Sunday Poem: Adrienne Rich

Diving into the Wreck

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
and absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it's a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

Adrienne Rich has been a leading figure in American poetry since winning the prestigious Yale Younger Poets award for her first book in 1951. Since then, she has published book after book of deeply personal and socially relevant poetry. While often claimed by the "women's movement" as one of their leading voices due to Rich's openness about being a lesbian and her activism for women's rights, Rich transcends any single puropse to her life and work. She is first and foremost an American poet.

Rich won the National Book Award in 1974 for Diving into the Wreck (which she accepted jointly with Alice Walker and Audre Lorde in the name of all women who are silenced). She has also been awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships, the first Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Brandeis Creative Arts Medal, the Common Wealth Award, the William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the National Poetry Association Award for Distinguished Service to the Art of Poetry.

I was a young man in college when I first read this poem in an Introduction to Literature class taught by professor James Dean (to whom I am forever indebted). In that class he us taught that literature offers a path into the deeper realms of human experience, and he encouraged us to explore those realms within the works we studied and within ourselves. Nearly everything we read for those three quarters moved us further into the interior of what it means to be human.

I was a psychology major when I took those classes, and this poem spoke to me about the process of Jungian myth work, of which I was enamored at the time. I saw in Adrienne Rich's poem a revisioning of the hero myth, a feminization of the hero's quest. There is no dragon to slay, no kingdom to save. There is only the Self and its quest for wholeness. This is the central, most powerful myth underlying modern psychology: that through introspection, self-awareness, and understanding we can gather the riches of our innate humanity.

This poem provided me with the template for my own efforts as a poet. I dedicated myself to the exploration of the wreck that lies in the depths of my psyche, to the exploration of "the wreck and not the story of the wreck."

A few years after first reading this poem, I immersed myself in the alchemical psychology of Jung and became especially interested in the idea of the alchemical wedding--the union of masculine and feminine elements in the psyche that can provide a new sense of wholeness and balance. Rich is working with the same theme here, being both mermaid and merman: "I am she: I am he." Yet it is only after entering the hold of the wreck, the symbolic container of the alchemical process, that the poet recognizes the unification of her duality and can proclaim, "We are."

For other critical assessments of the poem, click here.

Bibliomantic Quote of the Day

Sometimes when I am feeling uninspired, I will open a book I like to some random page and read whatever I find there. I call this process bibliomancy--I'm sure I didn't invent the word or the practice. Today's book is The Simple Feeling of Being by Ken Wilber, a thematic collection of quotes from his published works.

From Collected Works 4: "Stages of Meditation," pages 357-58.

When you practice meditation, one of the first things you realize is that your mind--and your life, for that matter--is dominated by largely subconscious verbal chatter. You are always talking to yourself. And so, as they start to meditate, many people are stunned by how much junk starts running through their awareness. They find that thoughts, images, fantasies, notions, ideas, concepts virtually dominate their awareness. They realize that these notions have had a much more profound influence on their lives that they ever thought.

In any case, initial meditation experiences are like being at the movies. You sit and watch all these fantasies and concepts parade by, in front of your awareness. But the whole point is that you are finally becoming aware of them. You are looking at them impartially and without judgment. You just watch them go by, the same as you watch clouds float by in the sky. They come, they go. No praise, no condemnation, no judgment--just "bare witnessing." If you judge your thoughts, if you get caught up in them, then you can't transcend them. You can't find higher or subtler dimensions of your own being. So you sit in meditation, and you simply "witness" what is going on in your mind. You let the monkey mind do what it wants, and you simply watch.

And what happens is, because you impartially witness these thoughts, fantasies, notions, and images, you start to become free of their unconscious influence. You are looking at them, so you are not using them to look at the world. Therefore you become, to a certain extent, free of them. And you become free of the separate self-sense that depended on them. In other words, you start to become free of the ego.

The quote continues for a couple of more paragraphs, providing a glimpse of the higher-order consciousness--nondual awareness--that will eventually develop. Most of us will not have more than a brief taste of that state in our lifetimes.

My practice has been frustrating lately, so this quote comes as a reminder of why I sit and that sitting is about the process, not the results.

One of the key points from this passage is the idea that we develop, through meditation, the power to witness our thoughts rather than having them dictate our consciousness. Possessing an observer self, that part of consciousness that stands behind our thoughts and witnesses them as they come up and dissipate, is crucial to nearly all higher-level psychological work we will ever do. If we cannot take a step back from ourselves and witness our thoughts, actions, and behaviors, we do not possess the freedom to change them.

I have been working with my inner critic for the past several months. Of all the parts of myself I have tried to work with, the critic is the toughest. As an introject, it wormed its way into my life at a very young age, before I had the rational thought processes to question it.

Sitting has helped me hear the voice of my critic as a distinct voice. That is why I sit--to know myself better, to witness and release whatever comes up. Most importantly, sitting allows me to accept whatever comes up as a part of who I am. Attachment and rejection only feed the energy of the thing, whatever it is, but pure acceptance reduces the charge it might carry.

The more I sit, the quieter my mind becomes.

Stuart Davis on U2

Stuart Davis has a wide knowledge of music, and he thinks U2 is the greatest example of depth and span in a band since the Beatles--"Depth being the degree of their interior spiritual, emotional, cognitive, artistic (etc) development; Span being their outward success in radio, tv, sales, all the objective markers that business enterprises meaasure."

Check out his thoughts here.

After reading Stuart's thoughts on U2, I'd love to hear what anyone else thinks on this subject. Personally, I'm a huge Peter Gabriel and REM fan--these guys (and Live) are the musicians who speak to me in a big way. A close second is David Sylvian.

Please add your picks in the comments section.

On Equanimity

The new issue of Tricycle has an article, "A Perfect Balance," by Gil Fronsdal and Sayadaw U Pandita, on cultivating equanimity. As I read the section by U Pandita, I found myself thinking, "Yeah, it's not quite that easy for most of us."

Before launching into my objections to the article, here are a couple of quotes that provide the Buddha's views on equanimity.

As a solid mass of rock
Is not stirred by the wind,
So a sage is not moved
By praise and blame.
As a deep lake
Is clear and undisturbed,
So a sage becomes clear
Upon hearing the Dharma.
Virtuous people always let go.
They don't prattle about pleasures and desires.
Touched by happiness and then by suffering,
The sage shows no sign of being elated or depressed.
---Dhammapada, 81-83

Equanimity is characterized as promoting neutrality toward all beings. Its function is to see equality in beings. It is manifested as the quieting of resentment and approval. Its proximate cause is seeing ownership of deeds (karma) thus: "Beings are owners of their deeds. Whose (if not theirs) is the choice by which they will become happy, or will get free from suffering, or will not fall away from the success they have reached?" It succeeds when it makes resentment and approval subside, and it fails when it produces the equanimity of unknowing.
---Visuddhimagga, 9.96

With this basic understanding of equanimity in hand, U Pandita offers five ways that each of us can cultivate more equanimity in our lives.

1) Balanced emotion toward all living things
2) Balanced emotion toward all inanimate things
3) Avoiding people who go "crazy"
4) Choosing friends who stay cool
5) Inclining the mind toward balance

(These ideas are from In This Very Life by Sayadaw U Pandita, copyright 1991.)

Numbers 3 and 4 seem pretty easy. We can certainly make wise choices about our friends and the people with whom we surround ourselves. However, the other three items fall into the "easier said than done" category.

Here are some of U Pandita's suggestions for generating more equanimity toward all living beings:

To prepare the ground for equanimity to arise, one should try to cultivate an attitude of nonattachment and equanimity toward the people and animals we love.
_____

One reflection that can develop nonattachment is to regard all beings as the heirs of their own karma. People reap the rewards of good karma and suffer the consequences of unwholesome acts.
_____

You can also gain equanimity about beings by reflecting on ultimate reality. Perhaps you can tell yourself that, ultimately speaking, there is only mind and matter. Where is that person you are so madly in love with? There is only nama and rupa, mind and body, arising and passing away from moment to moment.

Most of U Pandita's advice has a similar tone and content. For the most part, I find this of little use and unrealistic for most Buddhist students.

When I am working on developing equanimity in my own life, I find it crucial to look at the source of the attachment in as much detail as possible. Thinking about the nature of ultimate reality does me little good when a coworker is irritating me to the point that I can't get any work done or I feel like breaking something. Simply telling myself not to be attached to the feelings I am experiencing will not solve the problem, either.

What does work, however, is for me to look at what the person (or his/her actions) represent to me, and most importantly, is there something about the person (or his/her actions) that I see in myself that makes me uncomfortable. Most often, this is where the solution is to be found. As an example, a couple of years ago I had a coworker who I felt was self-obsessed, inconsiderate, childish, rude, and generally unpleasant to be around. He made me crazy on a daily basis. When I looked more closely at the situation, I realized that he was exhibiting exaggerated traits that I disliked in myself. When I began to work with those aspects of myself and got to know them better, he no longer set me off so easily. I had to reclaim my projection, as a therapist might say.

Similarly, when I was a very young man in college, I was crazy in love with a young woman. My self-esteem hinged on everything she did--either she was nice to me and I was a good person, or she was indifferent and I was worthless. I was so attached to her loving me and to our relationship that I completely lost myself for the time we were together. When I finally was able to reclaim my projection of self-worth from that relationship, I was suddenly able to see our time together in a whole new way.

When we become attached to people or things, there are usually deep psychological reasons that must be addressed if we want to release those attachments. It is not a simple matter of choosing not to be attached, or reframing the person, thing, or relationship in terms of ultimate reality. We must dig in the dirt of our souls to uproot the attachment from the place where it originally began to grow. Otherwise, it will simply grow again in a slightly different way from its original roots.

The single best practice for developing equanimity is daily mindfulness. If we start with one attachment we want to rid ourselves of and work each day to be aware of it when it surfaces, we will be well on our way to removing its roots. It won't happen in a week, and maybe not even in a year, but it will happen if we are willing to look honestly at ourselves and our motivations. I have found no other way to uproot deeply held attachments.

If you haven't worked on mindfulness before, have a look at some of Pema Chodron's or Lama Surya Das's books. Insight meditation can also be adapted to a daily practice away from the cushion.

Moral Hierarchy and Singularity

Another item from the new issue of What Is Enlightenment?

In an article called "Moral Hierarchy: The Key to Evolving Consciousness," Jason Hill argues in favor a new and improved understanding of moral hierarchy. For him, moral hierarchy seems to be more of a process and relationship than a static object.

He distinguishes between the hierarchee, the one who is seeking a wise teacher to whom one can voluntarily surrender the self for the evacuation of its "twisted inner logics, justifications, rationalizations, and obsessions," and the hierarcher. In this approach, surrender to the guru is not simply "passive submission," but rather becomes "a form of radical intersubjectivity."

The hierarcher is the guru, the wise one, the teacher who possesses, through direct experience of nondual consciousness, an inner moral compass superior to other mortals. "His moral center of gravity is a seat of compassion and humble gratitude for the blessings of being a high-order being." Further, "he is driven by a burning desire to evoke the discovery of the God that exists in the Great Beyond in us."

At this point, a more extensive quote is necessary in order to introduce Hill's variation on the notion of "singularity."

Noble spiritual cartographers that they are, moral hierarchers relieve us of the need to play hide-and-seek with ourselves. At various times in meditative reflection, I find myself asking: "Why are you playing hide-and-seek with yourself?" "Why do those you know intimately play such games?" The answer, I believe, is that we play this game because the hiding grants us solace from the burden of that which we are intermittently driven to seek: our raw, naked singularity. Our singularity terrifies us. It is not the same as individuality, which we often conflate with the type of music we like, the values and principles we self-righteously cling to, or our deepest sense of self-image. Singularity is the embodiment of our entire being--down to the smallest cellular and microscopic aspect of our corporeal bodies--as well as the nonsubstantive immaterial spirit that is both contained in and outside our bodies.

Our singularity terrifies us because we know that there is no other like it. To live a life faithful to its architectural spirit, to live in accordance with the demands of its identity (which is singularly our own but has a share in a greater singularity--The One--from which our indubitable version derives its imprint) is to live a life alone in the midst of others.

The moral hierarcher as spiritual teacher is like the brave bodhisattva reconciling us to this blessed aloneness by pointing a path toward our own singularity.

I like the idea of singularity as Hill presents it here. The only problem for any widespread use and adoption of this term is that the futurist people have already appropriated the term in reference to their notion of a coming time "when societal, scientific and economic change is so fast we cannot even imagine what will happen from our present perspective, and when humanity will become posthumanity." Renowned futurist Ray Kurzweil has just published The Coming Singularity. The AI people think this leap will involve human-machine hybrids.

What fun!?

So, back to Hill's version of singularity. His conception gives us a way to conceptualize Wilber's Atman Project, the evolutionary principal in Spiral Dynamics, and just about any other model that proposes the evolution of human consciousness into the nondual realm.

One last quote:

The moral hierarcher as spiritual teacher, however, is ultimately dealing with the immaterial as he engages us in the path toward evolutionary consciousness. Ultimately, to compromise would be to act as if the God in the Great Beyond in all of us exists as a different God in the corporeal house of each. This is the difference between New Age spirituality and an authentic guide toward evolutionary consciousness. Unassailable dignity is the location of one's singularity. In that inviolate space resides the God in the Great Beyond.

This is the paradox. This is the mystery to be contemplated. And this is the eternal gift of the moral hierarcher as spiritual teacher: The discovery and practice of singularity requires an unbreachable uniformity and implacable non-compromise.

Hill is positing a "one, true God" in this quote, but it is stripped of the religious baggage such claims usually carry. He is speaking of God as nondual consciousness, ungendered, fully manifest in matter as well as ineffable. This is the transcendent divinity--pure Spirit--so many of the world's great mystics have described.

I think this is a useful concept for our discussions. I hope to explore this idea further in future posts. Any thoughts any of you have would be appreciated.

Sunday Poem: Theodore Roethke

In a Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood --
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks -- is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is --
Death of the self in a long tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) taught at the University of Washington, in Seattle, for most of his career. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954 for The Waking: Poems 1933-1953. His early work is marked by plant imagery of growth and decay, which was a result of growing up around his father's greenhouse and its strangely beautiful dance of life and death. He also shows a mystic side of himself that sometimes echoes William Butler Yeats, as is evident in the poem above.

Like many of Roethke's poems, this one moves from despair toward hope. The final two lines are as transcendent as Roethke ever was in any of his verse. That this poem was among his last stands as a testament to the lifelong process of how far Roethke would go to find out who he was.

This is a classic "Dark Night of the Soul" poem, both in its literal context and in its thematic elements. Roethke encounters his shadow, knows "the purity of pure despair," feels himself to be on an edge, and experiences the "death of the self." Yet he climbs out of his fear--having lost the discernment of "which I is I"--and out of this despair emerges an experience of oneness with God.

All of us go through hard times, and if we are on a path of spiritual growth, no matter which faith or approach, we are sure to have one or more Dark Nights of our own. The finite self never wants to give up its hold on us, and in an effort to keep its place at the center of its world, it will drag us into the depths of hell. But it is the descent that makes transcendence possible, just as Roethke found in today's poem.

Buddhist Meditation Changes Brain Structure

Artist: Alex Grey


Reported by Yahoo News: Sara Lazar, assistant in psychology at Massachusetts General Hospital, conducted a small study (20 subjects) involving people with extensive training in Buddhist meditation practice. The results are published in the November issue of NeuroReport.

Results of brain imaging "revealed increased thickness in cortical regions related to sensory, auditory and visual perception, as well as internal perception -- the automatic monitoring of heart rate or breathing, for example.

The study also indicates that regular meditation may slow age-related thinning of the frontal cortex.

"What is most fascinating to me is the suggestion that meditation practice can change anyone's gray matter," said study team member Jeremy Gray, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale. "The study participants were people with jobs and families. They just meditated on average 40 minutes each day, you don't have to be a monk."

This confirms the widely held belief that meditation practice can alter brain physiology. It's a perfect example of UL quadrant influencing UR.

Wilber has maintained that meditation practice and the frequent exposure to higher states of consciousness can lead to a movement toward higher stages of consciousness development. [Wilber's view on states and stages is available here.] I have been skeptical of his position in this area.

I do believe meditation practice is essential to experiencing higher states of consciousness, and it may make the transformation to higher stages possible, but several other factors must be present for any movement up the Spiral to occur. First, as Wilber has often pointed out, cognitive development is necessary but not sufficient for reaching higher stages. Second, there cannot be any severe traumas or unhealthy lower vMemes in the stack, or else transformation will be partial or blocked. Any early wounds to the ego must be healed before the ego can be transcended. And third, life conditions must be such that the individual can make the transformation to a higher vMeme or stage of consciousness. As an example: an inner-city gang member, no matter how much he meditates, isn't likely to make any significant leap in consciousness without a change in daily life conditions. A Red Meme environment is not conducive to Meme change without some Blue structure and order.

I have argued in the past that meditation is necessary but not sufficient for major Meme change, and I still hold that view, even in light of this new research.

Related Story: Some neuroscientists are bent out of shape about the Dalai Lama speaking at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting this weekend. They have some valid complaints related to "soft science" as opposed to "hard science" (not many of the studies to date have been well-designed or of a large, untrained population), but the protest was initiated by several Chinese scientists, so the real motivation for their objection seems rather obvious.

Clarification: More on the Inner Critic

In the last post, Part Two of Learning to Respect the Blue vMeme, I mistakenly conflated the Freudian superego and the inner critic. While speaking with Maude Foster, a therapist in Sante Fe, NM, she clarified for me that the superego is a natural structure that begins developing very early in the child's life. On the other hand, the inner critic is an introject that comes from parental and cultural rules and expectations. It develops as a way to avoid punishment and ridicule. The inner critic, like all subpersonalities, emerges as a way to protect us from external criticism. By internalizing the criticisms, we can "head off" external criticism by beating ourselves up first--at least that's what the critic will try to tell you.

I hope that clears up any confusion I created.

One other note: the Blue vMeme makes for a perfect inner critic because of its reliance on rules and structure. However, it is the dominant vMeme of the parents that determine the tone of the inner critic.

For example, my father also had a strong and unhealthy Orange meme, so he despised emotions as a form of weakness and praised reason and rational thought. I internalized that as part of my critic.

If the dominant parent has a strong Green vMeme, the child might develop a critic that denies value structures, favors inner exploration over science, and can't function very well independently. This child might crave group experience and feel anxious or depressed when faced with doing something alone. The child might also refuse to place value judgments on things and feel very uncomfortable having to choose which friends to invite for a sleepover.

An angry and abusive parent might create a strongly Red inner critic, and so on. The point is that the parental style determines the voice of the inner critic. Not everyone has a loud critic, but everyone has a critic.

I hope to explore how each of the vMemes might manifest as an inner critic. If anyone would like to share their experience with me, please leave a comment or email me directly at Integral Options for Life.

UPDATE: Since I originally posted this, I have heard from a woman (my wise and lovely girlfriend) who had a dominantly Green mother. These are her observations on how her mother shaped her inner critic:

I didn't relate to most of what you said about a green inner critic, but here are two things from my experience that really stand out:
1. Getting the message that being with others is preferable to being alone -- the impulse to be alone is pathologized -- it's not that I can't/couldn't do it -- it's that it was always judged.
2. Getting the message that the only way for my life to be worthwhile is to be doing good in the world.
I DID get the message about denying value structures -- no one way is better, more aware, more evolved, etc., than any other way.

I haven't had a chance to speak with her about this, but I will try to get her to post (or give me further insights) on the topic. My guess is that there are a lot of children of boomers, ages 25 to 40, who may have had this type of parent, and therefore might be dealing with a Green version of the inner critic.

Learning to Respect the Blue vMeme, Part Two

Please see Part One of this discussion before reading Part Two.

[Prefatory Note: Ken Wilber argues that Spiral Dynamics is simply a values line, one of many developmental lines. I would counter that within the Spiral framework, all the developmental lines can be expressed and contextualized.]

In the previous installment, I provided a long-winded explanation of how the Blue vMeme works at the cultural level (lower left quadrant). We saw that Blue emerges to provide order and meaning to a world that, at the Red level, is experienced as chaotic, violent, and meaningless.

At the individual level, Blue works in a very similar way.

As children, we are born into a Beige state, focused purely on survival. Very soon, however, we begin to learn rules for acceptance and belonging. As the emotional self emerges, the world becomes a mysterious place filled with unseen forces. We begin to create stories to explain the world around us. Slowly, at around 12 to 24 months of age, an ego begins to form as a way to distinguish the self from the world around it. This rudimentary version of the ego is what Freud identified as the id, a self-structure focused on fulfilling needs and wants with little concern for anyone or anything else. We are attracted to power, and we want to be the people who appear to have the most power or prestige. Parents have generalized this developmental period as the "terrible twos."

During the time when the Red Meme is dominant, the child is exposed to parental limitations on behavior. Since the child is unable to think rationally (by adult standards), the limitations are internalized as a way to appease parental authority (to make Mommy and Daddy like me). This is the first development of the Blue vMeme.

As the child goes to school and learns a whole new collection of rules and expectations, the Blue vMeme becomes dominant, and along with it the ability to think rationally for the first time. This emergence varies from age five to eight, depending on a variety of factors. For the most part, the Blue Meme remains dominant until pre-adolescence, although the time line seems to be changing in recent years (the Indigo Child phenomenon, which is partly Green idealism and partly real).

As a child grows older and moves beyond Blue social structures and parental rules, the Meme is "transcended and included," which means that it is no longer dominant (transcended) but still a part of the child's "Meme stack" (included). If there were any "pathologies" in the Blue system as it developed, they will appear as rigid thinking, need for authority, or a tough inner critic, among other possibilities.

The Blue Inner Critic

I had a rigid father who used his authority to create behavioral compliance with the threat of punishment, and he usually followed through on the threat. It was "his way or the highway." In order to guarantee his love, I internalized his expectations and learned to anticipate his reactions to my behaviors. As I grew older, those rules and expectations (including his phrasing: "boys don't cry," "stop goofing off and get to work," "stop complaining or I'll give you something to really complain about," and so on) became my inner critic.

As a child, nothing is more important than parental love and affection. A child will do ANYTHING to guarantee that love. When children are learning rules and their relationship to them, a tolerant parent who can give a child space to explore boundaries is crucial. An authoritarian parent can create all kinds of trauma in the psyche.

It is important to understand that I am not assuming a victim mentality. All children go through differing degrees of this process, and some must endure unspeakable abuse (both emotional and physical). But it is important to understand that children are vulnerable and that they are sponges. No human being reaches adulthood without some form of pathology. This does not make us victims--but it does reveal the challenges parents face in doing the best they can for their kids and the results of failing to do so. As the world becomes more and more complex, with higher and higher possible levels of psychological development, it becomes increasingly crucial that parents get the early stages "right" so that children have fewer "issues" as they mature.

My authoritarian father created an authoritarian inner critic. The voice of that critic, because of the stage at which it emerged as a self-structure, is Blue. Until recently, I was unaware of this fact, but I knew that any manifestation of Blue in the world pissed me off (projection, as noted in Part One). Now that I have identified the source of my hatred for all things Blue, I have started cultivating an appreciation for the value of the Blue Meme, both culturally and individually.

Blue still disturbs me in a variety of ways, but I find myself defending the role of the Blue Meme when others attack it (especially Green). As I work to become more conscious of the inner critic and how it dictates my behavior, I become increasingly tolerant of Blue manifestations around me.

There are some good things about a tough inner critic, especially having a strong work ethic, loyalty, organizational skills, and so on. It's the bad things, such as intolerance of my weaknesses, fear of being "not perfect," rejection of emotions (partly an Orange issue), and a host of other things, that keep me from being the person I want to be.

Therapy and sitting meditation have been crucial in working on this, as has mindfulness practice. It's a slow process, but it is a process--not something that has an end.

Learning to Respect the Blue vMeme, Part One

There is very little that sets me off as quickly as religious fundamentalism. In fact, most Blue vMeme versions of religion have irritated me in ways that seem out of proportion to their influence. I assumed it was because I was raised Catholic. I was wrong.

It recently became clear to me that my hatred of the Blue vMeme was not about religion, or Republican politics, or that vMeme's general need for order and control. It was about me -- it was a classic case of projection. I have a very rigid inner critic (Blue vMeme rules and structures introjected as the superego), and when I see that rigidity mirrored in the world around me it triggers my own discomfort with having such an unyielding inner voice.

I recognize that the Blue vMeme is crucial to the health and development of the Spiral, although holding that as a thought and feeling it as a belief are two very different things. I have only recently been able to feel it as a belief.

I want to explore the role of the Blue vMeme in individual development (see Part Two), but in order to do that I am first going to post some thoughts from Elizabeth Debold published in the new issue of What Is Enlightenment? ("Spiritual But Not Religious"). I want to work from the macro (cultures) to the micro (individuals).

In this selection, Debold is talking about the Axial Age, the great period in human history when nearly all the world's great religious traditions emerged. Debold cites Robert Godwin (One Cosmos Under God), who has documented that era with precision and understanding.

Miraculously, as if in response to a crying human need, the great religious traditions either emerged or transformed in the span of about one thousand years to embrace humanity in a new vision of the future. The era is what historian Karl Jaspers identified as the Axial Age, seeing in it the dawning of "what was later to called reason and personality." We are still indebted to the insights of the sages and saints who walked on earth then: Lao-tzu, Gautama Buddha, Jesus Christ, Socrates, Confucius, Jeremiah, and Muhammad. From approximately 800 BCE to 200 BCE, there was a dramatic shift away from identification with one's tribe and toward the development of individual consciousness--giving birth to the first truly individual sense of self. Before this, as Godwin explains, a human being "felt his own impulses were 'not truly part of the self, since they [were] not within man's conscious control.'" Tumultuous emotions, like rage, envy, and lust, were thought to be "a supernatural attack [by gods or demons] from the outside." So, for example, it wasn't your own lust driving you to distraction over an attractive neighbor, but the zing of Eros' arrow. It was only during the Axial Age that human beings gradually began to recognize, and take responsibility for, those forces of good and evil that they had projected onto the gods. As theologian Ewert Cousins tells us, "'Know thyself' became the watchword of Greece; the Upanishads identified the Atman, the transcendent center of the self. The Buddha charted the way of individual enlightenment; the Jewish prophets wakened individual moral responsibility." Practices of inquiry, meditation, petitionary prayer, and confession were developed to give humanity the practical means of cultivating an inner sense of responsibility and, most importantly, a moral conscience.

What she has revealed here is the shift from a Red-dominated world, still influenced by Purple magical thinking, to an emerging Blue worldview. In the next passage, she explains why this shift was crucial to the development of human beings in their quest toward the higher stages of evolution.

Strange as it may seem to us today, it was the development of an individual sense of conscience--accompanied by the painful experience of guilt--that enabled us to step out of the shadows and begin to author history. As long as we humans felt ourselves to be mere victims of powerful and uncontrollable forces, both internally and externally, there was no way to be responsible or to make choices that would lead toward salvation--in this life or the next. "Only an independent self has the power to recognize its guilt and confess its wrongdoing," write social scientists James and Evelyn Whitehead, and that recognition makes each person "responsible for his [or her] own actions." . . . . As Richard Tarnas writes in his brilliant opus The Passion of the Western Mind, "By granting immortality and value to the individual soul, Christianity encouraged the growth of the individual conscience, self-responsibility, and personal autonomy relative to temporal powers--all decisive traits for the formation of the Western character." . . . . But this [salvation] demanded strict obedience to one's relationship to God and to the extraordinary order of God's creation, manifested in the dazzling perfection of the Great Chain of Being [body, heart, mind, soul, spirit]. For the first time, we had a moral obligation to bring ourselves in line with that perfection. And if we broke that sacred covenant, thereby sinning, which literally means "missing the mark," we felt guilty, and that guilt propelled us to do right . . . .

This is the power of the Blue vMeme. What is missing from this discussion is the state of the world before the emergence of the world's great religions. It was the brutality of the Red life conditions that necessitated the emergence of Blue.

Imagine being bound in a rigid social hierarchy to the small group of people with whom you share a language and customs, living in a frighteningly violent and disease-ridden world teeming with demons and supernatural forces. Murder and mayhem are common; demonic forces throw people into uncontrollable rages and lusts. Strange and unpredictable things happen--your child is born deformed, bringing disfavor on your tribe, which leads to a drought that ruins the crops. You don't know why these things happen or whether your people will be successful in appeasing the gods. Skirmishes with other tribes may result in your death or your capture and enslavement. Most of your life is spent trying to avoid the wrath of the gods or anyone above you in the social hierarchy, as you toil in backbreaking labor just to eke out survival.

This the world of the Red vMeme. There are still hundreds of millions of people living exactly like this on the planet today. When well-meaning Green, with its hated of rigid moral structures and all forms of traditional religion, tries to help these people by removing the emerging Blue structures (which Green sees as oppressive) from their world, they are condemning these people to an endless existence in Red life conditions.

Blue emerges, as we saw above, precisely to ease human beings out of the violence and unpredictability of Red life conditions. Whether we like it or not, Blue offers stability, order, and, on the interior level, the first experience of a unique self that has value and worth before the eyes of God. These things are crucial to allowing a person or a culture to emerge from Red into Blue.

On the African continent today, Islam, Catholicism, and evangelical Christianity are competing for the souls of people who have only known a tribal existence. As much as some of us despise missionaries for the ways in which they destroy native cultures and traditions, the people they seek to convert need to be exposed to the Blue vMeme, and they need to be allowed to evolve through that stage of growth.

[Note: Red is a valuable and crucial stage in human evolution as well, marking the first emergence of the ego and the possibility of a distinct self that emerges in Blue. Humans need to experience Red in order to grow out of the "tribal mind" of the Purple vMeme, with its intense focus on the life of the tribe.]

Please see Part Two for the ways in which the Blue Meme works at the individual level.

Wilber's New Color Scheme

From "What Is Integral Spirituality?" Copyright Ken Wilber, 2005.

Is Wilber Corrupting Spiral Dynamics?

Ken Wilber is without a doubt one of the most important thinkers on the planet. On top of that, he has done a lot to bring attention to Beck & Cowan's Spiral Dynamics model, one of the most comprehensive models available for understanding human beings.

However, I have been growing increasingly frustrated with the way Wilber has been using Spiral terminology in ways inappropriate to the model. The biggest issue so far had been his use of "second tier" and "third tier." In Wilber's scheme, which is presented in Boomeritis, second tier is reduced to the Yellow and Turquoise vMemes. Wilber then proposes a third tier that would begin with Coral (the next identified emergent vMeme).

In Clare Graves's original model, the second tier would have been a recapitulation of the first tier, but at a higher level. This means that the second tier would have six vMemes just like the first tier, with each one being a higher-order version of its first-tier version. (Example: Yellow is the second-tier, higher-order version of Beige, and Turquoise is the second-tier, higher-order version of Purple.)

The real problem with Wilber's version is that he has a much wider audience than either Beck or Cowan, so his version gets all the attention. This is further exasperated by Andrew Cohen's adoption of the Wilber scheme in What Is Enlightenment?

The newest frustration comes from Wilber's new Integral Spirituality project (there used to be a PDF by Wilber explaining his new system, but it has been taken down in the last couple of days). In this new approach, he has attached colors to the developmental levels -- much like Spiral Dynamics -- but the colors move upward parallel with the chakras (also, the visible light spectrum). Parts of Wilber's color system match the Spiral, but most have been changed, which is bound to create a huge amount of confusion.

Wilber clearly has seen the popularity and ease-of-use of color coding, but his new system loses some of the subtlety of SD, especially the warm color/cool color alternation, which maps the shift from self/outer focus to group/inner focus and back again.

I like Wilber's new system, and I see the value in what he is doing, but I dislike the impact this will have on Spiral Dynamics. It feels like a betrayal. But then, Wilber has always viewed SD as a simple values line system, not as a whole and complete system.

I'd love to hear any thoughts SD or SDi followers have on this topic.

Is Hillary Clinton the First Integral Politician?

During the SDi II sessions in Boulder last month, Jean Houston (who never misses an opportunity to mention her relationship with Hillary and Bill Clinton) suggested that Hillary is a second-tier thinker pretending to be blue-ORANGE. Houston spent a lot of time working with Hillary during the writing of It Takes a Village, so she does know a bit about the Senator from New York.

I might have dismissed Houston's comments if not for an article in The Nation back in May of this year. Greg Sargent wrote a piece called "Brand Hillary" about how she is recreating herself, what is referred to as "branding" in the business world.

From the article:

The political classes tend to offer us two tidy Hillary narratives to choose from. The first (courtesy of Dick Morris and company) is that Clinton has given herself a moderate makeover designed to mask the fact that she's really a haughty left-wing elitist, in order to appeal to moderate Republicans and culturally conservative, blue-collar Democrats who are deserting their party. The opposing narrative line (courtesy of her supporters) is that Clinton, a devout Methodist, has revealed her true self as a senator; she's always been more moderate than is generally thought, and, as Anna Quindlen wrote recently in Newsweek, "people are finally seeing past the stereotypes and fabrications."

Yet if you watch Clinton on one of her upstate swings, as I did earlier this spring, it becomes clear that neither story line gets it right. What's really happening is that Clinton, a surprisingly agile and ideologically complex politician, is slowly crafting a politics that in some ways is new, and above all is uniquely her own.

Clinton's evolving approach--call it Brand Hillary--is sincerely rooted in her not-easily-categorized worldview, but it's also a calculated response to today's political realities. In effect, she's taking her husband's small-issue centrism--its trademark combination of big but often hollow gestures toward the center, pragmatic economic populism and incremental liberal policy gains--and remaking it in her own image, updating it for post-9/11 America with an intense interest in military issues.

This is the political context in which Hillary must work. The Republicans have made her the most targeted Senator up for re-election in 2006, but they could find no one who could give her a real race for her seat. She's that popular in New York.

As the most hated woman in the Republican world, she still must convince liberals that she hasn't sold out her base of support.

For liberals it remains to be seen whether this transaction will prove to be a good deal. Yet for some Democrats the trade is indeed worth it, as you could easily see during one of Clinton's first stops on her upstate swing, a speech to Democrats at a re-election fundraiser north of Albany. The event was closed to the press, and the Senator shed her typically demure, bipartisan approach and launched a sharp attack on the GOP. Yet she knew her audience--these were hardly red-meat-craving Democratic activist types. They were rural, moderate Democrats--small-town schoolteachers, librarians, general-store owners. So Clinton's assault was spirited, but even-tempered and larded with patriotic language.

"We're seeing the slow and steady erosion of what made America great in the twentieth century," Clinton told her audience in an even tone. "When I got to the Senate I asked myself, What's going on here? At first I thought the President just wanted to undo everything my husband had done." Clinton waited a beat, then added, "And I did take that personally."

The audience laughed. "But then I thought, Wait a minute. It's not just about turning the clock back on the 1990s.... They want to turn the clock back on most of the twentieth century. They want to turn the clock all the way back beyond Franklin Roosevelt. Back beyond Teddy Roosevelt. That's why they're trying to undo Social Security. Make no mistake about it.

"What I see happening in Washington," Clinton continued, "is a concerted effort by the Administration and the leadership in Congress to really create absolute power. They want to control the judiciary so they can have all three branches of government. I really don't care what party you are--that's not in the American tradition.... Right now young men and women are putting their lives on the line in Iraq and Afghanistan, fighting for the America we revere. And that is a country where nobody has all the answers--and nobody should have all the power.... We all need to stand up for what made America great--what created a wonderful set of values that we revere, that we exported and tried to really inculcate in people around the world!"

Wild applause rolled over Clinton now, although it was unclear whether the crowd had appreciated the political subtleties of what they'd witnessed. She had offered a critique of the GOP sharp enough for any progressive--even as she'd given an approving nod to American exceptionalism and a paean to US troops defending our "values" abroad. She'd stoked the partisan passions of her audience--even as she'd sounded an above-partisanship note of concern about the state of the Republic. Indeed, she'd managed to pull off what many Democrats struggle to do these days: She'd weaved her criticisms into a larger narrative about America's past and future, criticizing the GOP leadership without sounding as if she wanted America to fail--when she said she was "worried" about America, you believed her.

Let's look at this last paragraph from a Spiral perspective. She feeds the Green vMeme by attacking the GOP, while supporting Orange vMeme economic concerns and Blue vMeme patriotism. She activates Red vMeme passions (the source of all revolutions), but she manages to sound as though she isn't a radical whose mission is the destruction of American values (which is how some heavily Green-based Democrats are often--if unfairly--perceived).

She correctly read the Meme base of her audience and gave them what they wanted to hear--without misrepresenting her positions. So what happens when she must face an audience filled with much more conservative constituents, such as farmers?

Not long after that speech, Clinton appeared at a dramatically different event, a speech to a roomful of around 300 farmers. These were hard-bitten people who were fully prepared to believe that the Senator from Chappaqua is who her caricaturists say she is. When Clinton strode into that room, she was an entirely different Hillary from the one who'd addressed Democrats only hours earlier. Anyone accustomed to seeing Clinton on TV--where she sometimes seems stiff and insincere--would have been flabbergasted by her sudden transformation. She instantly, and effortlessly, became Homespun Hillary. Her vowels grew flatter, more rural-sounding. "Little" became "li'l." "Get" became "git." Entire pronouns vanished, as in: "Heard there are some places in California selling gas for three dollars a gall'n." She poked fun at city folk. Speaking about how farmers could make money supplying the specialty produce that New York restaurants need, she mimicked a demand made to her by city restaurateurs: "We need all those little funny things you don't know what they are when they put 'em on your plate."

The crowd seemed especially impressed with her command of their pocketbook issues. She talked about fuel prices, protecting farmers from foreign competition, the Senate's neglect of New York agriculture in favor of Western agribusiness. She touted an initiative she'd spearheaded making it easier for local businesspeople to sell products via the Internet: "Fella made fly-fishing rods and lures--all of a sudd'n found there were people in Norway who wanted to buy th'm!"

By the end, you could feel it: Her audience had been won over. Her listeners filed out, murmuring approval of what they'd heard. As Robert Madison, a Republican and owner of a small local dairy farm with his three sons, put it: "Real down-to-earth person. Knows what she wants to do for the farmer."

Some may call this manipulation of the audience. So? The measure of any Spiral Wizard is the ability to meet the audience where it lives, to seem as though you are one of them. That is what Hillary has learned to do.

Beck and Cowan talk about the POA factor in building positive relationships. P--politeness; O--openness; and A--autocracy. The autocracy element makes people uncomfortable, but as the authors explain, "Autocracy simply means taking charge, accepting responsibility, knowing where 'the buck stops,' and being willing to put one's self on the line" (SD, 121). The autocracy element is where most Democrats fail (look at how Kerry lost in 2004 to a man who should have been very easy to beat).

Hillary is comfortable with power. She knows how to be polite and open, as the above passages from The Nation article show. As we saw above, she can read the vMemes of her audience and meet them where they are, even changing her speech patterns to make them more comfortable.

Is she integral? I don't know, but we do know that Bill has read a lot of Ken Wilber and has met with Don Beck in the past. She likely has been exposed to the ideas.

Is she a Spiral Wizard? Looks like it, even if she isn't familiar with Spiral Dynamics.

Is she second tier, as Jean Houston claims? Probably not in any whole-self sense, but if she can think politically in second-tier ways--meaning that she can perceive and value each of the vMemes--then she's probably second-tier enough to defeat any politician who doesn't share that skill.

The 2008 presidential election could be very, very interesting.