IS: Development vs Healing smackdown
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- Friday, May 3 (tomorrow): Open-to-all Office Hours
- Saturday, May 11: Exploratory Series session #3 — Alexander Technique with Michael Ashcroft
all start @ 1pm Pacific Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC). S14 Core Calls on Sundays for members run every week through June 23.
silly smackdown: dueling frames of rightness
"The World is perfect as it is, including my desire to change it." -Ram Dass
This koan points (IMHO) to a paradox-holding that is required to move with integrity in relationship to the world. Yes, our desire for better fuller thriving futures is good. And also, Yes, we must practice accepting the is-ness of the present world and all the suffering and joy it contains. Does "perfect" go too far, due to the is-ought confusion the word pulls in? Perhaps. But this multi-perspective frame, the one able to hold the paradoxical both-and-ness of polarities, is one major key in post-conventional development models.
Another pointer to the same kind of right/healthy action comes from the term "post-healing" as used by Tucker Walsh and Forrest Wilson lately to refer to the positive drive that comes online after tiring of the filling-the-lack, fixing-the-wounds frame of much available healing work. Tucker's realization that his "‘innerwork’ has gone from sacred to indulgent" recognizes and validates the goodness and usefulness of the healing frame, and also gestures at another stage, another phase, of motivation after that filling-the-hole migrates to from-the-whole.
Expansion vs contraction. Acceptance vs rejection. Positive fuel vs negative fuel. Developing vs healing. These seem like diametrically opposed concepts! Yet is one OR the other better or righter?
Consider: It is right and good for a child to contract away from the family member that hurts them. It is right and good for a college student to reject complicity with genocide. It is right and good to turn negative feelings like guilt and shame into desire to improve and do better. It is right and good to stop striving and attend to healing the wounds of the traumas we've collected in our lives.
But consider also: It is right and good to discard contraction when we are equipped to safely expand our security and compassion. It is right and good to accept that genocide around the world doesn't end because you feel sad or bad about it. It is right and good to discard external approval as one's source of validation when one's internal wise knowing can be relied upon. It is right and good to turn from the few remaining nicks and scrapes and start running again with a new thriving vitality.
code-switching: development vs healing (vs spirituality)
I hope that we can see together that the paragraphs of considerations above illustrate the context-dependency of rightness and goodness. The way is a path, a journey, and what is right and good is thus so only in conjunction with the capability of the person and the affordances available to them in their environment.
So what? To everything there is a season, right? Yes, and, the language we use is similarly contextual — I could use developmental language, or healing language, or even spiritual language, and be describing the same moon. BUT, the contexts also flow back and define the terms in our vocabulary!
Healing language came to prevalence (in the simple story) with the hippies, the '60s, new age, countercultural revolution, the post-modernist green vmeme advance of cultural evolution. Half a century later, the hippies were right, man.
Spiritual language, in contrast, has existed for thousands of years. But it is that very age that also associates this kind of language frame with the belief schemas of pre-modern mindsets from the axial age. It's also muddled by the loudness of the fundamentalists drowning out still, small voice of the mystics — which was then also co-opted by hippy healing culture, confounding things even more.
I tend to speak the language of development, which in my view is connected with a metamodern mindset. To me it has greater space, more capacity, to hold the bigness of the perspectives we are led to next in our collective journey of cultural evolution.
But, to those inside a healing frame, development (especially that "vertical" term, yuck) sounds more like the meritocratic ladder of modernity. I think that's pre/trans confusion at work, so... should we then become all things to all people with our language? I'd say yes to using our translational dexterity across vocabularies, but no to smuggling mindsets to the unwary under the cover of our code-switching. A fine line perhaps, but if it smells manipulative, there's the line.
Healing to wholeness and raising consciousness. Spiritual transcendence to non-dual Buddha-nature Christ-consciousness. Developmental shifting into alchemist awareness. It is not true, over long-enough time scales, that there is nothing new under the sun. The path of life in the universe is one of increasing complexity. From biological evolution, to cultural evolution, to the conscious awareness now dawning upon more of us, things are accelerating exponentially.
The language isn't the thing. Modern civilization (and everything we conventionally hold dear) isn't the thing. The thing is in us, and is the whole universe. Let us dance with accepting each moment, while leading our volition into each new moment with integrity.
Cheers,
James