| The Next Step in Evolution:
Exploring the Organizing Principles that Continue to Structure our Mindset Transpersonality Times | by Karen Engelsen “What is the spiritual cost of knowing every day that one human being is taking aim at another human being with intent to kill?” - Phil Steger, Augsburg College When Phil Steger, executive director of Friends for a Non-Violent World, spoke these words at the rally for the Roadmap Out of Iraq, an appreciative roar emerged from hundreds of attendees. As I craned my neck around to see all the cheering faces, a strange sensation washed through me, a lifting of my spirit that I literally had not felt in years. What I felt was hope. Connection. Community. We were One Mind, cheering through 500 voices. I’d all but forgotten what it felt like to be a part of something larger than myself. I’d been so immersed in my personal soulwork, that I’d lost sight of the World Soul. In her book Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach writes, “Without a genuine willingness to let in the suffering of others, our spiritual practice remains empty…when we are caught in our own self-centered drama, everyone else becomes ‘other’ to us, different and unreal.” There has been a spiritual cost for us, in knowing that our countrymen are taking aim at other human beings with intent to kill, in our refusal to take in the suffering of countless Iraqis facing American guns, and Phil did well to remind us of it. Insofar as we have stayed raptly focused on our own dramas and failed to comprehend the suffering of our fellow human beings, we spiritual seekers have been complicit in the emptying of our own spiritual practices. We’ve come loose from our Universal, human moorings, and drifted away in search of Oceanic Bliss. How do we find our way back to a collective, compassionate harbor? How did we get lost in the first place? Whether we speak of resource wars, religious wars or “culture wars,” the essence of the conflict lies in the creation of an “other” that is not us, whom we must oppose. Those of us who work to reclaim feelings and sensitivity instead of reliance on cold rationality, who believe in spreading the earth’s resources and opportunities among all members of the human race, and value reaching decisions through reconciliation and consensus processes, are a distinct sector of society that the author Paul Ray has termed “Cultural Creatives.” In our current culture wars, this perspective is mocked by terms such as “Do-gooder,” “Sensitive New Age Guy” or “Treehugger,” and described as “leftovers of the ’60s.” Facing daily barrage of “othering,” Cultural Creatives ceded the public sector, and instead, retreated into private arenas of home, workshops, seminars and gathering of the like-minded. We’ve allowed the voices of those with other values to predominate in government and media. In doing so, we Cultural Creatives have become marginalized, and lost contact with each other and our collective identity. We’ve fallen prey to what Crenson and Ginsberg in Downsizing Democracy call the “disaggregation of the public into a collection of private citizens.” This “Culture War” is actually a finger pointing to the leading edge of our spiritual evolution. Spiritual teachers from Sri Arobindo to Ken Wilber describe our spiritual evolution as a nested set of spiritual realities that unfold over time. Each new layer of spirit is deeper and more profound, enfolding ever more complex spiritual realities. The term “culture wars” aptly conveys the abrasion between old evolutionary patterns, and the arising new consciousness. Evolution of consciousness emerges as much more than a random event. There is a logic, a formal structure to its unfolding. The concept of a “meme” was first proposed in the 1970s to describe units of cultural transmission. According to Don Beck in his book Spiral Dynamics, “core value memes” act as organizing principles that are so central to the way we think that they can “reach across whole groups of people and begin to structure mindsets on their own.” A helpful image is to think of a “meme” as a “program” that runs on a “multi-human” platform, directing our thoughts, beliefs and actions. In the same manner that DNA replicates itself in a body, a meme is “bio-psycho-social-spiritual DNA-type blueprint that spreads throughout a culture, and plays out in all areas of cultural expression, forming survival codes, myths of origin, artistic forms, lifestyles and senses of community.” Memes have arisen in ever-more-complex orders during the course of our evolution, from those that promoted no more than raw survival, to the new memes conveying global holism and systems thinking. Problems are resolved by the adoption of one meme, but in turn, each creates a new set of problems that can only be resolved by adoption of the next, more complex meme. Thus we progress, individually and collectively as cultures, through each meme in sequence as we mature. “What I am proposing is that the psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating, spiraling process, marked by progressive subordination of older, lower-order behavior systems to newer, higher-order systems as man’s existential problems change.” -- Dr. Clare Graves Core values within each meme tend to oppose the core values of other memes, resulting in “culture wars.” For example, one highly visible meme in opposition to the values of Cultural Creatives is conveyed in the following language: “The world is a jungle full of threats and predators. Stand tall, expect attention and demand respect. Conquer, out-fox and dominate other aggressors.” According to Spiral Dynamics, this Impulsive, egocentric meme-set of “world-as-jungle” describes a consciousness that first arose 10,000 years ago. While this meme is vitalizing and brings us the strength to accomplish our work in the face of life’s resistance, it also has negative aspects. If you listen to the war-drums beating in Washington, you’ll hear the downside: “Might Makes Right.” Those acting out this meme lack empathy for the “Other.” In the spiritual arena, the God of this mindset is the wrathful Thunderer, the punitive God of the Old Testament – an image of the divine that many Cultural Creatives have a serious beef with. At this phase of consciousness, God is very much an external force, a kind of sadistic Father that must be appeased. Many of us began our spiritual quests in search of healing from the punitive effects of this God-image. The next meme unfolded to resolve the problem of channeling and directing the potent energies of the Egoistic meme. The Purposeful/Authoritarian meme first arose 5,000 years ago, embodied most clearly in the “Peoples of the Book.” By “The Book” I refer to those God-given written codes with basic themes of sacrificing oneself to the righteous pathway, Cause, or Truth; order that must be enforced by an external code of conduct based on eternal, absolute principles; the belief that impulsivity must be controlled through guilt; and that laws, regulations, discipline build character and moral fiber. Put into play, this meme has the effect of stabilizing societies and human relationships, resolving the problem of lawlessness and disorder inherent in the Egocentric meme. However, the Authoritarian meme has its own downside. Study this meme long enough, and it becomes visible that it is one still shared, ironically, by both militant Islamists AND Fundamentalist Christians. Islamic Fundamentalism bears a stark resemblance to Christian Fundamentalism in a mutual hostility to the pluralistic, secular Nation-State, and the goals of turning the State (be it Afghanistan OR America) into a Theocracy whose mission is to spread the Word (Gospel or Koran) as they interpret it. Essential to the Fundamentalist perspective is a rigid adherence to the “Laws of God” – and a subsequent demonizing of “unbelievers” into others only deserving ostracism or death. This is a virulent form of “othering” that many Cultural Creatives have struggled to heal from. Many of us have been the recipients of projected sin – as women, gays, people of color, Pagans/Buddhists, Native Americans…the list goes on. The root issue is the Authoritarian need to project shadow onto an entire class of people, objectify and then ostracize them as a means to expiate some “original sin.” Fortunately, those playing out the Authoritarian meme only account for about 25 percent of humanity at this time. By far the largest portion of us constitute the Achievist/Strategic meme, which arose about 300 years ago, with the Enlightenment – again, as a response to the toxic aspects of the previous meme. For this 50 percent of the population, the basic theme is to act in your own self-interest by playing the game to WIN. By manipulating Earth’s resources, we’re meant to create and spread the good life. It’s not the Holy, but the risk takers and competitors who deserve success. Societies prosper through strategy, technology and competitiveness. This meme provided the genesis of science, a belief in the superiority of human thought and the flowering of Democracy. One of the triumphs of the Achievist meme is the insistence on “proof,” rather than reliance on blind faith. On the surface, reliance on the rational mind and the objective study of the material world sounds like a vast improvement over the Authoritarian meme, but as with any meme, its extremes become toxic. The Achievist meme can lead to a focus on winning at all costs, blindness to the communal good and de-sacradization of life. Spirit becomes divorced from matter, and if God isn’t dead, he’s merely a mathematical property of the Universe. This leads to a conviction that all material things are no more than objects. Rather than being a never-ending flow of process that arises, is in constant flux, then dissipates, “materialism” treats every phenomenon or event as a discrete, isolated thing. The results are a damaged environment and a pervasive sense of alienation; self from nature, self from God, self from Others. If we’re all “objects”…there is no glue to bind us. Succumbing to the lure of the Achievist urge to consume is one of the ways we Cultural Creatives can lose sight of our values. We’ve been invited to treat Enlightenment as a “thing” – separate and outside of us. If we just take the right workshop, complete the right program, give the right guru our money, the return on investment will be Enlightenment. However, if we “buy into” that perspective, we’ve lost understanding that spirituality is not an object to be consumed, but a process to be lived – and we’ve started to drift into dangerously self-oriented waters. So who are we at our best, we Cultural Creatives? The leading edge of spiritual evolution? And how do we find our way back to our essence? There are three memes at play in our group. The first is the Egalitarian meme, arising about 150 years ago and now constituting about 22 percent of the population. Our themes are the search to recover the indwelling Soul that’s been lost in separation of spirit from matter, the search for peace within ourselves, and the work to create caring forms of community. We’re built to be the healers, the human “glue” that binds community together. We’ve realized the value of relationships – our relationship with the Divine, with fellow seekers in sangha, in our families, neighborhoods, businesses, Nation and World. We’ve realized that salvation lies in joining together, relating to each other, not being driven further into individual, fearful, consumptive egoic states. Like every meme, the Egalitarian phase has its positives, as well as its negative expressions. The philosopher Ken Wilber refers to the downside of the Egalitarian phase as “Boomeritis”: a tendency to align with Egocentric narcissism to destroy the structures built by Authoritarian and Achievist memes. In the insistence on flattened hierarchies and equalizing resources, Egalitarians curtail the ability of systems to address the very problems they seek to solve. It does this by destroying Achievist economic systems (recall the effects of communism on the economy of the Soviet Union), and destruction of Authoritarian ability to control Egoistic meme expressions of power run rampant. (An example: When the Baathist party control of Iraq was removed, individual guerrilla warfare rapidly increased.) Which brings us to the cusp of our current evolution. Each of the previous memes – Egocentric, Authoritarian, Achievist and Egalitarian – has at its core a boundaried and limited sense of what constitutes the self, determined through relationship with a “not-I” – an Other. This separation and conflict is part of what defines the first tier of human evolution. However, Cultural Creatives harbor the second tier memes that are the cutting edge of Spiritual Evolution– twin memes that no longer rely on boundaried definitions of Self -— the Integrative and Holistic memes. Starting about 50 years ago, this second tier began to express in the human collective. The Integrative meme brought us the understanding that life is a kaleidoscope of natural hierarchies, systems and forms. Here is when we first gain understanding that human differences, rather than irrevocably dividing us, can be integrated into an interdependent, natural, flow of process, one where it is understood that chaos and change are natural, rather than being something to fight against. This meme is the one that demonstrates all memes are necessary in their place and time, and all have value to resolve particular human needs. It is not necessary to make war against those of another meme-set, but rather to understand the life conditions and needs driving that particular meme expression. With understanding comes respect and tolerance. Integratives emphasize the understanding that we do not arrive at an “end state,” but rather that we are always in process of learning, always in process of becoming. The Integrative meme is the twin, individual phase of the Holistic meme, a collective meme, which began to arise a mere 30 years ago. Here, one experiences the wholeness of existence through mind and spirit – a state formerly only spoken of by the rare few adepts. As a species, we’re now developing a conscious knowing that the world is a single, dynamic organism with a collective mind – a paradigm first discussed by Teilard de Chardin as the “Noosphere.” Within this meme, self is known as both distinct and as a phase or aspect of a larger, compassionate whole. At this level of human evolution, it is no longer possible to view another human being as an “Other,” to treat him as an object to be manipulated, dominated or destroyed for one’s own purposes. Thinking that I, on one side of a gun, am separate from you, on the other, is readily understood as a delusional, incomplete state of consciousness. The spiritual cost of knowing every day that one human being is taking aim at another human being with intent to kill is precisely this: Loss of our essential nature. It is a fall from grace, into ignorance, a fear-filled retrograde spiritual devolution. Much language of the Cultural Creatives has been cast in terms of personal healing from collective wounding. Our stories have been about “my” path to bodily healing, “my” relationship with the Divine. We’ve rightfully had to recover our lost sense of self, overwritten by church dogma, savaged and sold by creeping corporatism. Writing these narratives of discovery has been a vital and necessary step in pursuit of the spiritual path, and in recovering a sense of ensoulment. At this juncture, however, there is a great need to reach beyond personal narrative and toward a progressive collective destiny. It is imperative that we evolve beyond fear and loathing of the “Other” and embrace, fully and consciously, a profound understanding of the gifts differences bring to the human collective. This deep need for a holistic vision in our culture was driven home to me when another speaker at the rally, Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak spoke of his family’s ritual of dining together. While preparing the meal, he noted, often all one heard on the news was report after report of hatred, killing and revenge. The constant barrage left him feeling lonely and separated from other people. Yet, as he dined with his family, Mayor Rybak knew a different reality, one of connection and warmth. He noted the striking disconnect between the world on the television, and the world that we experience in our homes and families. It is pivotal, he said, for us to take part together, to know that we are not alone. Humanity’s evolution is not just an abstract concept. It is accomplished by reaching out our hands across lines of race, geography and faith, creating a resurgence of hope, and ending our sense of alienation from each other. Healing our separation into small, frightened individual selves lies in the strength inherent in community. Let’s make that happen! Let’s reclaim our collective identity as Cultural Creatives, people who believe in the indivisible wholeness of our nation and the world. Let’s hold out the hand of brotherhood to people that our leaders would have us treat as “Others.” We have an evolutionary mandate to work together to heal the environment, create fair and just economies, and cherish each other as sacred repositories of a rich and diverse Global Wisdom. Let’s take that next step in our evolution, and embrace the full force of our human potential! “Let us go forth and be makers and repairers of the peace.” – Phil Steger Resources: For further information on Spiral Dynamics search on ‘Spiral Dynamics’ on this site: www.wie.org Also see Spiral Dynamics – Mastering Values, Leadership & Change (Blackwell, 1996) Don Beck’s Website: www.spiraldynamics.net For information on U.S. Out of Iraq, see: www.roadmapoutofiraq.org Karen Engelsen is a writer, editor and writing consultant who assists writers to publish works on spiritual development. She also teaches Spiral Dynamics in Community Education classes. She can be reached at siribear@earthlink.net Copyright © 2004 Karen Engelsen, all rights reserved. |
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Nov 2004 |
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