Manifest Revolution Live Truth.

It's very easy to devote oneself to a spiritual path at the exclusion of the world around us. Pretty much every major spiritual tradition actually encourages some level of disengagement with the world. "In the world but not of the world," is repeated in both Eastern and Western traditions. But if we are looking at spirituality as inseparable from the evolutionary process, then it demands that we actively engage in the world in order to fix the problems that have been created in the course of human development. Politics is the poster child for spiritual disengagement; it's about the hardest thing to reconcile to a path of honest spiritual inquiry, and to some degree it has become the postmodern house of religious thought. In order to reconcile these seemingly irreconcilable areas of life, we first have to examine how political thought relates to the development of consciousness.

For thousands of years, teachers of spiritual realization have taught that consciousness is one. The quintessential enlightenment experience that is spoken of is a taste of the vast oneness of consciousness, sublime and stark. But traditional paths to that realization involve retreating from the world -- the rest of that same consciousness -- into a personal space. What?!? If consciousness is one, why do we limit our search for enlightenment experience to the inward perspective? Here we have embedded the duality of consciousness: consciousness is one, yet we are many; consciousness is undifferentiated, yet we are individual. The inward enlightenment experience relies on the holographic nature of consciousness -- that the whole can be perceived in the one -- and one critical assumption: that individuated awareness is without value.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Robert A. Heinlein

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.

In my last post I talked about shadow and how it operates to obscure and project those parts of ourselves that we don't want to acknowledge or deal with. But we all know that we're imperfect on some scale. Our postmodern culture indoctrinates us to reject any hierarchical assessment that would call us anything less than perfect, so why does this even matter? And if we are to agree that it's important, what are we to do about it?

Sage and teacher J. Krishnamurti spoke at great length about fragmentation, and that's essentially what shadow is: it is the fragmentation of the identity and hence the strength of character. This creates an internal tension in the consciousness, because the mind is rejecting part of the whole. Krishnamurti described this: