I've been following some threads of late on a dualistic description of conscious development, in which motivation is held as separate from development. This comes from Steve Pavlina's blog, which I've been following for a year or so since his polyphasic sleep experiment caught my interest.
Steve has recently proposed a model for self-effectiveness based on a concept of polarity: polarity being the "direction of flow," whether toward the individual or from the individual to the collective. He proposes that the motivation is distinct from the development of consciousness, and that a selfishly-motivated individual can experience the same levels of conscious development as the selflessly-motivated. Read more about it here.
In Steve's model, the selfish motivation and the selfless motivation are two sides of the same coin.
It's not inherently superior to place the welfare of the collective at the starting point of your motivations, neither is there any sin in placing your own desires at the head of the chain, because it is a false distinction: the classic duality.
Both paths ultimately lead to the same place — to God realization… to enlightenment. The lightworker primarily experiences the creative out-breath of God, while the darkworker resonates with the powerful in-breath of God. You say “ah.” I say “om.” :)
Although polarization is a path of duality, it leads to a place of nonduality. That’s one of the great paradoxes of being human… that we can experience nonduality by completely embracing (instead of resisting) our experience of duality. The big irony is that when you really devote yourself to a single polarity (light or dark) and experience it from the inside, you realize that you’ve actually chosen both paths simultaneously. But I would say this is next to impossible to fathom until you’ve actually made that kind of commitment, which is why most people remain stuck in a kind of dualistic limbo.
I found this thought-provoking at first, primarily because I have always identified myself as "spiritual," and have tried to direct my personal growth in the direction of universal care and tried to reject opposing desires. For anyone who has tried this, you know that this is especially challenging in today's world, and not -- as one would assume -- because we live in a self-indulgent, materialistic society. But because there is no model for living a life of unconditional love in the postmodern world. I have always felt that our power lies solely in our ability to choose a deliberate course of action, and that one of the primary reasons to develop consciousness is to increase our awareness and thus increase the sphere in which we are capable of deciding and acting consciously. That is the liberation, the moksha taught by the traditions.
But while past traditions of morality made sense in the contexts in which they arose, they aren't strictly applicable now. Stability was contingent upon a general favoring of the collective interests over the individual when people were highly dependent upon community for safety and survival. But many of the moral credos have become embedded in the assumptions of the collective, and the structures of society and government that have developed in recent centuries, despite their shortcomings, have proven more effective at maintaining a certain ethical baseline. So there's a strong argument to be made that the lines upon which past moral codes were delineated really don't apply in a postmodern context, especially if you accept Steve's assertion that selfish and selfless motivation ultimately coincide because personal interests require a stable collective and collective interests require prosperous individuals.
Heads I Lose, Tails I Lose
Digging into this, one is forced to ask why? Why does this matter? It's certainly not a recipe for global stability. Even in the ideal scenario where the concerns of the enlightened merge, regardless of whether they are self-motivated or collective-motivated, Steve himself claims that maybe 1 out of 100 will even try to align themselves to one polarity anyway. This isn't a model to change the world. The goal of Steve's site is to provide ideas about personal development. It's basically a model for eliminating conflicts of conscience in order to support more effective narcissistic behavior.
You see, we waste so much energy embroiled in internal conflict about whether it's okay to do things for ourselves or whether it makes us a chump or a communist to act out of collective interest. Karma says go for balance. Steve says go for the gold. It is "personal development for smart people," after all, and not a spiritual teaching. What bothers me is that to read Steve's forums, it sounds like people are reading it as a spiritual teaching; which is a reasonable reading since it claims to contain enlightenment in both paths. And that's scary.
Steve is not describing an enlightenment path, and his assertion that both paths lead to a "god realization" is misleading. The idea that personal desires run parallel to the development of consciousness is absolutely true. But it's because all personal desires arise from ego, good and bad. While he uses "enlightenment" in his explanation, what he is describing falls well short of what enlightenment means in a present-day context in which find ourselves part of an ever-expanding universe that sprang into existence from nothing 15 billion years ago, on a planet that was formed from a cosmic dust storm 4.5 billion years ago, and we, made up of the emissions of long-dead stars, the manifestation of consciousness a spry 60 millenia young, mere newborns on the evolutionary scene. (And in fact, we can only assume that there's a context within which the universe exists, but we simply have no comprehension of such a context yet.) Enlightenment means realizing and living from the highest perspective available. At present, that is the universal context in which we discover that consciousness is latest manifestation and tool of the evolutionary process. In other words, enlightenment has nothing to do with the individual at all, and any personal pursuit runs in a parallel course that never intersects the path of enlightenment.
In that context, Steve is describing two sides of the same side of the coin. He concludes that selfish and selfless are ultimately the same thing, but he doesn't take the next step of asking why. The paradox duality is not that apparent opposites turn out to be the same; it's that it happens over and over. That is, every non-duality is half of a dualistic pair comprising the next stage of non-duality. The evolution of consciousness isn't just about expanding our perspective; it's about breaking the paradigm of the old. Find the duality in your assumptions and realize it as non-dual. Then find the dualistic pair and realize the non-duality between them. And so on as the universe expands infinitely until we realize non-duality containing the universe as half of a dualistic pair. If you think you've seen the end in non-duality, then you're just "stuck in a kind of non-dualistic limbo."
The Path of the Enlightened Narcissist
From that perspective, we see that polarity is simply an elaboration of two paths for the postmodern narcissist. When you fully realize the non-duality of the selfish and selfless paths, you see them for what they are: Which is the desire to choose a path of personal effectiveness that makes one feel like they have chosen the right path. In this case, those paths are divided -- as drawn from the moralistic traditions -- along the lines of whose interests the path favors. You might call it the path of the enlightened narcissist, but therein lies the fallacy. There is no enlightened narcissist in the present-day context. The enlightenment that Jesus taught was one side of Steve's model. Now consciousness has evolved, and we are able to transcend the enlightenment and non-enlightenment of that context, but that's not the end of the road. That's just the doorway to the new enlightenment; the other side of the next coin.
The paradigm of enlightenment has shifted. Enlightenment pursued through adherence to or rejection of moral codes is simply not relevant. It doesn't intersect the path of postmodern enlightenment. What is relevant is the imperative to evolve, the primal urge that exists in everyone and everything. It is the same impulse that caused the universe to explode into being from nothingness. It is the same impulse that drives humankind to progress in physical and spiritual domains. But like any impulse, such as the moral impulse, only once we have become aware of it can we act consciously in response to it. But when we are not acting consciously, we are blindly driven by the emotional states that get stirred up. Those emotional states may drive us to seek our own ends, or the welfare of the collective -- as in the polarity model. And it's true; it doesn't matter which. Both arise from the individual, and not to the evolutionary imperative.
What we realize through this is that the development of consciousness at this stage is an entirely impersonal affair; it transcends the question of who's benefit we are acting because the motivations of consciousness transcend the perceived best interest of both the individual and the collective. The universal context is so big that even the collective interest of humanity is small. When our perspective is that of an evolving universe rather than a conflicted planet, it becomes obvious that enlightenment isn't about you or about me or even about all of us. We are not extraordinary because of what we can do; we are extraordinary because we are becoming aware of the existence of an enlightenment process at the universal level. And that bears no relation to the accomplishments or failures of one or any number of individuals. It has to do with the evolving story of consciousness itself. We are the crest of a wave in an evolving universe, and we should work vitally to evolve consciousness in the world so we can keep that wave vital.
The polarity model is a sound and well-reasoned treatment of a particular domain of human experience. That domain is the success and attainment of the individual. But it is not a spiritual path or an enlightenment model. And its claim that enlightenment is to be found in either path rests on the postmodern claim that spirituality can make no absolute demands of us. Enlightenment is about transcending the personal impulses of individuation in order to realize and expand the boundaries of human evolution in a universal context. This demands the very highest motives of which the human nature is capable, and that excludes narcissism in all its forms -- even those that appeal to the postmodern ego and which can be explained as morally sound. It's not about finding models that make us successful or that make us feel good. The imperative of enlightenment compels us to transcend the individual in order to unleash the next stage of conscious evolution.
