perspectives, are as conditioned by language, society, culture and so on as everyone else and so you have no authority to “judge” the value systems of others. This leads to is a significant distrust of subjective experience, a rabid dislike of hierarchy, and spiritual experience and as a logical consequence, the result is a relativistic moral despair. (In its inevitable extreme, we can’t condemn Hitler because, after all, his value system is just one of many and who is to say, in any absolute sense, that his viewpoint wasn’t valid.) Indeed, it becomes very difficult to ultimately justify actions of liberation and political action – if every system is as valid as any other, then what allows us judge the oppressor’s way as “wrong”. Ultimately, postmodernism ends up becoming form of moral nihilism. Foucault recognized this, rejected his deep constructivist approach in the middle of his career and began working towards a different model.

In response to this moral quagmire, Pluralism hypocrically simply asserts an elitist moral system. All systems that are less broadminded are simply declared to be inferior on the grounds that they are not inclusive. Thus, in the name of inclusiveness, the Pluralists exclude vast swaths of human culture. Their ire is directed towards what are perceived as dominator worldviews – namely mythic religion and rationalist scientism. In self-contradiction to the notion that there is no morally superior worldview, the pluralist sees any moral system that cannot tolerate other systems as intolerable. There is also a tendency to romanticize and exalt cultures that are indigenous or non-Western. These are seen as pure and the victims of the dominator cultures of Europe. Moreover, feminine values are exalted over male values. The former are seen as inclusive and connective while the later are seen as destructive and purely agentic. Thus for all of its vaunted open-mindedness, the pluralistic worldview cannot admit even the partial validity of the moral stance of religious or scientific worldviews.

Consequently, postmodernism tends foster the apotheosis of victimhood. Victims should be rescued from the dominating forces of Western culture (whether religious or scientific/industrial). There is a great deal of anger and judgment against those who are perceived to be seeking the imposition of their value system on others. On an individual level, this leads to a certain degree of narcissim (which I will explore in a different blog entry).

Politically, pluralists tend to have a very difficult time figuring out how to address “evil”. They are deeply conflicted around issues of crime and punishment, terrorism, use of force and other agentic action. They simply don’t have the bandwidth or the categories to figure out how to address such issues from their framework. They recognize that lower tier responses are wanting, but they have nothing compelleing to offer in their stead.

The Fundamental Failure of Open-mindedness

While the entire ethos of this worldview is a purported open-mindedness, the irony, of course, is that this elitist and monoptic view of the world denigrates any value system perceived to be less open-minded. Despite that fact that it has a deeply nihilistic moral fabric, it seeks to impose its view of what is moral on anyone it perceives to be less morally developed. In fact, postmodern pluralism is a very closed system. Political correctness and thought policing are endemic. Straying from relativistic notions is met with fierce opposition and castigation.

If humanists are alive and well in the UU church, so are post-modern pluralists. Our denominational academic institutions are predominately pluralistic (as are most higher level academic institutions). Post-modern pluralism is also easy to spot in our churches. Most Unitarian Universalists claim open-mindedness and tolerance, yet cannot tolerate political or religious conservatives. There are certain things which could not be said in a UU church without provoking a virulent response. There is a stark dualistic thinking that takes hold of many with certain things declared to be good and other things declared to be evil. Our ability to think in nuanced and creative ways is hampered by the fact that we simply write off vast amounts of cultural and intellectual legacy that could be used as fodder for advancing our understanding of the world.

What's Next.

So why do I bring all of this up. A few posts ago, I talked about Jean Gebser and his view that humanity is on the brink of a significant transformation. Pluralism may well be a way station in the evolutionary development, but it is a mistake to linger there for too long. Indeed, post-modernism may represent the final stage of the mental structure with its insistence that material reality is all that exists. Gebser would encourage us to recognize that there are orders of consciousness that are above this worldview.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Corrosive Criticism

When my wife and I joined our first UU church in 2003, it was obvious to us that we had “come home”. We found in our community a group of very congenial folks who cared about the world and were willing to engage with each other and with life in thoughtful ways. We got involved immediately and have never looked back. I have my issues with the UU church as a whole. I am concerned with what I view to be a fundamental failure of the larger church to address the deeper spiritual needs of congregants and capture a cultural trend that could sustain us into the future. However, none of that affects my deep respect and compassion for my fellow UUs, particularly those I know at my church.

It is now three years later. I have sat on and chaired several committees. My wife is now president of our Boar. During that time I have noticed something I have found endemic to the life of our community and, from what I hear, is pretty characteristic of other communities as well. It is the pall of corrosive criticism.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I do believe that there is a place for thoughtful and informed feedback and even criticism if it well conceived and designed to build up and improve on what exists. However, this type of criticism takes a lot of work and care. It is almost never an immediate reaction to a fresh set of facts and circumstances. I am not taking about this kind of thoughtful, constructive criticism. Rather I am talking about what might be called “corrosive criticism”.

In my sort tenure with our church, I have seen people leave our community because of the harshness of people’s judgments of their contributions or the contributions of others. I have watched good people who have put in hours and hours of hard work have it torn to shreds by people in seconds who are reacting without any real thought or consideration. I have seen good, thoughtful ideas tentatively put forward by people who have potential leadership skill put down and dismissed without any real understanding of what was being said. The toll of this type of criticism is enormous.

From what I can see, more than any other dynamic in church life, this type of knee-jerk response and lack of restraint in sharing every idea that pops into our heads, demoralizes people and makes it difficult to recruit leaders. Who wants to set themselves up for this kind of abuse? Why would people want to put their heart and soul in the work to have it so cavalierly disregarded?

Personally, I think this is a real problem. I am really trying this year to be a part of the solution. As such I am working on the following:

• Affirming people for the work they are doing and the contributions they are making.
• Using as a mantra: “Those who do the work get to make the decisions.”
• When I don’t understand a decision of some import, I am trying to go to a person who participated in making the decision and ask questions. The types of questions I have found useful include: How did you come to that decision? Did you consider X and how did that factor into your decision? Is the decision final or is there additional opportunity for input? How are you finding that people are responding? Is there anything I can do to help?
• In conversations about decisions, I am trying to acknowledge the hard work of the people involved and the fact that they undoubtedly had more information than I do.

I find that these questions are almost always best prefaced with something like: “This must have been a tough decision. Have you gotten any flack for it? I want you to know that I support your personal work in this community and I know how much you give. I also want you to know that, to the extent the opportunity arises, I will publicly support the decision you all made. It would help me to understand how you got to the decision both for my own sake and also to help me in my conversations with others."

In trying to avoid corrosive criticism, I feel that I can positively contribute to the community. What I have found is that the people who are making decisions have most often very thoughtful reasons for deciding as they did. I may agree or disagree, but these things are rarely so clear cut that there is only one right course of action. And for the sake of my community, and its long term health, I can support people of goodwill who are doing the best they can as volunteers.

Finally, I would note, that if we cannot be civil and supportive of one another, it seems that it will be very difficult to make an appreciable difference in the world. And so, out of compassion and out of a desire to support and strengthen those in my community who contribute, I am seeking to avoid corrosive criticism.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Guest Blog: Maslow Revisted

By Anna Davis, ARNP, MA

I have long appreciated Maslow's insights on which he based his theory of needs, but I've always had a problem with the idea that the being needs are luxuries. The definition of a need is that without it, an organism is less/not able to grow along its developmental arc, if not survive. An example of this difference is sex, as plenty of people have survived long times without sex, but there is something to an argument that levels intimacy of relationships and the prospect for progeny are severely curtailed without it.

While I was finishing my MA in psychology, I chanced upon an old article written by a man who was then APA president. (Alas, I have been unable to recall his name or find it again.) The article stated that the further in time between the initial urge to meet a need, and when actual physiologic damage happened, the more psychopathology one could find about that need. As an example, he offered the difference between the needs for urination and eating. Both are needs, but damage from urine backing up into the kidneys can happen in about 2 hours, vs starvation takes about 2 weeks. Accordingly, we find very little psychopathology about urination, and so much about food.

I offer that Maslow was correct about his hierarchal arrangement of needs, but what he got wrong was the criteria. I offer that ALL needs are equally needs, and not one is more important than the other, but some are more immediate. The further up the list, the longer it likely takes to meet the needs. Trancendance seems to take the better part of a lifetime, if we get to it even then. (The concept of reincarnation appeals for this---if at first you don't succeed, try, try, again.)

I think Maslow listing them as importance vs immediacy was him reflecting a major value of our culture; the easiest way to control people is to keep them with one or more needs pitted against each other. (Most of us have at one time or another chosen to tolerate some sacrifice of our need for self esteem in the workplace so as not to endanger our ability to provide for food, clothing and shelter.) Double binds such as these have long been seen in psychology as a most toxic source of stress. Research into the effects of the stress hormone cortisol is increasingly showing us that stress not only breaks our bodies down, we can't repair and grow beyond past damage until the coast is clear.

Because our culture makes the being needs seem as luxuries, and most of us are constantly on a treadmill chasing after the deficiency needs, we remain maleable and will sacrifice self-actualization and trancendance that would more likely free us from the yoke.It is no coincidence that each of the few examples of people who have reached trancendance (MLK, Jr, Jesus, Ghandi, etc.,) have been radicals and revolutionaries, and terrifying to those holding power in their age. Our current system is no different and prefers there be as few such leaders as possible, and ones who emerge must hire body guards because their predecessors have tended to get killed for thier trouble.

I would not necessarily ask everyone to lead a nationwide or global movement, but encourage revolution in more subtle ways. As part of my practice as a therapist, I routinely refer clients to "The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook," (Davis, Eshelman, & McKay; New Harbinger Press) which is a collection of exercises designed to help people gain some control over one's own internal experience. (This is not suppress emotions, but be able to not have them take control, allowing wisdom to emerge when rationalism is imformed by the heart.) When people have such skills to call upon at any time, they become confident that they get to make clearheaded choices in life, and they get less vulnerable to external manipulations.

Further, I teach my ideas about Maslow's hierarchy and that yes, we all will still have to juggle varying priorities as needs emerge and are sated on different time scales, (much like the old image of a Vaudeville plate spinner.) But, if we know that ALL of our needs should get to included on the list, we can keep an eye to the longer term ones in the quieter moments between meals, chores, bills, homework and the distraction of entertainment. Having all the needs on the list allows us to make clearer choices about what we really need in the long run, and avoid the trap of functioning in crisis mode all the time.

I believe that as more people change thier perspectives as I have offered, there will be a critical mass effect that will change our broader culture in profound ways. I am not a visionary who can offer strategies of how it will all work out. But I am hopeful that these changes are for the better. I believe that if all people were freer, calmer, and more aware of thier own needs, it would make for deeper and richer communication, which might lead to more efficient means of everyone getting all thier needs met, at least eventually. I continue to wait and see while I work to subvert the dominant paradigm. Viva la revolucion!

© 2007 Anna Davis, ARNP, MA. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

The Work of Jean Gebser

This is a post I have been wanting to do for some time. I finally got up the gumption to tap this out. I hope you, dear reader, find this useful.

Jean Gebser (1905 – 1973) was an autodidact whose main impact was in the study of the transformations of human consciousness. He was also a linguist and poet. While he has had a loyal following both in the United States and Europe, it has been relatively small. Ken Wilber’s work has brought him to the attention of a much wider audience and Gebser’s ideas are most important to anyone who is wrestling seriously with issues of spirituality, politics and human development. His experiences in pre-war Germany, Italy, France and Spain and reflection on the sea-change of intellectual perspectives reflected in the full blossoming of post-modern thought caused him to look closely at the structures of human consciousness through human history. After fleeing to Switzerland hours before the boarders were closed after the invasion of France, we befriended Carl Jung and did most of his mature writing while connected to the Jung Institute. His most notable book is The Ever-Present Origin. His work draws on fields as diverse as poetry, philosophy, religion, physics, architecture, music, and political science. His principal thesis is that humanity has experienced various structures of consciousness that carry within them deep perspectives of time, space, human relations, cosmic connections and images. These epochs span millennia and as there is a fundamental failure in one structure, another emerges. Gebser identifies five basic structures evidenced through human history: The Archaic, The Magic, The Mythic, The Mental and The Integral Ages. Each age includes, yet transcends the ages before it.

The Archaic Structure is difficult for us to grasp – it lies at the dawn of human awareness. Consciousness is dimly aware of itself as something separate from the flow around it. There is some sense of past, present and future but it is wrapped in a miasma and is largely undifferentiated. It is a world devoid of perspectivity. Structures that associate with this stage are groups or family units much like the great apes.

The Magic Structure is characterized by five primary characteristics: 1) a sense of self, but little or no ego structure or deeper self-awareness, 2) ambigous or cyclical sense of space and time, 3) interweaving of self and nature, 4) a magical relationship between self and not-self, 5) a lack of understanding of the differences between the non-liminal and liminal. Language emerges as this stage and words are seen as powerful in their own right. Man is deeply identified with nature and surviving within the natural order is a matter of ritual, incantation, and magic. Religion tends to be shamanistic and animistic. Political organizations tend to be tribal. The cultures tend to be hunter-gathers or in their later stages, horticultural. Tool making is rudimentary. Slavery is endemic. Art begins to be produced. Time tends to be cyclical and space is holy and laden with significance. Gods begin to emerge, but they tend to be local and associated with the tribe or family. This is a highly emotive phase.

The Mythic Structure brings the advent of more sophisticated tools and with it agriculture. Myths begin to emerge and with them mythical beings who stand above nature and can control it. The afterlife begins to become an important factor in life. Formal religion, typically with priests and holy men emerges and political structures tend to be centralized and autocratic. Slavery continues to exist, often on a massive scale. This phase tends to rely heavily on images and art begins to become quit sophisticated. Poetry becomes an important communicator and oral traditions develop to share the myths and stories. Space tends to be two dimensional and time is linear but malleable by the gods. Eventually this stage develops into monotheism and creedal belief systems. This in creates a profound ideological identification and an intolerance of the myths and religions of others. Political structures tend towards the authoritarian and imperial. Technology is sophisticated but largely based on trades and crafts. Guilds and castes are common.

The Mental Structure involves humanity stepping from two dimensional space into three dimensional space. Art becomes truly perspectival and fully articulated. Intellectual abstraction becomes possible as do pursuits of philosophy, science, mathematics, and other studies. Works of fiction emerge. Monotheism continues but eventually gives way to esoteric forms of unitive mysticism, philosophy or atheism. Time is seen as linear and cause and effect are essential to understanding the nature of the world. Ultimately, the mental structure gives way to a form of reductionism in which all that exists is material. Technology is used to reshape our understanding of the universe and matter itself. Industrialization emerges. This stage sees the rise of the nation state and the corporation. Human freedom is highly regarded. The dark side of this age is a profound lack of ethical restraint. While technology can be used for great good, it also wrecks havoc with war and environmental degradation.

The Integral Structure may, according to Gebser, be emerging. He sees the fundamental changes in our understanding of space and time as highly significant – just as with the transitions of prior ages where space and time underwent radical restructuring in human consciousness. The emergent picture is that time and space are not fixed, but relative and related. This age, Geber speculates will be trans-rational, trans-personal, and diaphanous (where there is transparent recognition of the whole, not just parts). It is likely to be highly mystical with deep realizations by both individuals and societies in which truth is uncovered in large chunks of integrated wholeness. The tensions and relations between things are more important, at times, than the things themselves and process becomes of pre-eminent concern. Nothing is seen as isolated and there is a profound experience and understanding of inter-connection and even identity. Time is seen both as infinite and illusory. Sentient life is seen as connected. While it is too early in this process to determine what political structures will emerge or what art will evolve into, there is are hints on the horizon for those who are looking for these.

I find interesting is that the mental stage was adumbrated well before its more general emergence. It was presaged by the intellectual flowering in ancient Greece. Is it possible that, with the current Integral Stage, a presaging may be found in the writings of India in the writings of sages such as Nagarjuna and Sankara?

As we look at our own culture, we see examples of late mythical stages (with rational overtones) and late mental stages of development. We begin to see, in cultural creatives and many on the vanguard of spiritual and intellectual exploration, the emergence of an integral consciousness. This, it seems to me, is important news for Unitarian Universalists.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Rapid Discovery Morality

In his book Sociology of Philosophies, Randall Collins uses the term “rapid discovery science” to refer to the blossoming of human understanding of the material world that occurred in the late Renaissance, its development in and through the Enlightenment, into a burgeoning economic and technological juggernaut that continues to this day. He argues that this breeder reactor phenomena of human knowledge was made possible by three things: the development of genealogies of research instruments, the creation of mathematical models in philosophic networks which both drove and were driven by technological research innovations, and the social networks of philosophers, scientists and occultists that existed at the time. (p. 807.) As Collins states, “The “scientific revolution” in Europe around 1600 changes not the natural focus of traditional science but its social dynamics. By linking intellectual networks onto genealogies of research equipment, a stream of new phenomena is produced on which theoretical interpretations may be constructed. Innovation and hence intellectual reputations no longer depend on moves in abstraction-reflexivity sequence, as in philosophy, but on manipulating the forefront of research technology.” The development of quick consensus at the intellectual core solidified these networks and allowed them to develop exponentially. The convergence of these factors transformed the Western world and generated the apogee of what Gebser would call the “mental” age – the Age of Reason. While a great boon in many ways, as Gebser points out, it lacks a moral center – it creates remarkable technology but no commensurately powerful moral values system that governs how it should be used. That failure has led us to the brink of planetary destruction either through our exploitation of the earth or through nuclear annihilation.

So the question, it seems to me, is how do we, as humanity, create “rapid discovery morality” before it is too late? What are its constituent parts? It seems that some pieces are in place. We have now mapped both the human psyche and the stages of moral and social development to some degree. We have models in place that allow a human being to consciously and intentionally begin to explore human potential. We also have a popular convergence of great spiritual traditions in the West and the East in forms heretofore unknown. Finally, for better and for worse, we have an occultism that is playing at the margins of this process. What we do not have are lineages for passing on information, nor have we discovered processes that reliably take advantage of moving those individuals and societies that are willing to the next higher stages of development. That, it seems to me, is the challenge of the religious calling – first for ourselves, then for our communities, and finally for the world. Do we not owe it to ourselve and our planet to figure this out sooner rather than later?

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Social Transcendence

In her book, Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics, Marsha Sinetar talks of the inherent disquiet that accompanies the beginning of the spiritual journey. There is, she says, a distancing from social convention and being enmeshed in the currents of life. She calls this process “social transcendence”. From my experience, there is a great deal of truth in this concept. Those who seek a spiritual path are a bit syncopated. We are in the world, but not quite of it. We make different choices for different reasons than our peers. This difference is part of what fuels and engages us in the quest of deeper truths. There is nothing special in this, everyone has this to some degree, it is only that those who are on a self-consciously spiritual path don't push these things away - they instead embrace them.

This is, to my mind, precisely where a vipassana practice is so very useful. When I am paying attention to the little things, as they arise in my awareness, I find that I socially transcend in more skillful ways. As I pay attention, it becomes increasingly clear that a large part of my “identity” is the result of social conditioning and I can actually see its working as it exists in my thoughts and actions. This revelation of the nature of the the self, with the slow peeling back of the accretions of social layers, admits the freedom required to begin to explore my own true nature. And, as I do this, I become less reactive in the world around me. I am naturally more tolerant of the social unfolding. And, on very good days, I am able to see that process clearly enough to be able to interject the right action at just the right point to be helpful.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Humanism Reprise

In the recent article “Does Humanism need to be new?” Doug Muder wrestles with the question of how humanism can be made relevant and how a militant new atheism fits into the picture. To paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, “practical people who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct philosopher.” Some of my very best friends are religious humanists, and I care for them deeply. They are very moral and kind people and have very good intentions. However, I have to say that they are the unwitting slaves of some very defunct philosophers.

With all due respect to them and to good humanists everywhere, humanism is fighting a rearguard action and simply will not succeed. Its quest for widespread acceptance of an Enlightenment worldview is doomed to ultimate failure. While the reasons for this inevitable failure are intensely complex and wrapped in long history, the culmination of the line of the thought that spelt their demise is found in the thinking David Hume. While this grossly oversimplifies the matter, it is the best leverage point I know of to make this point. Hume’s body of work conclusively demonstrates that one cannot arrive at a moral system from observable phenomena alone. That singular observation, the rationale behind it and its necessary corollaries spelled out more fully in Hume’s broader work sound the death knell to an optimistic humanist value structure. This fundamental breakdown of the ability to of representational reason alone to cope with moral and aesthetic truth, as acknowledged by Hume, accounts for the Humanism’s increasingly marginalized voice

If humanism had its birth in the early renaissance, it met its demise over 300 years ago in the late Enlightenment. The rise of empirical skepticism was a deathblow from which it cannot recover. The German and English Idealists attempted to revive a moral center, but in the end were unsuccessful. To date we have not been able to find a widely acceptable answer to the question of the relationship between reason and morals. Post-Kantians everywhere (and most of those educated in universities after the 1960s are the unwitting slaves of Kant and his intellectual progeny) understand this problem at a visceral level. Such people recognize the fundamental inability of Humanism to put forward a compelling moral position.

This fundamental failure of humanists to grasp post-modernist thought means that they will be forever marginalized. The world has clearly moved on into postmodernism and many are now exploring integral models of understanding the world. Humanism simply does not have the intellectual horsepower to address humanity’s deepest questions. Continuing to dream of a rationalist renaissance is a fine fantasy, but rather quixotic in a post-modern world.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Contemplative Activism

What is the relationship between the contemplative life and the ethical life? Is there a way to tie these two together? To what extent does the development of a greater sense of inner spaciousness and transformation result in more profoundly transformative practices in our efforts to make the world a better place? Many intuitively believe that the outer journey must be supported by a rich interior life and that an exclusive focus on interior practice is narcissistic and in the end, counter-productive to true spiritual development. Yet the connection between a rich interior life and a robust social engagement remains elusive. Precisely how these two are connected remains, for many, a mystery.

While pondering this question recently, the image of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs popped into my awareness and I began to play with it. As most will recall, Abraham Maslow attempted to create a model for psychological health. He posited that there is a hierarchy of needs that human beings have. These start with base survival needs (such as food, shelter and warmth), move into subtler needs (such as love, belongingness and self-esteem) and eventually end up in transformative needs, such as self-actualization and transcendence. He referred to the lower needs as “D-needs” or deficiency needs and “B-needs” or being needs. The D-needs are fulfilled out of a sense of basic drives and, if they are not met, the vacuum is felt acutely. B-needs are far less compelling and meeting them is largely optional. If they are not met, the individual may feel a sense of disquiet, but individuals need not pursue these for survival or even contentment.

As we ponder the higher levels of need – needs for self-actualization and transcendence – it seems that the pursuit of meeting these needs is what many people mean by leading a spiritual life. Those individuals who develop disciplines in these areas and consistently seek to explore these aspects of their lives are often said to have spiritual disciplines.

At the other end of the pyramid, something very interesting emerges as we ponder the question of ethics. It seems that creating situations which impair or potentially impair the ability of others to meet these basic needs is clearly immoral. For example, stealing is wrong because it threatens the individual’s ability to meet basic needs. Adultry is wrong because it alienates one from a fundamental source of love and affection. Denying health care seems wrong because it threatens physical survival and also a persons need to feel safe and secure. For those with some subtlety in their ethical analysis, we would say that stealing from a poor person is more reprehensible than stealing from someone who is wealthy because of the increased risk to that the poor person will be unable to meet basic needs.

Finally, we would say that the person who goes out of her way to provide for the basic needs of others is a highly ethical person. The person who gives their time or funds to feed the hungry, house the homeless or ensure basic liberties for those who have few legal or social protections, are held up as models of ethical behavior. Those who give self-sacrificially to meet these types of needs are seen not merely as ethical people, but as highly spiritual people, particularly where this type of self-sacrifice is seen not as motivated by pathology but out of a sense of psychological abundance.

The notion that spirituality and ethics is tied together by human need provides the possibility of bridging the gap between contemplative life and the life of the activist. Seeking to meet the basic needs of others is the heart of activism, seeking to meet the growth needs of self is spirituality. Thus, spirituality and ethics are flip sides of the same coin.

In looking more deeply at the higher order needs, Maslow noted that, at these stages, effort is required to keep B-needs alive and engaged. There is a point at which people who are seeking to reach their fuller potentials will become self-motivated and create a positive loop that will continually feed the need for further growth. One of the principal ways in which that that cycle can become self-perpetuating is through a concerted and sustained effort to meet the D-needs of others. This focus on others can become a prime driver in the process of self-actualization. Indeed, to do so in healthy ways requires that the B-needs be addressed. Those who become lost in meeting the D-needs of others, without boundaries or a healthy sense of ego protection, are quickly burned out and diminished. Conversely, those who simply seek to meet B-needs find it difficult to sustain motivation, particularly in early stages of B-need development.

While it is clearly possible to engage in meeting B-needs without affirmative ethical behavior (i.e. intentionally seeking to meet lower level needs in others), one could argue that a person seeking to fully self-actualize and do so as effectively as possible, will engage in deeply ethical behavior that stresses not merely doing no harm but actually seeking opportunities to do good for others. Thus, commitment to justice and compassion fosters spiritual growth.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Implementing the Plan

Introduction

This is the final installment on the series Bullfrogs in Wheelbarrows. Here we get to the level of implementing our plan. The work of any church can be divided into two basic parts – maintenance and ministry. The maintenance side is all about meeting the needs of the organization. Any organization requires a certain amount of effort simply to keep the organization afloat. In a church this means that you need a finance committee, a building and grounds committee, a stewardship committee and perhaps one or two others. These are important ministries in themselves and should be see as such. Folks in these committees are real servants to the entire community and it is their work that allows the church to continue to exist. However, if you compare the needs you identified in the strategic plan to the committee structure that you have, probably not one of committees on the maintenance side would be reflected. Thus it is important to differentiate between an individual ministry (which may be to serve on the Finance Committee) and the ministry of the church, which is to meet needs of individuals, families and the community at large.

Overhead and Human Capital

If you considered maintenance of the organization as “overhead”, you would almost certainly want to allocate only a small percentage of your resources to that effort. The vast bulk of your efforts would be spent in actually doing the work of the business. Perhaps the most valuable asset that a church has is its people and the commitment, creativity, imagination and hard work that they put into making the church a viable place. These hours of time are a form of “capital” that must be stewarded. Thus a significant goal would be to decrease the volunteer hour “overhead” that goes into maintaining the organization and increasing the amount that goes to meeting the needs of individuals, families and the broader community.

Structural Alignment

So let’s look at your existing committee structure. Take out two sheets of paper and create three columns. Title the first two Maintenance and Ministry, respectively. List your existing committees under each column. Under the third column list the Needs from your strategic plan. (as outlined in the last article). Now draw lines from each need to the committee that is meeting that need. What is the overlap?

On your second sheet of paper, reorganize your church so that each need has a group of people that is meeting that need. Some needs may be subdivided, but the idea is that we are focusing on the needs and the needs are driving structure, not the other way around. On the Maintenance side of the chart, put the minimum number of people necessary to do that job. For example, some churches have found that a committee of 1 is sufficient for finance if it is the right person and there is good oversight. This is an important number to keep in mind as think about all of the work that must be done in the church Many churches are finding that committees work well on the Maintenance side of the chart, but that the committee model carries too much baggage to work well on the Ministry side. One option to consider would be to have Ministry Teams that are focused on a need with a steering committee of a couple of team members who actually meet to discuss the coordination of the work of the team.

Now the ministry teams or committees are charged with meeting the need based on the strategic plan’s statement. The Board can take its hands off and the creativity and imagination of the people on those teams can simply go to town on meeting those needs. These committees or ministry teams can look at the need, at the statement in the strategic plan, go to work to meet that need as it sees fit. The Board exists to monitor issues as they arise and, in rare cases, to intervene if groups need to be called back to task.

Now you have structure that allows for maximization of the chaordic nature of the church. It is now powered from the periphery but unified at the core; it is based on clarity of share purpose and principles; it enables and empowers its constituent parts; it is durable in purpose, but malleable in form and function; it has distributed power, rights and responsibility; it should liberate and amplify ingenuity, initiative and judgment; it is compatible with and fosters diversity, complexity and change; and it restrains power and embeds authority in persons vested with accomplishing the tasks.

A Side Note on Giftedness

In the early Christian church, there was a recognition that people have different roles to play in the life of a church. They saw these roles as "charisma" or "gifts" given by God to individuals and the community. These gifts were part of what made individuals feel special and connected to the community, gave them a sense of purpose and that they were a valued and important contributor. From what I have seen in UU churches, we don't focus on this much. I think that is a shame. Clearly the gifts and talents that we have are diverse and many of us can serve the church in a variety of ways, but my guess is that most of us have a place where we feel most productive and most useful to our community and where the work most fulfills us. Any chaordic organization should take than giftedness into account and, perhaps. as a church, it might not be a a bad idea to a bit more "charismatic" in the sense of empowering people to do what they are good at and what has heart and meaning for them. This sense of giftedness is often what moves our contributions of time and effort from being "work" to "play".

Conclusion

At the end of this process we have come to creating a model that

1. Accounts for the chaordic nature of most UU churches
2. Ties every aspect of the organization in meeting basic needs.
3. Provides clarity to each person in the organization.
4. Creates an empowering and effective construct for meeting the real needs of people.

I hope that this has been helpful. Please feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have.

If you want to start this series from the beginning, go to Bullfrogs in Wheelbarrows.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.