無 / 有 – Sungwon Peter Choe Online

Unprecedented Opportunity: The Moral Imperative for Growth

You and I are the luckiest people who have ever lived. The simple fact that, for example, you are reading this blog marks you as one of a handful of global elite supported by a complex and highly developed social infrastructure and culture. You enjoy enormous wealth, privilege and opportunity the likes of which have never before been seen in history. (Take financial wealth alone. If you make only $25,000/year, you are among the top 10% of the richest people in the world.)

We are among the first generations for whom self-actualization is a real possibility. We have the opportunity to choose where we live, even becoming global nomads  if we wish. For the first time in history, all the world’s knowledge, it’s sciences, philosophies and religions are open to us. We have now the opportunity and means for deciding our own social roles. We can choose what kind and how many loving relationships we want. We can choose meaningful and fulfilling work. We can enjoy searching for and living our individual life purpose. Even our parents never had such freedom. We are near Gods, creators of our own destinies.

At the same time, the world is coming apart at the seams, offering up monolithic and fearful challenges that threaten life as we know it. This is the inherent danger that lurks at every increasing level of societal development. As we know from Spiral Dynamics, each new level of collective consciousness solves problems of the previous level and also creates new ones.

With the emergence of each new level, not all of human society progresses to the next level. Only those societies and indivduals at the cutting edge. The increasing complexity of cultural conflicts comes as a result that we have people and societies living at -all- levels of consciousness, but with access to the technologies and ideologies of all the other levels. Thus ethnocentrically-centered political and religious leaders with weapons of mass destruction. The distance between the lower and higher levels of consciousness grow. Each level brings greater opportunities for freedom and expanding consciousness, but also greater dangers for fucking it all up on horrific scales. The stakes get ever higher.

We privileged are extremely few. The daily reality for much of the world is brutal. Most live in horrifying poverty, in the midst of war or at the mercy of overt and severe political and religious oppression. As we elite enjoy more freedom and more opportunity, those below experience even more poverty. For poverty exists as the distance between what some have and some do not. The more we have, the more impoverished those without. A moral responsibility lies on us all to close this gap.

There are two ways in which we can meet these challenges, both in the present and in the future. In the now, we must seek out direct solutions through community activism, non-profits and other such initiatives. We use these tools now available to us to express our compassion.

Unfortunately, these short-term solutions are not enough. Most of them do not address the root cause of humanity’s problems, which is a narrow view of self. Lower levels of moral consciousness focus on what is good for the self as individual, one’s family, one’s clan. Most of us do not extend our compassion and understanding beyond an ethnocentric or nationalistic frame. The average level of consciousness is simply not great enough to overcome this selfish self.

Pursuits like self-development and spirituality are critical in raising the average level of global consciousness. It seems selfish to work on oneself when there is so much altruistic work to be done in the here and now (and indeed it must be done, we can’t all leave a man bleeding to death in the street to chase down his killer), but lasting solutions to our 1st-tier (see Spiral Dynamics) problems will only come when a critical mass of us have reached 2nd-tier levels of consciousness. Otherwise we’ll always just be cleaning up after own bloody mess.

For you and I, heaven on earth is within reach for a pittance of blood, sweat and tears. Yet most of us are barely even aware of the opportunities that are laid at our feet. We subconsciously inherit the social structures and values of our cultures, instead of consciously choosing our own and becoming our own personal anarcho-utopian islands of free and full individual men and women.

For the good of all, it is necessary to pursue your own passions and grow into your own true self. Increasing freedom for you is increasing freedom for us all.

Freedom: Self-Development, Anarchy and Spirituality

Freedom is understood in many different ways by different people at different levels of intellectual, moral and spiritual consciousness. It is the masculine in us all that seeks autonomy and freedom (as noted by David Deida and others). The feminine yearns for fullness and relationship. This is yet another manifestation of emptiness and form as the masculine and feminine. We all have both the masculine and feminine within us whether we are men or women, but these aspects of us may be at very different stages of development. Nevertheless, the masculine within all of us seeks freedom.

Revolution

When I first started ‘waking up’ a few years ago, I became interested in Anarchism. Like many people with a liberal background (see previous article on the individual and socio-cultural environment), I was impressed by how social structures constrain and limit people. 

Most people who don’t take the time to think about themselves and their environment simply adopt the values and culture supported by the social structures around them. Using our individual-environment model, we can say that the environment feeds strongly into the individual, but most individuals simply regurgitate this feed of values and culture back into the environment, contributing little to its growth and evolution. Most of us are like the human batteries in the Matrix (what would we ever use for analogies had that movie never been made? , never questioning the reality or legitimacy of the environment presented to us.

At the time, I determined that if the social structures were forcibly changed, that individuals could be changed, in this case freed, as well. This is true to a large extent, of course, but it also neglects the role of the autonomy of the individual, one of the very ideals we are trying to realize through social change in the first place. That is, it focuses solely on how to change the society to effect change in (”freeing”) the individual. It does not consider how it may be possible to develop the individual to change society.

The Individual is the Society

I became conscious of problems with a solely revolutionary approach to freedom as I began reading Krishnamurti. As a rational Atheist kneeling at the altar of Science, I was naturally skeptical of this don’t-follow-gurus-preaching-guru. But as I read The First and Last Freedom, my skepticism turned to confusion (I was largely inspired to begin having an open relationship even though it has almost nothing to do with what Krishnamurti was saying) and then interest and respect. Although the romantic notion of revolution was alluring, Krishnamurti’s cautioning that all revolutions lead back to the status quo resonated with me. He noted that the means are the end (violence leads to violence) and that revolution, as it is a reaction to a tyrannical government, is ultimately defined by it. A revolution is often just that. Another turn of the wheel. How can revolution effect real change if the individuals in that society don’t also transform themselves?

The T.A.Z.

I reread Hakim Bey’s (pen name of Peter Lamborn Wilson) T.A.Z. and his poetic argument that the individual himself need only free himself to live as a free Anarchist. He simply need not accept the given social structures and cultural values to determine his own freedom. T.A.Z. also takes the Anarchist dinner party analogy to its artistic conclusion. Bey, in his beautiful poetic essays, explored how spaces (like pirate utopias) and the collection of people who inhabit them can espouse many Anarchistic ideals through their emergent behavior. He called such spaces Temporary Autonomous Zones (T.A.Z.s). Early ravers, the Burning Man Festival, the music of Bill Laswell (which is how I came to first know of Bey back in high school) and many others have been influenced by the T.A.Z.

Self-Development

Following Krishnamurti into the present through Deepak Chopra (Chopra was inspired by what Krishnamurit had to say, but believed he would be better able to express it to people) and through Steve Pavlina (his article on 10 reasons never to get a job was the catalyst that first began my journey of awakening in the first place), I was led into the world of self-development. I had once been extremely skeptical and dismissive of self-development material, but I was soon reading and gaining respect for even the likes of self-help giants like Anthony Robbins. Soon, it wasn’t just self-actualization, but other specialized areas like personal finance, seduction and fitness. 

Self-development is ultimately about taking control of your own life according to a lifestyle of your choosing. Its practices and philosophies can be tools in discriminating in what values you choose to inherit from your culture and what you develop in yourself. As you change and become more conscious of yourself and your relationship to society, you influence your environment in turn. This is, of course, the opposite of a political approach to freedom like revolutionary Anarchism, focusing on changing the individual rather than society, with complementary strong and weak points.

Spirituality

Another path opened up to me through Krishnamurti and Chopra, that led me away from faith-in-Science Atheism and towards Spirituality. Many spiritual practices are approaches to finding higher levels of spiritual freedom beyond rather than within the feedback cycle of individual and environment. Traditional approaches have largely found this freedom in the ground of being (ultimate freedom and emptiness before time or space). However, most serious modern spiritual practices are concerned with how to manifest this freedom in the world of form as well as being able to realize your true self in the ground of being. Andrew Cohen interprets this as a Kosmic evolutionary drive towards freedom. Ken Wilber sees this drive as unfolding through the lines and levels of development and quadrants of Integral Theory.

Libertarian Socialism

Earlier this year I finally got around to reading Chomsky on Anarchism. Chomsky is sympathetic to forms of Anarchism that are related to Libertarian Socialism in a lineage that goes back to the Enlightenment. It’s interesting that he stresses both the libertarian, i.e. focusing on the autonomy and freedoms of the individual, and socialist, i.e. celebrating the communion and society of individuals, traditions. Indeed, any philosophy of freedom must understand or at least recognize both sides of the individual and environment relationship to be effective in the world of form (though this understanding can simply be a context for a specialization in either side). 

Integration

Reading Chomsky again after several years and within the context of a more spiritual and integral understanding, I realized many of my interests over the past few years were related in terms of this common theme: the search for freedom. I began to see how these different levels of freedom related and flowed into each other. I believe there is a progression, albeit rough and overlapping, in searching for and understanding freedom.

Spiral Dynamics provides a useful model for understanding this progression, as does any other developmental model like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

The basic freedom is freedom from want. Once you have your basic needs of food, water and shelter satisfied such they are not short-term concerns, you are probably living in a structured society that helps provide these resources. But although such a society frees you at one level (basic needs), it imposes restrictions that constrain you in other ways. This is true going all the way up the hierarchy of freedoms to spiritual forms of freedom, each level solves problems of the previous level and creates new ones for the next level to solve.

With this understanding, we can see how self-development tools helps free the individual in several important ways. Self-imposed individual psychological restrictions can be broken through with psychotherapy, dream analysis, seduction community “inner game” techniques, meditative exercises and behavior and habit changing methods. Personal finance, Tim Ferris-style Lifestyle design, and entrepreneurship can help free the individual from debt and time- and wage-slavery. When “free time” is abundant and finances under control and sufficient, one is free to discover one’s own creative passions (one of the Anarchist ideals). As more individuals on the leading edge achieve self-determination and self-actualization, the society and culture itself will advance.

This doesn’t mean that bottom-up change is the only way to go. Top-down approaches are also needed. Chomsky argues that Anarchists and Libertarian Socialists should support social programs in government if they are aligned with their values even though they increase the scope of government and its involvement. Whereas the ultimate goal of an Anarchist agenda is to be free of hierarchical government, religious and other forms of control, the path towards that goal follows a progressive hierarchy of steps. Within a Spiral Dynamics and Integral Theory understanding, this makes perfect sense. There is no “skipping levels”. From “blue”, a society must progress to “orange” and then “green” (though of course, in any society you will have individuals at many different levels). This is why if you have a revolution attempting to build new social structures to match a Utopian Anarchist (or other ideological) ideal, it doesn’t work and you get something that is pretty similar to what you started with. The level of social consciousness must develop progressively through a hierarchy of developmental levels before the society at large is ready and responsible enough for such an ideal. That being said, we need the leading edge of social activists and revolutionaries to ensure not only that a society’s social structure upholds its values and morals, but stretches them and pushes them up towards the next level.

The modern spiritual practitioner, if she is serious, can find freedom in the ground of being through meditation and contemplation. Spiritual practice alone helps to literally raise the level of consciousness of a culture. But the spiritual practitioner can bring more to the world of form by developing her other lines (moral, psychological) or by engaging in social activism. By doing so, she expresses compassion for the world of form and those within it by helping them reach the next level of freedom.

As in Defined by Limitations, in each level in the hierarchy she pushes beyond the limits of the previous one, embracing a bit more of the world in compassion. The search for freedom in this world is, like the limitations it pushes past, never-ending, but that does not mean that there is no progression. We can continue to discover and expand into higher levels of freedom, becoming progressively more loving and compassionate for all of manifestation.