Understanding The Way
If the way is not seeking better ways, it is not The Way.
This article is about the goal of Actualisation, and to be clear, actualisation of a different sort that what modern psychology and sociology popularised off the back of Abraham Maslow’s work. To be clear, I believe Maslow had the correct, wider perspective, only how his work is served and digested, is shallower than he intended, and what is remotely possible.
Our current limits are not our permanent limitations. The human race is standing at a unique frontier. We are poised on the threshold of an impossible moment, we are so incredibly empowered right now. We have never had this amount of technology and understanding and knowledge at our fingertips, and our ability to reach for the stars, to define a society that is wholesome and enlightened, is limited only by our desire and our knowledge, not by our potential. Our potential is infinite.
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If The Way is anything, it is amending ourself to whichever path will produce the skillful, optimal avoidance of regret.
All of the human story has been played out on the chessboard of the what Maslow described as the hierarchy of needs, usually depicted as a pyramid, with the most fundamental physiological needs and then safety needs at the base, and the pinnacle of the pyramid demarcated for ‘actualisation’, that is to say all those human endeavours we pursue in the interests of making real a potential within us.
Every war, every famine, every invention, every innovation throughout human history was to address some perceived need on the hierarchy of needs. From the actions of the great conquerors like Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great, from the Magna Carta to the Declaration of Independence, from the invention of the aqueduct to the ubiquity of modern plumbing - Not a single one was not done in the service of human needs, from the most basic to the most far-seeing.
In 1943, American psychologist Abraham Maslow first introduced the concept of a hierarchy of needs in a paper, titled "A Theory of Human Motivation", and again in his subsequent book, "Motivation and Personality." This hierarchy suggests that all people are motivated to fulfill basic needs before moving on to other, more advanced needs.
The premise was brilliant and in many ways rather simple; human needs were arranged into 5 tiers of a pyramid, with the most fundamental physiological needs at the base, and grading up steadily in social relevance, culminating in Esteem, and the apex of the pyramid reserved for what Maslow referred to as Self-Actualisation, or self-fulfillment needs.
There is something of a paradox at play here, because the original sense of what Maslow meant by self-actualisation is most certainly less short-sighted than what came to be popularly understood. The modern interpretation of self-actualisation is in fact far more short-sighted than what we will be discussing in this text: namely ‘True Actualisation’. In one sense the project is exactly a pursuit of self-fulfillment as Maslow and modern psychology define it, but it is also so much more than that. The lay-interpretation we live with and which contemporary psychology and sociology recognise, is that the context is limited to non-spiritual pursuits. (To avoid a further digression see the article on Advocating Spiritual Health for definitions of what is intended by this term). The implication of what this can mean is so much greater and more expansive than the ‘here-and-now’ of our modern human reductionist context.
“What a man can be, he must be.”
Abraham Maslow.
The full quote from Maslow’s own work, namely his book Motivation and Personality:
“A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization. . . . This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”
— Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality
Whether Abraham Maslow had the wisdom and vision to fully understand the implications of his own words can only be guessed; Maslow, although Jewish, was non-religious. We might assume that his views on humans and the ‘human potential’ were likely imagined and described through the comparatively limited lens of the sciences.
Beyond Maslow.
It can be more simply put in these two different but related framings which apply when most people discuss or consider actualisation:
Firstly, the general assumption relates to pursuit and attainment of the individual, regardless of the implications it has on society and humanity.
Secondly, it almost always confined to a context of human excellence in arbitrary fields of accomplishment.
The widespread adoption of Maslow’s work is under the rubric of these two assumptions.
But it turns out that Maslow intended something further, that is to say, he also proposed something beyond what is commonly recognised and appreciated as Maslow’s work. Maslow went beyond Maslow.
Transpersonal psychology or spiritual psychology includes but eclipses the scope of actualisation to the context of the individual the way it is framed in the earlier two assumptions.
What is Transpersonal Psychology you ask?
Transpersonal psychology is a branch of psychology that explores the spiritual and transcendent aspects of human experience, such as self-transcendence, peak experiences, and mystical states. It views individuals as more than just their bodies and minds, considering our capacity to experience deeper or higher states of consciousness.
If this discussion was a Venn Diagram, the mundane vernacular sense of actualisation and self actualisation would be a smaller somewhat off-centre circle, partially intersecting with a larger circle of transpersonal actualisation, thoroughly eclipsed by an enormous circle of Aligned Stable Mutual Actualisation.
We will get to that shortly.
The words of Maslow, provide the most telling clue, as poignant as they are beautiful: “…to become everything one is capable of becoming.” Maslow was particularly concerned with the impelling force of ‘desire to become more…, everything one is capable of becoming.’
The missing ingredients in our world today is The Desire and Imagination. We simply lack the imagination to conceive of a potential large and worthy enough of our true desire.
The question we are invited to sit with, is what the potential the human species could be. To begin unfolding the implications of that question we take a look back to where so much of the best of our modern thinking and reasoning began; Ancient Greece.
A Brief Look Back to Antiquity.
Ancient Greek philosophy gives us these two related concepts:
Entelecheia
that which realizes or makes actual what is otherwise merely potential.
and
Telos
the ancient Greek term for an end, fulfilment, completion of a goal or aim.
Telos is a term used by philosopher Aristotle to refer to the final cause of a natural organ or entity, or of human art. Telos is the root of the modern term teleology, the study of purposiveness or of objects with a view to their aims, purposes, or intentions that is to say the explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they might serve rather than the cause by which they arise.
This was a revolutionary idea because of how it changed the focus of the the big question. Humans have always lived under the shadow of the big question: What is the meaning of existence and of Life?
For a significant slice of human enterprise, that is superstitious, scientific and religious have been in service of defining the causes and the rules they imply, to answer all questions about who we are in relation to the world, and from that define how we ought to conduct ourselves.
So much of our exploration of our sense of Meaning, especially in the context of human life, suffering, misadventure and potential, the focus has been on the question of where we came from, who made us, what the origin of life was, what lead us here. For many thousands of years, this conversation was held at the level of intimacy with nature and the superstitions and mythologies we attached to that. Later our dogmatic religions such as Juadism and its offspring Christianity and later Islam made their own absolute claims about the answers to the big question. The Age of Reason gave us the modern sciences which we enjoy today, and which have explained again so much of our origins and the nature of progression of life, and the laws by which our universe will one day suffer the energy death of entropy. Philosophy was the only game in town that tried always to broker a mediation between religion and science and ask the question of what the meaning to life might be, straddled in between the tension of these two opposite voices of Science and Religion.
Religion has been playing catch-up with science since the very first time it tried to carve into stone or commit to parchment, the truth about the world, having to concede, moderate and give ground in the face of emerging unfolding reality. Science, conversely, has been trying to explain the inexplicable, while trying to discount the ineffable.
The irony is that while being completely misinformed, Religion makes absolute claims about what our Meaning is, and what we should be doing to fulfil it, while science is constantly asking itself if something else could be more true, and as a rule would never venture to assert anything about what ought to be. In fact, there are adherents to atheism that find some comfort in the assertion that there is no meaning to existence, that it just is, and we are left, if we choose, to find meaning.
Philosophy, via the contribution of Albert Camus, proposed that the meaning of human existence was to create meaning.
For our purposes, Telos and Entelecheia are more useful than either science or religion, because they focus on the purpose or the intention, and the potential. They drag our attention away from trying to pick the locks of how things were made and when and who did it, to what Life wants of us, as implied by our potential.
This leaves us with two key considerations: Desire and Potential.
The Question of Potential.
If Actualisation is the pursuit of our potential, it cannot be a singular goal, and it is most certainly cannot so myopic as ‘self-actualisation’.
Actualisation in the context we are referring to, is not simply excelling at something, or a sense of fulfilment because of said accomplishment - this is merely an extension of the Esteem needs of the fourth tier of the hierarchy of needs. We are referring to the pursuit of Purpose, in alignment with the un-scratchable itch some of us are plagued by, whereby we cannot come to rest without making this pursuit a part of our lives. (Whenever I mention Actualisation, in any of my writing, this is what I am referring to.)
This also cannot be something which is confined to the level of an individual either. A couple can actualise in the context of their relationship, a family can actualise, nations can actualise. Our species can actualise.
Our current limits are not our permanent limitations. The human race is standing at a unique frontier. We are poised on the threshold of an impossible moment, we are so incredibly empowered right now. We have never had this amount of technology and understanding and knowledge at our fingertips, and our ability to reach for the stars, to define a society that is wholesome and enlightened, is limited only by our desire and our knowledge, not by our potential. Our potential is infinite.
All of the problems we face in the world at the moment, and in ourselves, are more coordination and alignment problems than they are capability problems. On an individual level, we want to eat healthier, be fitter, have better relationships, we want to grow and develop, we want to binge-watch and doom scroll less, we want to pursue more things that give our lives meaning, and less that erode our sense of meaning. We want to minimise our regret. We want to reach the end of a day, a month, a year, a life even, with minimal avoidable regret.
If THE WAY is anything, it is amending ourself to whichever path will produce the skillful, optimal avoidance of regret. We simply are not awake to the implications of how brief are rare life is, and the implications of how much better life could be, what better choices we might be making, what better incentives we might be earnestly pursuing. By definition, this has to encompass our self-awareness, our emotional competence, our health and wellness, our mobility and our ‘spiritual wellness’. By definition this has to encompass an understanding of what is, on both sides of every duality.
It is no different at a societal or community level. We have normalised the idea of states and nations. Some people see a future defined on lines of race, or ideology, or religion. The problem is that none of those have at their core, a set of shared incentives which do not imply drawbacks and inevitable costs to something or someone else, to their hierarchy of needs. Capitalism assumes eternal growth, based on an endless supply of materials and energy. All our major world religions are banking on an end-state that will play out in some other arena, with different laws and needs than the ones we live with. The ideology of manifest destiny which defined the Abrahamic religions as well as the psyche of America, is reliant on ‘our team’ winning, at the expense of all the other teams. These are so clearly myopic and primitive in their scope. But they were wrong in the simplistic classic sense.
It becomes easier to grasp when we consider two things, the first is the idea of iteration, the second is the concept of a sandbox environment. In modern software and product development these two conventions have enabled a flourishing of delivery, innovation and progress.
How Software Development defines Actualisation.
The sandbox environment is a set of circumstances where different building blocks of a solution can be cobbled together and tinkered with to produce different expressions for different applications.
Iteration is simply the technological mimicry of evolution, guided not by the fractal variation and external influences of nature, but by the deliberate intervention of the developers who enhance features and ameliorate bugs to build progressively on earlier iterations towards ‘ever better’. Iterations and releases are how software and other technology products are improved iteratively over time.
Complex version control systems have been developed in contemporary software development practices, whereby instead of creation linear progression of versions, many different aspects of change and iteration can be worked on independently and simultaneously. This is called branching.
Branching is the process of creating a separate line of development, as per the bottom right model in the image above. This allows developers to work on new features or bug fixes without affecting the main codebase until the new work is ready to be merged back in. Each branch can be seen as a separate 'iteration' of the software, but unlike iterations, branches can exist concurrently, allowing for multiple lines of development to be pursued at the same time.
All our earlier forms of statecraft, laws and religion can be seen as iterations and variations on existing themes in the sandbox of human existence on earth. We just simply weren’t committing pull requests consciously, that we never began with a trusted code base, and we never added or took things away discerningly, not really. When modern “democracies” draft constitutions, or amend their laws, they believe they are doing this, but the codebase is always infected with superstition and bias, and earlier vestiges of cultural code which emerge over time as bugs.
All forms of government, all approaches to trade, communication, civil administration, education and welfare have been variations and iterations of each other. Our language is an example of this. Inside the Operating system of Windows or Apple OS you are using, there are vestiges of old DOS and Unix code that has been variated and iterated since the beginning of modern silicone computing. Our modern version of English still carries, traceable via etymology, ancient roots and meanings and windows into the psyche of the human race of that time. The modern Christian perspective on the sanctity of life and human rights has more to do with the age of enlightenment than the original texts.
Microsoft basically stole Unix and relabeled it as DOS and then pretended like they had invented something. Christianity itself, stole all of Judaism’s homework, added a whole bit on the back written not by the hand of god, but by dozens of authors and compiled by committee over several centuries, while making Jews the villains of the piece. Later England, fed up with the way the Catholic church’s political leanings undermined their interests against their European enemies, manufactured the Anglican faith, by copying the Catholic church’s homework and making the Catholics the villains of the piece.
To make matters more complicated, Judaisim was not the first ‘modern’ religion in the middle east either. Zoroastrianism had arrived there first, and for a while, stood a very good chance of becoming the dominant religion of the area. We very nearly had Zoroastrianism as our Windows 95 out of the age of polytheism into modernity.
Zoroastrianism is an Iranian religion and one of the world's oldest organized faiths, based on the teachings of the Iranian-speaking prophet Zoroaster. It has a dualistic cosmology of good and evil within the framework of a monotheistic ontology.
Monotheism is the belief in a single, all-powerful god. In Zoroastrianism, this supreme being is Ahura Mazda, who is considered to be all-good, the creator of the universe, and the source of all life.
Eschatology refers to the part of theology concerned with death, judgement, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind. In Zoroastrian eschatology, there is a belief in an apocalyptic end-time in which Ahura Mazda will ultimately defeat Angra Mainyu. This will be followed by a Last Judgement, where each individual will be judged based on their deeds during their lifetime. Those who have done more good than evil will be led to paradise (the 'House of Song'), while those who have done more evil will fall into the abyss (a place of torment). After this final judgement, the universe will be purified and evil will be destroyed. It sounds awfully familiar. In this way, Zoroastrianism unites the monotheistic concept of a supreme deity with a dualistic worldview of good vs. evil and an eschatological belief in a final judgement and the ultimate triumph of good.
The Danish invasions of England very nearly ended the ambitions of Alfred the Great, who was sent scurrying to live in the marshes for a time, as the last and greatest Christian kingdom fell to pagan rule. The Danes, like all their Norse neighbours still enthusiastically worshipped the Norse gods. The Norse religion had a compelling afterlife particularly for warriors who died in battle, which added ideological impetus and a set of incentives which made them even more formidable martial adversaries. When death is not a deterrent but carries a kind of salvatory incentive, the person on the other end of the sword or axe becomes even more dangerous in battle. As it happens, Alfred survived and his ideal of a unified England survived, eventually brought to fruition by his heirs. In time the Danes were converted to Christianity or driven out of England.
The way the Christians beat the Danes, was through civil military reforms not through their faith. Alfred increased and empowered the militia and ordered the fortification of towns.
If the Christians had not incorporated a militaristic branch adaption to their code base, they would have been overrun by the Vikings and central to our religious argument in the world today might not be Jesus and the prophet, but rather Odin and the Valkyries.
We have been going through merging and fusion of our belief systems and our societal operating systems since forever. The story of recent human history is a sandbox of innovation and testing of ideas. Not everything we have created or spilled blood over has survived, and not everything is equally arbitrary either. For example, money is here to stay. It cannot remain coins and notes forever, in the the same way it could not remain sea-shells and gold nuggets forever. Once upon a time there was no common currency, no lingua franca of trading. Money was an innovation which we have been iterating and variating since its inception. Our first stabs at advancing it to keep pace with our rate of change and evolution of commerce and exchange has been blockchain and cryptocurrencies, which by all accounts have great potential, but in their current unregulated state, are a sordid steaming mess.
As with so many of our failing systems and conventions, it is not the potential we lack, it is the commonality of Desire. We have some technology limits, but moreover as a species we suffer from a lack of common cause. We have a resounding coordination problem. No single ideology, no single technocratic solution can ever pave the way in the face of a lack of common cause. A lack of common cause is a lack of common incentive.
To be clear, The Way, is whatever gets anyone closer to the higher goal, of actualisation / transcendence, be that as an individual, a group or our entire species.
By definition, if the way that is being advocated or followed, is not evolving as the journey and the ‘travelers’ evolve, then it is not THE Way. (The premise of The Way, will be described in another article titled The Way and linked accordingly.)
We get prescribed many ways during childhood, at school, in the workplace, in marriage and other relationships, in parenting, in professional partnerships; in every conceivable project and pursuit of human endeavour. Someone is always prescribing or debating “the way”.
The Invitation
We are standing always, at a raw edge of existence we call ‘Now’. From where we stand, thousands of potential opportunities we could have stepped into, are closed, cauterised in place by the choices we made, or did not make.
Most people that have what is called a mid-life crisis, is the phenomenon of us waking up into the reality of our lives, and how they might play out given the shape of them we have allowed to congeal around us, and being alarmed at the absence of what you once felt. That absence was potential. As young people we invariable feel more invulnerable and immortal not because youth will last forever, but because the wellspring of what is possible, is still brimming over with potential. We have not yet made the magnitude of choices in our lives that will close those sliding doors, and while we stagger blindly across the threshold of those sliding-door moments, we are never aware of the magnitude of implications those choices or lack thereof will have.
It is like a tree that branches off from the trunk, every smaller branch holds a stream of potential experience and ways we can actualise. But the choosing of any bifurcation point, closes the door to the other one, and eventually we wake up in mid-life, closer to our inevitable ending, and aware that something is missing. And that something is potential.
The invitation is to wake up to this reality that is constantly unfolding. Caution and rumination are not the answer either; these simply lead to another form of regret, namely procrastination and the failure to live, the failure to risk.
Life expands and contracts in proportion one’s Courage.
Anais Nin
This is simply another form of cowardice. The only way forward, is to live from the heart, asking oneself at every juncture: “What would love look like right now?”
Some regret is inevitable. When we make choices from love rather than fear, the regret does not land the same. We each, and our relationships, our families, our entire species is always at the fork in the road of some choice leading down a path, the ends of which we cannot spy from here, standing as we are on the blind-curve. Nevertheless, ahead of lies, always another infinite tree of possibility.
Everything is possible, but not everything is probably. An apple tree cannot grow strawberries. Understanding how we are configured, how we are wired, owning and accepting our whole truth, all our shadow, our flaws and our desires, is the necessary step of liberation which can free us to begin to pursue our own pathway forward. We cannot choose what we truly want, and what we truly are -this was always what was meant by Dharma.
There is a paradox here. Half of all wisdom is about defiance, choosing to defy our limits and improve ourselves and outgrow who we were yesterday. The other half, is about acceptance, and equanimity and surrender to what is. The question we are left with is, what then are we to do in our projects of actualisation. The project is not simply about actualisation, but also about acceleration, asking, “what is the surest way?” This is essential because sometimes the wave of life is overtaking us and we are set to be swamped by the swell of the mundane and the troubling. Sometimes we can miss the invitation or arrive at the departure gates too late. At this moment in human history we do not have the time or the luxury to meander, much less to keep looking away.
To risk correcting Shakespeare, the question is not ‘to be or not to be’, it is ‘To Be or to Become’. We often get confused about when to Be, when to try and Become. When to Choose, when to Surrender. When to apply equanimity, when to apply defiance. Both which take a different kind of courage.
Being and Becoming. Actualisation and Integration.
All activities we pursue to lead fulfilling lives, to heal, to grow, we don't realise that they are two sides of the same coin. We are trying to go beyond ourselves, we are trying to accept our limitations with grace, and then we find comfort in knowing that our current limits are not permanent limitations.
Curiosity and Self-Permission are the two wings of the soul. Our current limits are not our permanent limitations.
It is like the phases of the moon, or a tide that ebbs and flows, like seasons that are ever turning - the answer of course, is neither wholly or only A no B, it is both. Actualisation and Integration. Anchoring below the surface to the deep and unlovely places, so that we can grow and stretch and reach. Remembering that to Reach, means both to strive against our current limits, as well as to arrive at a place beyond them. The first golden truth we might take on board is that there needs to be time for both, the point to our practices and our spiritual efforts is to figure out for ourselves, in our own ways, when to practice choice and when to practice Surrender.
DANCING The answer to the riddle of being versus becoming, is stepping behind our intentionality of where we would wish to be and stepping into an acceptance of where we are now, over and over and over again, until we realise it is a dance. We cannot choose what we want, but we can choose what we would want to want. Rocco Jarman
Everything in life, everything we can observe and experience, all the ways in which this world and our engagement with it, delights and saddens us, is a result of Cause and Effect. To arrive at better outcomes within, in our relationships and our lives, of the world and society at large, we need to understand and be aware of the causes, so that we might all become more aware, of what we can and cannot change and where to learn and apply equanimity and when to learn and apply courage; both of which are expressions of Surrender and of love.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
As always, some words are deliberately capitalised. These are Archetypal words and convey a profound depth of meaning, like Holograms.
The overwhelming majority of wisdom, mystical commentary, esoterica, self-help literature and personality cults which so capture the masses lack the necessary depth, nuance and alignment to actually discern The Way. If you are walking with the crowd, be assured that you are heading the wrong way.
As always with my work, this article is a Gift, whereby every True Gift is an Invitation to the deeper Gift. Reach out.
If the way is not seeking better ways, it is not The Way.