Using Qualities of Breath to Control Technology
Lower Left Grounding:
Qualities and Processes that Allow Holons to Transcend and Include
Overview
How do we develop ethically directed technologies that adapt to an ever-increasing rate of societal change in such a way that they are less likely to be perverted in ways that undermine the common good? In the following short essay we will first unpack the title and then discuss the need not only for ethically directed technologies but for access to a dependable inner compass. We will then discuss some of the problems that have made finding a solution so difficult before offering an outline for one partial solution, derived from a universally human “lowest common denominator,” breathing. Finally, we will briefly consider some of the applications of this model to the four quadrants of any holon, to meditation, daily life, corporate and technological applications.
Holons, Quadrants, and Why they Matter
In reference to the title, “Lower Left” refers to the interior collective quadrant of any thing, object, or system, called a “holon.” This usage comes from the AQAL (“all quadrant, all levels, all lines, all states”) model developed by Ken Wilber. A holon is a part which is also a whole in itself, which describes just about everything. Can you think of anything that is not part of something else? Can you think of anything that is not, in and of itself, whole? Similarly, the four quadrants that make up every holon are based on two similar observations: “Can you think of any inside that does not have an outside or any outside that doesn’t have an inside?” “Can you think of any individual that is not part of a collective or any collective that is not made up of individuals? Functionally and practically, the answer to all these questions is “no.” The result is the creation of the following four quadrants: interior individual, exterior individual, exterior collective, and interior collective.
The interior individual quadrant is the domain of our private thoughts and feelings, largely unknown to others unless we disclose them, and our level of development or consciousness, which has historically been largely unknown to most humans and remains unknown to other species, to the best of our current knowledge.
The exterior individual quadrant is the domain of the observable external behaviors of cells, organisms, individual humans, organizations, and systems. lt deals with discrete structures and functions of individual holons. The exterior collective quadrant is the domain of observable interactions among atoms, molecules, organisms, objects like planets, processes like energy fields, investors and corporations, and the accounting and sales departments of a business. The interior collective quadrant is the domain of meanings, interpretations, values, beliefs, and world views.
Which of these four quadrants is most important? In Wilber’s model, they co-evolve. Developmental failure is the result of a lagging quadrant or quadrants. Consequently, no quadrant is more important than any other, although we all, businesses and civilizations included, innately tend to prefer one or more and ignore or repress one or more. So why do we need such a complicated model and what does it have to do with the issues we face in our daily lives? How does it help to address the multi-faceted deluge of crises facing the world today?
In his award-winning book, Collapse, the noted scientist Jared Diamond explains in detail how the absence of exploitation of environmental resources and other species by peoples and civilizations is not a product of ethical development or wisdom so much as it is an expression of a limited means to do so. The historical record shows that if people can find a way to exploit something to their benefit, they do so. They inevitably come up with explanations that are basically justifications and rationalizations for why exploitation of others and the environment is acceptable. This is not limited to the “People of the Bible” (Jews, Christians, and Muslims) justifying exploitation in terms of the famous Genesis passage giving man dominion over all things. We find it in the Anasazi of the American Southwest and the Easter Islanders destroying the flora they absolutely required to sustain their cultures. Essentially, humans historically exploit what they can as much as they can until they win a “Darwin Award”: they commit cultural suicide and effectively take themselves out of the gene pool. This has been of lesser consequence when civilizations have been varied and disconnected. However, since 1945, man has demonstrated that he now has the technological capability of exploiting his resources to the point that he takes the entire species out of the grand evolutionary experiment. The external quadrants of technological systems and human behavior have lost their moorings in the internal quadrants of consciousness and values. Those quadrants have not evolved nearly as quickly, creating an imbalance that must be corrected in one of two ways: either the internal quadrants will “catch up” or the external ones will regress. While the first choice is uncomfortable, the second one is lethal.
We need to develop ethically directed technologies that come with built-in safeguards that will reduce their potential for misuse. In other words, the interior quadrants have to catch up with the evolution of technological and social systems and the extraordinary power they provide to individuals. Is this realistic? We can look at previous examples and conclude that indeed, it is. Consider nuclear power. If power companies had not been granted congressional indemnity against liability for meltdowns they never would have been built. If governments had required waste disposal protocols be developed and followed by their militaries, would there presently be the degree of nuclear proliferation that exists? If oil companies had been required to submit to appropriate safety standards would the Gulf oil catastrophe have occurred? All of these technological excesses are due to failures of oversight, transparency, and accountability, EI (external individual) behaviors and EC (external collective) systems that are reflections of the values of an evolved Internal Collective quadrant.
The reasons why such relatively simple and rational measures do not exist boil down to the fact that people want their ability to maximize their profits to be unimpeded. It also is about the inherent conflict between power and freedom to act, on the one hand, and oversight, transparency, and accountability, on the other. Consequently, financial and political interests are inherent opponents of self-regulation while, ironically enough, acting as strong advocates of the regulation of competing or opposing interests.
The question therefore becomes, “How do you incentivize systems in such a way that financial and political interests are motivated to submit to objective oversight, transparency, and accountability?” The answer presents itself when the risks of exposure outweigh the benefits of secrecy, covert operations, and lying. This in turn relies on the continued advancement of open policies and behaviors, mostly fostered by the internet, such as phone camera and webcam uploading to YouTube, release of documents to publishers such as Wikileaks, education into a sense of societal loyalty that extends beyond the interests of employer and nation, and the support of media standards that no longer consider a policy debate between an authority and a proven partisan liar to be journalism.
Even more important is access to and use of a reliable ethical compass within all of us, children as well as adults, upper classes as well as lower, top management and shareholders as well as consumers. The good news is that there are observable trends in this direction in all of these areas, despite the fact that the exceptions get the media coverage. (Think child murderers, the Kochtopus, British Petroleum, and Tea Party politicians.)
Finding, Developing, and Following Your Inner Compass
The challenge is to develop a method that will evolve your ethical compass as you grow, since most people don’t do that. Humans tend to develop an ethical sense in their childhood and stick with it, more or less, throughout their lives.
Their ethical compass is not innate but rather a product of their environment and the values of those in their family culture and societal structure. The sad truth is that the record shows that many people will lie, cheat, and steal if that is what they need to do to keep their job or advance in the company. This is not simply cynicism; examples abound, from the military, national intelligence agencies, people in positions of political power, to wall street, banks, and the corporate world. The message and culture have to be created from the top down, that incentivize honesty and responsibility and de-incentivize unethical behavior. It has to be insisted upon from the bottom up (think workers and individual shareholders). It has to be developed from the inside out (your own ethical choices today) and from the outside in (good organizational and governmental policies and laws). Unfortunately, in cultures where profit, success, or status come before all else (think First World “democracies,”) people do what they need to do to expand power – as long as they calculate that they can get away with it. Machiavelli was being a realist in this regard, although that does not lead to the conclusion that human nature is innately predatory, but that it tends to reflect the values of the culture in which it is embedded. Your internal collective quadrant is to a considerable extent a refection of the values of the internal collective quadrants of the holons in which you are embedded. That must change.
Fortunately, this is an area in which IDL is strong. Just as dreams are always products of our present consciousness, so interviewing self aspects produce ethical development that is appropriate for our present level of development. As children, as well as when we take on a new job or life situation, or as a people, when we are in crisis, we need a compass that tells good from bad, right from wrong. This compass needs to be both internal and a part of our external cultural/social contexts. If we have not developed these in times of relative stability we find ourselves ill-equipped when challenging times come such as when a selfish, zenophobic, fear-based minority rises or when our ecosystem tells us that it has had enough abuse. At such times we are likely to melt down and use the coping skills we mastered when we were three: yell, name call, and hit. Such strategies effectively reduce our most evolved individual, organizational, and societal quadrants to the developmental level of our lowest one.
While Wilber tends to speak out of the internal individual quadrant of consciousness and therefore imply that in such regressive convulsions life reverts to the current lowest common denominator of societal consciousness, IDL tends to emphasize the internal individual quadrant, both as an orienting and limiting context. It orients in that potentials pull us into broader, more inclusive definitions of both interior, personal culture, and patterning societal norms, including concepts like Jung’s collective unconscious or the Mahayana alaya vijnana of the Yogacharins. It limits in that it creates criteria by which to determine whether and how any technology is to be used.
When and if we attain an ability to doubt our personal and cultural assumptions, to hold opposing and contradictory possibilities simultaneously in our thoughts, to observe our feelings instead of emotionally reacting, and to distance ourselves from tribal, group, career, and national loyalties, we need a compass that provides internal (subjective) objectivity, since we remain prisoners of our own waking conclusions, regardless of how rational they may be. We need both external and internal challenges to our rationality, because it can and does justify most of what we choose to do, think, and feel. Clearly, some of the most lethal and toxic minds in the world today are highly rational. Consider the leaders of the world’s financial institutions, brokers, and derivative traders, or President Obama authorizing drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan that are killing civilians, clearly in violation of international law, or of the many very intelligent minds in the world, particularly in Israel and the U.S. that are currently justifying apartheid in Palestine. Such acts are not done by irrational minds. The problem is that if brilliant rationality is not harnessed to an authentic internal compass, there will be no congruency between words and deeds, yet the individual will be unable to see the discrepancy, because since the actions are rational, they must also be ethical. Clearly, this is itself an irrational conclusion.
IDL supplies a transpersonal compass, regardless of your level of development, in that it provides you with perspectives of parts of yourself that do not die (because they were never born or created)
and that therefore are not conditioned by your survival scripting. In addition, they provide concrete recommendations for growing into those potentials regardless of your level of development. Regardless of whether you are a CEO or a citizen of the third world, a True Believer or a Unitarian, a conservative Republican or a liberal democrat, you will get recommendations that make sense to you and that you find realistic. That does not mean that you will not need help in implementing them; you will, because they always involve moving out of your comfort zone.
What then are the marks of a transpersonal internal compass? You will be able to tell that your internal compass attains at least to the level of vision logic if it is aperspectival: it has the ability to clearly and accurately express a wide variety of world views that are different from your own, including some that clearly contradict your own.
You will be able to tell that your internal compass attains at least to the level of low transpersonal if you experience a degree of control over your life that is not grounded in cultural luck (a job as a derivative trader) or educational advancement (training as a lawyer, health professional, or engineer). This is difficult to define, but it has to do with a sense of being in the right place at the right time. It is a sense of surfing through life, knowing you will be thrown off your board, yet not only continuing undeterred but thriving on the experience.
You will be able to tell that your internal compass attains at least to the level of mid transpersonal if you experience as a default space in your awareness a non-judgmental acceptance of others and what is. This does not mean that you do not discriminate between the trustworthy and the untrustworthy or between the practical and the impractical; it is that you are not particularly identified with such judgments; they do not define the person or the reality of the situation. They are instead merely descriptors in the moment. While familiarity with such a lack of judgment is common, the trick is to maintain it consistently, as your default framework or world view. That is a challenge attained by few.
You will be able to tell that your internal compass attains at least to the level of high transpersonal if you experience life as absurd on an ongoing basis. This is not the absurdity of the existentialists; this is not the absurdity of life being meaningless. At this level your internal compass tells you that life is extraordinarily meaningful, yet totally arational. It is not that it is irrational; it is not that you do not rely on your rationality or your sense of who you are; it is that what matters in life for you has nothing to do with either.
You will be able to tell that your internal compass attains to the non-dual if you can witness not only yourself talking, thinking, and acting in both waking and dreaming on an ongoing basis, but can watch yourself watching yourself – you can witness yourself witnessing the drama of your life in both waking and dream states and stay in such a mode in dreamless deep sleep.
While such an accomplishment seems formidable, it really isn’t, because there exist at this moment many parts of yourself that are already doing so. You have not yet learned to be aware of them, much less become them on an ongoing basis. This is an ability that every person can be expected to naturally grow into as they continue to practice IDL interviewing and refine their sensitivity to their inner compass. The more they make applying the recommendations that they receive a central component of their daily integral life practice the faster they will progress.
Mono-Dimensional or Aperspectival Solutions?
Diamond also shows in Collapse how inflexible adherence to an ethical and cultural code is deadly. He cites, for example, how the Norse colony in southern Greenland died out because it refused to eat the sustainable fish-based diet worked out by the native eskimos over millennia or give up its cattle-based horticulture, which was environmentally unsustainable.
We are all attracted to simple, simplistic solutions and struggle with solutions that are complex, because they require an ability to not only tolerate but use ambiguity and contradictory elements to arrive at broader, more adaptable solutions. We might call this a preference for “mono-dimensional” solutions. We prefer “Jesus saves” to saving ourselves by practicing integral deep listening to our own self-aspects. We prefer love to compassion. We prefer belief in AA, comfort, habit, and drama to belief in our own potentials. We prefer honoring Manjusri or Avalokitesvara, the Bodhisattvas of compassion and wisdom, to attempting to honor and balance a full spectrum of transpersonal qualities and processes. We prefer to focus on one or another quadrant rather than do the hard work of balancing all four of them.
If we are scientific humanists or rationalists we tend to prefer objectivity over subjectivity instead of honoring and balancing both. If we are at a late personal stage of growth we tend to honor the contributions of all peoples and all species out of respect for pluralism and egalitarianism rather than grapple with the uncomfortable reality of hierarchy and merit. If we are of a New Age mindset, we tend to see everything as in “divine order,” perfect in this moment, rather than grappling with the reality of accidents, imperfection, disillusionment, and failure. If we are into energy medicine, we will tend to talk about reality in terms of energy and quantum energy, which is much more a way of talking as if we knew what we were talking about rather than saying anything that is practical, testable, productive, or meaningful.
Listening to Core Components of Breathing
IDL sees listening as a core competency for healing, balancing, and transformation of any holon – any individual, business, nation, or ecosystem. This is because listening is intrinsically a demonstration of respect; the deeper the listening the more profound the respect shown. The listening recommended by IDL is based on listening to the wisdom of the body, in particular that of a core inner voice, the breath. When we deeply listen to and observe breathing we discover that it is a cycle comprised of at least six components. These are abdominal inhalation, chest inhalation, the short pause at the top of the breath, chest exhalation, abdominal exhalation, and the longer pause at the bottom of the breath. When you are awake, breathing comes from both abdomen and chest; when you are asleep, breathing is mostly abdominal, mediated by the diaphragm and the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system. When you meditate, all six phases of the cycle can for the first time come into conscious play, with the goal of generalization into all states.
If you closely observe these six stages of your breath right now, you will notice that there are processes that are associated with each stage.
Abdominal inhalation is about waking up. It brings new life as oxygen to the cells of the body. It is about rebirth. In the cycle of a day, it is about waking up out of deep sleep. In the cycle of life, it is about birth and infancy. In the cycle of the seasons, it is about early spring. In the cycle of business and relationships, it is about new beginnings and new discoveries.
Chest inhalation is about aliveness. It is about being full of life as a maximum amount of oxygen becomes available for meaningful work. It is about the productive parts of your day when you are performing some task or doing some job. In the cycle of a life it is about service, giving, and sharing in your family, relationships, and work. In the cycle of seasons it is spring into summer. In the cycle of business and relationships it is about being productive and solving problems of production, distribution, management, and containment.
The pause at the top of the breath is about balancing alertness and activity, on the one hand, and relaxation and unconsciousness on the other. Too much of either creates an imbalance. In the cycle of a day it is about everything running smoothly as well as the shifting of your energies from work, productivity, and external focus to relaxation, regeneration, and a passive or internal focus. This can happen at any point of the day but it is mostly associated with the commute home, the evening meal, and time relaxing, reading, or watching TV or movies. In the cycle of life it is about the life transition from career to retirement. In the cycle of seasons it is late summer and early fall. In business it is a stepping back and appraising systems and progress in all four quadrants.
Chest exhalation is about letting go and detaching from feelings, thoughts, actions, stages of life, roles, activities, and world views. In the daily cycle it is most closely associated with relaxing before sleep. In the life cycle it is associated with preparing for physical death, but it can also be associated with the death of a relationship or job or self-definition, such as occurs when a person active in a sport can no longer play, or dealing with the loss of a loved one. In the cycle of seasons it is Fall. In the business world it is about the challenge of letting go of employees, projects, priorities, or the business itself.
Abdominal exhalation is about giving up the energy and will to live. In the round of our daily life it is associated most closely with the surrender into unconsciousness and deep, dreamless sleep. In the life cycle it is most closely associated with the process of dying. In the cycle of the seasons it is the onset of winter. In business it is experiencing the consequences of fewer employees, the abandonment or completion of a project or a priority, or the death of the business itself.
The pause at the bottom of breath is about silent gestation. It appears that nothing is happening, but it is the emptiness which contains all potential. In the round of our daily life it is both deep sleep and dream sleep when regeneration and incubation are powerfully at work. In the round of seasons it is both winter and late winter, when life prepares to awaken. In the cycle of life it is life after death, a time of non-beingness when all that exists is context – the potential for new life. In the business cycle it is the spaciousness between profit and loss, success and failure. It is the counterpoint of stillness at the center of the cyclone of corporate energy.
To summarize, there are six life processes that are suggested by the stages of the round of breath. Many names could be given to them, but in general they are awake, alive, balanced, detached, free, and clear.
The Six Associated Qualities
In addition, one can extrapolate qualities that are related to or associated with these six processes and their associated stage of the round of breath. The awakening of new life is magically death-defying and brazenly courageous. It is an expression of fearless confidence in the face of common sense and entropy, a fundamental law of physics, which says that everything moves toward dispersal and chaos. At its best, aliveness is growth into identities that transcend and include the other. Aliveness is at best a life of compassionate service. Ideally, balance is an expression of a type of wisdom that intuitively is in the right place at the right time. Ideally, detachment is acceptance of oneself and others. At its best, freedom is inner peace. Ideally, clarity is witnessing: the ability to stand back and watch the drama of life without getting caught up in it.
This is why IDL refers to the six qualities that accompany these six aspects of the cycle of breathing as confidence, compassion, wisdom, acceptance, inner peace, and witnessing. These are also qualities of deathlessness. If you could not die, you would not be afraid. Therefore you would be confident. If you could not die, you would be selfless – there would be no you that could or would die. Selflessness makes room for an infinitely expanded sense of self that contains all and is therefore compassionate. If you could not die you would have the ageless knowingness of that which is never born. If you could not die there would be no preferences and nothing to reject. As a result, you would be completely accepting of yourself and others. Again, this does not mean that there are no consequences for acting in unwise ways, only that those consequences are not an expression of some sense of justice or non-acceptance. If you could not die you would experience deep, inner peace. If you could not die you would observe the drama of life in an objective, witnessing way.
Quadrant Processes and Qualities
How do the processes and qualities show up in the internal individual quadrant of any and all holons?
Awake/Confident
To become more conscious, the core quality of the interior individual quadrant, means to expand your definition of who you are to include more of the “other” as you grow. This is one meaning of “transcend and include.”
To become more confident means to act with less fear. In order for such actions to be rational, you must act in a way that is congruent with your expanded self-definition. This is not the mindless, narcissistic confidence of a two-year old or a cocky adolescent. It is a confidence that is built on the co-evolution with the five other qualities and six other processes.
Alive/Compassionate
When you become more conscious you become more alive. However, this aliveness involves a significant trade-off. You are not only more aware of beauty, but of ugliness, of pleasure, but of pain, of suffering as well as freedom and of hate as well as love. We all want the good without the bad, but the evolutionary expansion of consciousness inevitably includes more of both, but with less attachment to them. The required balancing quality that allows consciousness to not self-destruct under the weight of a clear awareness of all of these negatives is the evolution of compassion.
Balanced/Wise
Becoming more conscious is a product of the balancing of such forces as those just mentioned, and such a balancing is itself a manifestation of wisdom. This is another example of how these forces not only co-evolve, but of how the rate of evolution within any of these four quadrants (and therefore of any holon) is limited by the lagging processes/qualities in any one of the four.
Detached/Accepting
As consciousness expands in its definition of itself, it naturally detaches from previous, more limited, self-definitions. It continues to have access to and use previous, more limited self-definitions, but only as tools. They no longer define who you are. Consequently, previous levels of self-definition are no longer seen as threats to your sense of self and so can be accepted. Other individuals and forces that previously were not accepted because they were seen as direct threats to survival and as assaults on identity, like pain, immigrants, poverty, discrimination, or intellectual property theft, are now viewed as factors in a homeostasis that make up a larger, necessary picture.
Free/Inner Peace
A very real but transient experience of relative freedom naturally and inevitably accompanies every genuine expansion in consciousness. It is real because the expansion is genuine; it is transient because one quickly adapts to any genuine expansion, reflecting the inevitable movement from the transformation of synthesis to the problem-solving nature of the new, emerging thesis stage of a broader, more inclusive dialectic. However, while the experience of freedom is relative and transient, the accompanying quality of inner peace tends to be relatively profound and stable. As a broader, fundamentally desired experience in consciousness, it is unmistakable. An individual organism, human, or organization knows when it has it.
Clear/Witnessing
The result of the evolution of all these co-factors in the internal individual quadrant of holons is increased clarity. Clarity means the ability to see, in particular, but more broadly it refers to an expanded ability to sense in any way. Consequently, individuals and organizations have fewer blind spots. They misperceive less. They are less prone to convenient delusions, such as the belief that profit is more valuable than work well done or that lasting growth can be maintained while costs are being externalized.
Any expansion in consciousness is not only an increase in clarity but in objectivity; the ability to stand back and observe first the other, then yourself, then yourself observing yourself. The result of such objectivity is not some dry rationalism; it creates a foundation for a genuine growth not only in company confidence but in corporate compassion for employees, customers, suppliers, and for the materials out of which its products are made.
How do the processes and qualities show up in the external individual quadrant of any and all holons?
Awake/Confident
Awake and confident behaviors are prized in the external individual quadrant. We are taught as children that we do well if we are attentive and confident. The attentiveness required to make good grades and become a good employee is not the same as the wakefulness of IDL. It involves waking up out of the Drama Triangle in one’s relationships, thoughts and feelings, and dreams. It involves cultivating constantly expanding meditative consciousness. It involves cultivating a confidence that is not based on technical expertise or the validation of others or by the size of one’s bank account, but on the ability to take realistic risks based on a solid grounding on who one really is. These are not competencies of wakefulness generally acknowledged or supported by societies or their cultures. These are not competencies of wakefulness normally supported by entrepreneurs or business enterprises of all kinds, although I suspect that as they familiarize themselves with the value of them they could lead the way for other components of society.
Alive/Compassionate
While aliveness is superficially not only valued but craved by humans in the 21st century, it is the aliveness of the Drama Triangle, a sort of zombie sleepwalking through great excitement that adds up to very little of consequence, when perceived from the perspectives of innumerable self-aspects. Most societal aliveness is about addiction: to thoughts, to having our feelings stimulated, to tastes, textures, smells, status objects, in our worship of comfort and our sense of self validation.
While great good can and is done by most people, either purposefully or by the passing of their wealth and gifts on to future generations, little of this is about the type of compassion discussed here. When you save a child, a home, a forest, or a community it is indeed a compassionate act, in the sense that it is an expression of giving that expands beyond our immediate self-sense. It is not that such acts, regardless of what level of consciousness they come from, are not beneficial and worthy of our respect and gratitude, but that we can do better. So often in interviews we hear from self-aspects that score high in confidence, wisdom, acceptance, inner peace, and witnessing, but low in compassion. The message seems to be that we do not know what real compassion is, and any portrayal of it by the self-aspect would be misinterpreted. From their perspectives, we need to exercise much less of what we call compassion, because from where they stand what we consider compassion is generally shallow and phony. Instead, they recommend that we focus on strengthening the other core qualities. The way authentic aliveness and compassion appear in the IE quadrant of any holon is in action that is not within the Drama Triangle and is, paradoxically enough, not motivated so much by compassion but by the balanced expression of the other five core qualities or values.
Balanced/Wise
Balance in the External Individual quadrant of a holon is the product of an integral life practice: a daily discipline that addresses body, mind, spirit, and interpersonal relationships. Wilber adds shadow. Note that few businesses or corporations identify behaviors that will address or balance most of these elements. Note that most politicians vote (an EI behavior) in ways that are expressions of exterior demands, such as party loyalty and payback to donors, rather than in a way that has any kind of internal, balanced, consistency. External Individual wisdom is behavior that is in the right place at the right time and that benefits the greatest number.
Detached/Accepting
EI detachment is freedom from addictions of all sorts, but particularly the Drama Triangle, because it is foundational for all other addictions. IE acceptance is not the absence of preference or non-action. It is about behaving in ways that are structured in such a way as to reflect the will of a broad consensus of self-aspects.
Free/Inner Peace
Many people confuse freedom with license, the maximization of choice, and the absence of limitations. However, without structure and boundaries freedom has no meaning. Freedom only exists when its context is defined, such as “freedom from poverty,” or “freedom from fear.” The problem with such freedoms is that they are not positive goods, but only the absence of negative ones. As defined by IDL, freedom is found in waking up, finding and following your inner compass, getting out of the Drama Triangle, interviewing self-aspects and following their recommendations, and identifying with self-aspects that score high in the six core qualities being reviewed here.
The result of these actions is, among other things, an increase in inner peace. Inner peace is not the absence of stress; it is the ability to thrive in positive stress and the ability to perceive all stressors as positive. Behaviors in this quadrant are chosen based on this definition of freedom and inner peace and behaviors are increasingly undertaken from a space of inner peace, regardless of how much physical, mental, or emotional action is required.
Clear/Witnessing
In the common meaning of the term, when a person or organization is “clear” in the external individual quadrant, they know what to do and they do it for right or wrong, good or evil. They know their goals, intentions, motivations, and their actions are a clear expression of them, even if their motivations are purely emotional and reactive. Similarly, those who witness in this quadrant observe their behavior or the behavior of some other holon. Witnessing is a behavior that is seen up and down the phylogenetic scale, from frogs observing mosquitos to meditators observing their thoughts and feelings.
However, there are deeper understandings of clarity and witnessing, and they involve consideration of the perspective of the definer of clarity and the act of witnessing. For example, the clarity of a dream or nightmare is one thing from the perspective of the dreamer; it is quite another from the characters that share that experience. To get authentic clarity one must take on behaviors that generate clarity from the perspective of other self-aspects, which is done in IDL through character identification and interviewing. To get authentic witnessing, it is not enough to observe from the perspective of waking identity, because it is only one minority perspective within the entirety of identity. If any holon wants to be able to claim an ability to do authentic witnessing it must behaviorally witness from other legitimate perspectives that comprise its greater identity. CEOs must identify with and “become,” through interviewing, line workers; line workers must be CEOs. Whether or not this is realistic or practical is another issue entirely.
How do the processes and qualities show up in the external collective quadrant of any and all holons?
Awake/Confident
For a group or system to be awake it has to be conscious, which means self-aware. This is on its face a contradiction in terms, because while individual holons are more or less conscious, groups indulge in groupthink and systems are well, systematic – robotic, preplanned, automatic, instinctive, inertial. But every holon is comprised of individuals, and the combined awareness of those individuals create the degree of wakefulness of that holon. Therefore it is plausible to speak of the degree of wakefulness of a corporation, a government, a religion, or a nation.
What does a confident group or system look like? Generally it is one that has good feedback mechanisms and uses them to maintain a healthy homeostasis. On a family level, that would be good communication skills and role maintenance. At work, it would be clear policies and job descriptions with clear boundaries, rewards, and consequences for abusing the system. But beyond these more or less prosaic definitions of confidence, there is a higher octave which is fearless in its willingness to embrace the common good in the belief that if all benefit then the bottom line will too. This is not an obvious or a necessarily rational conclusion. In fact, for many people, it is irrational and foolish. It takes great confidence to clearly act against the short-term interests of powerful sectors in the conviction that the long-term benefits will more than offset those losses. It’s something like eating less and going to the gym: good in principle but very difficult to carry out in practice.
Alive/Compassionate
Most holons are not alive; they are 90% or more automatic, habitual, instinctive systems that are comprised of methodical, dependable routines and subroutines. We know this because almost any and all behavior, if it can be observed, can be predicted. For example, if you followed me around for a month and noted what I did every moment of every day and could also hook up electrodes to my brain and get a readout of my thoughts and feelings, all without me realizing it, you could predict what I would do, think, and feel next with such accuracy that I would be convinced that you were a great psychic.
So if our normal, everyday consciousness is largely preprogrammed, automatic, habitual, and anything but creative and spontaneous, despite how we may experience it, what does it mean to be alive? Clearly the answer has to do with that small cutting edge of awareness that is unpredictable, that integrates thoughts, feelings, relationships, and activities in novel, unexpected ways. These moments of genuine aliveness are few but precious for humans; how much less common are they for human systems? Generally such novelty happens by accident or as a type of synergism that results from patient perseverance in a collective course of action.
Similarly, what individuals and groups call compassion is generally a collection of socially-derived “shoulds” which are undertaken as part of a group or a tradition. We can consider an act as compassionate when it meets a need in a selfless way, regardless of the intention of the giver, or we can define a compassionate act by the intention of the giver. For IDL, groups and systems act compassionately when there is service to a greater good in a way that is selfless. By this definition, the sun, sky, oceans, and Earth are compassionate. Individuals and groups can be but tend to be much less so, because they have survival and security needs that are factored in. This is one reason why practice in becoming such broadly compassionate self-aspects is important: it models for us what a more genuine compassion looks like. If we don’t experience it ourselves, we won’t know what it is. If we don’t know what it is, how can we create it in our work and institutions?
Balanced/Wise
The beauty of the concept of balance lies in its inherent recognition of the value of conflict. Many people spend their lives avoiding contention; other people seem to invite it. Neither of these extremes reflect or create healthy balance; instead they support dysfunctional states of disequilibrium – passivity and rescuing on the one hand and aggression and persecution on the other, with both resulting in the experience of chronic victimization. Balance in IDL is aperspectival. That means it listens to, integrates, and applies multiple diverse and sometimes competing perspectives regarding who you are and how to live your life. On a systemic and social interactional level balance is a system of checks and balances such as exist among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government or between the accounting/financial branch of a company and its various other departments. For such systems of balances to be higher order there must be an awareness of the interests of each of the four quadrants and efforts made within the system to hear, acknowledge, and apply approaches that take all into consideration.
This is a very wise thing to do, because it maximizes input but without allowing the input process to supersede the implementation and action phase. Systems are wise when they click; they are in the right place at the right time and everything flows. This means that there is a harmony and integration that is greater than the sum of the parts. The system knows what to do and does it.
Detached/Accepting
While groups can be detached from their labors, a detached group or system tends to focus on its work rather than impinging internal or external factors. This may be selfish or unselfish, unproductive or productive. Clearly, if an individual or a corporation is too detached from important feedback or marketplace trends, it will suffer. On the other hand, if it personalizes and is hyper-reactive to feedback and trends it will not steer by an inner compass. The result will be the fulfillment of someone else’s dream and not your own. Higher order detachment comes into play when a person or organization becomes finely tuned to its own inner compass. Following it becomes the priority, and feedback that does not support it is given less weight.
Such detachment allows for the acceptance of loss, failure, and delay without moving into either passivity or a tolerance of people, practices, and plans that are basically distractions.
Free/Inner Peace
System-group freedom involves flexibility, adaptability, freedom from regulation and freedom to work within supportive structures. Group/system inner peace is most closely correlated with an ability to listen or to be open and receptive in the midst of work, for example, a crowd listening to a symphony or a manufacturing plant running smoothly.
Clear/Witnessing
System/group clarity comes from the minimization of distractions and secondary issues. Witnessing is the ability of the group to reflect upon itself and observe itself from multiple relevant perspectives.
How do the processes and qualities show up in the internal collective quadrant of any and all holons?
Awake/Confident
An “awake” value or interpretation is changing, open, taking form. It is in the process of being defined. Compare this to most values: set, rigid, formed, defined. We base our actions on our values and interpretations, yet if there is anything we know about them it is that they are partial, limited, and at best, only partially correct. Values and interpretations need to be more like weather and less like stones. Confident values reflect those of high scoring, potential self-aspects. They are confident because the are core and deathless. They are core because they reflect aspects of the basic life process of breathing. They are deathless because they are not dependent on any particular individual to continue to exist.
Most people are supremely confident in their values and interpretations, the way a young child is confident that he knows what he sees, hears, and what he is doing. There is a confidence based on ignorance – not knowing what you don’t know – and there is a confidence based on having nothing to lose and therefore nothing to fear. While both are part of the same continuum, their resemblance is purely superficial.
Alive/Compassionate
An “alive” value or interpretation takes into account a number of relevant values and interpretations as well as the conditions in the other three quadrants. It is not self-referential; it does not believe because it is the truth or knows the truth. Instead, it seeks to link to other values and other interpretations in creative, productive ways, which in itself is a good definition of one aspect of compassion.
Balanced/Wise
A balanced value takes into account other values and thereby transcends both itself and other values. For example, when love takes into account confidence, wisdom, acceptance, inner peace, and witnessing, it is transformed into compassion. Compassion is a relatively wise form of love because it contains this balance. Consequently, compassion is able to be more effective in the world because it is both balanced and wise. This is why individuals, groups, governments, and corporations need values and interpretations that are both balanced and wise.
Detached/Accepting
A detached value does not insist that it be validated by winning an argument or proving its point. If your values are detached you do not have to demonstrate that you are brave, intelligent, beautiful, or successful. Detached interpretations are clear but provisional. Values and interpretations that are accepting transcend and include their opposites, as compassion transcends and includes both love and its opposite, hate, and as inner peace transcends and includes both relaxation and its opposite, stress.
Free/Inner Peace
A value or interpretation is “free” to the extent that it does not have to be expressed. This is very different from the freedom to express a value, which is generally a declaration of personal license rather than about the freedom of the value itself, which is forced into a particular expression. For example, freedom to be yourself forces the value of freedom into the channel of self-expression; freedom from hatred forces the value of freedom into channels of non-expression of hatred, making the value itself non-free. Under such conditions there is no inner peace for a value. Because its expression is distorted the conveyor of the value is simultaneously depriving themselves of inner peace.
A good example are the values and interpretations of your dream characters. When a dream monster is chasing you, your assumption is that it values attacking and scaring you. If you think about how the monster interprets its experience you may well conclude that it either doesn’t like you or wants to hurt you. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be perceived as a monster. However, you have constrained the values and interpretations of the monster. You don’t really know what they are and you will not and cannot until you are willing to ask the monster. Until you do, you will have no inner peace regarding the monster, either when you are dreaming or when you think about it while awake. Some clever people work around this problem by killing the monster or changing the dream or meditating or waking up in the dream. However, none of these solutions free the values and interpretations of the monster to generate inner peace. Instead, they keep those values locked away, impoverishing us in our disconnection from our greater identity while allowing us to complacently assume that we really know what the monster is as a part of ourselves when we know nothing of the sort.
Clear/Witnessing
A clear value is one that is transparent for spirit to shine through; a clear value does not call any attention to itself; it is simply a prism through which the light shines with a particular interpretation, like the color of one diamond facet or another. A clear value also provides a degree of objectivity that is not found in ones that are less clear. For example an interviewed self aspect that scores ten in witnessing is clearer than one that does not, and one that scores ten in all six qualities and not only witnessing is clearer than one that just scores tens in witnessing. Such witnessing from a value/interpretation means that awareness is clearer and therefore that decision making and problem solving is likely to be that much more effective.
Once we have an understanding of how these core processes and values manifest in each of the four quadrants of holons we can consider more specific applications of this approach to various subjects, in this case to meditation, daily life, and organizations.
Meditation
Awake/Confident
To be awake when you meditate means the absence of drowsiness, sleepiness, and daydreaming. It means the transcendence of habitual, structured states of mind. To be confident means to not allow fear to knock you out of expanded awareness. It means to believe in meditation and the process you are using and to stick with it in a determined way. In addition, for IDL, it means to identify self-aspects that score high in confidence while you meditate. That doesn’t mean to visualize them; it means to become them. This is easier than it may sound, because in the course of an interview and dialoging with high-scoring self-aspects around the application of their recommendations, you have already practiced becoming them on more than one occasion. Also, you can use abdominal inhalation to expand your sense of fearless confidence when you meditate. The goal is not to think about confidence or even to get into that feeling state, as much as it is to experience an awakening of confidence with every abdominal inhalation.
Alive/Compassionate
Being alive when you meditate is to experience vitality and activity, but on an energic level prior to color, shape, form, thought or feeling. When this aliveness is experienced as a service to your greater self, both within and without as all sentient beings, it is compassionate. In IDL you can also do so by focusing on the chest aspect of the cycle of the round of your breath or by identifying with self-aspects that score high in compassion.
Balanced/Wise
Balancing inhalation and exhalation, alertness and relaxation, yang and yin is one way of describing the work of meditation. To do so is not only wise; it cultivates or generates wisdom by creating a homeostasis that provides a context for the blossoming of awareness that transcends and includes. IDL uses the pause at the top of the breath to amplify balance and wisdom by amplifying inhalation if you become too relaxed and drift off into day dreaming, imagery, or drowsiness, and by amplifying exhalation if you become too alert and are unable to quiet your mind or your emotions. In addition, it encourages the identification with self-aspects that personify wisdom, as demonstrated by their scores, comments, and felt presence.
Detached/Accepting
Detachment in meditation is freedom from monkey mind, from the five trees of thought, feeling, image, sensation, and states. This detachment does not come from avoidance or control but rather from such profound acceptance that there is non-identification with all of these always present realms of experience. They are experienced and used as tools but no longer define who we are. IDL expands acceptance by emphasizing the long chest exhalation portion of the cycle of breathing and by becoming associated high-scoring self-aspects.
Free/Inner Peace
Freedom is the classical Hindu definition of spiritual enlightenment, and it is amplified by Buddhism as freedom from suffering. As such, meditation is seen as the royal road to such freedom. Freedom is both a freedom to and a freedom from. It is freedom to choose, freedom to be or not be. It is about having a constantly expanding range of options and perspectives to use. It is also the result of injunctive methods. In IDL, this freedom is cultivated by becoming aspects of yourself that have more freedom than you do. By becoming them, you integrate a freer perspective into your own.
While meditators generally seek inner peace, what they typically experience is something else: their thoughts, feelings, images, sensations, or drowsiness. Perhaps they mistake these mental contents for meditation; perhaps they are trying too hard. It’s rather like not thinking of a purple elephant on the roof of a red barn: the more you seek inner peace the more you tend to end up with everything else when you meditate. What can we do?
In IDL inner peace co-evolves with the development of the other five core qualities. Rather than focusing on inner peace, you interview what comes up, which is the currently surfacing wake-up call. That is about the element that is currently most out of balance, the lagging element, which if not integrated will limit your ability to find, experience, and appreciate inner peace. In meditation, this is about finding and supporting the part of the cycle of breath that is lagging and support it with the help of self-aspects that are already strong in that skill set. Focus on abdominal exhalation is also used to amplify inner peace in IDL.
Clear/Witnessing
Clarity in meditation brings up associations to a night sky, mountain spring water, ambient air, and alert, awake mental awareness. In IDL clarity includes and transcends all six core qualities and processes as they manifest as high scoring self-aspects. These scores are relative, and a “ten” today in clarity will be a “five” in a year or two if you continue to practice deep listening and use it with your meditation.
While meditation may cultivate the development of witnessing more than any other core quality, its expansion is limited by the lagging qualities. This indicates why meditation alone doesn’t bring enlightenment; it does not intrinsically support balanced development. You can be a dedicated meditator and lack compassion, wisdom, or confidence, for example. Meditation is one essential element of any integral life practice, and that practice is best coordinated by IDL because it helps to assure that waking goals are congruent with those of our intrasocial community. IDL amplifies witnessing by identifying during meditation with self-aspects that score high in witnessing and by experiencing deeply the long pause at the bottom of the breath.
Daily Life
Awake/Confident
To be awake in our daily life has a lot of practical implications. It means to remember, to be organized, focused, disciplined, and aware without bleeding over into anxiety, anality, an inability to see the large picture, rigidity, or hyper. Clearly this is too large a task for waking identity. It is like trying to consciously digest your breakfast: too many peptides, amino acids, and secretions to keep track of. However, your larger identity can pretty well find and maintain this balance when you partner with it by learning to first identify with this or that aspect, depending on its expertise, and then delegating this or that task to it.
It takes a lot of confidence to delegate responsibility to sunflowers or toilet brushes, a type of confidence that is not, like typical confidence, All About Me. With this type of confidence you don’t go through your day marketing yourself or confusing your roles with who you are.
IDL uses waking identification with confident self-aspects in designated circumstances to build confidence. By following their recommendations you grow in trust of yourself, confidence, and healthy fearlessness.
Alive/Compassionate
Such wakefulness and confidence naturally generate both aliveness and compassion which can show up at home and at work. Aliveness is about creating a culture wherever you are that is not built around the Drama Triangle. Your aliveness creates inertia that keeps you from getting pulled into the drama and confusion of those who don’t practice deep listening. Your compassion allows you to respectfully listen to others while your aliveness keeps you from manufacturing phony consent. When you become this or that compassionate self-aspect at specific times during your day you integrate potentials into your daily life. The distinction between concept and application, spirituality and daily life dissipates and a higher order authenticity slowly emerges.
Balanced/Wise
It is difficult enough to balance home, work, exercise, and diet, and this is basically what balance in everyday life is about. The IDL idea of balance takes into consideration what balance means from a cross-section of self-aspects. If your waking identity is some 10% of your overall consciousness, IDL interviews are “ice cores” that provide invaluable biofeedback about the priorities of the dog that is wagging the tail of waking consciousness, based on the knowledge that there can be no life balance without taking the majority of identity into consideration.
Not only is this a matter of practical, everyday balance in the world, it is wise, in the sense that we gain objectivity about how to achieve our own waking priorities, and because it expands our definition of wisdom by taking into account more perspectives critical to our success than we did before. When you follow the recommendations in your waking life of self-aspects that score high in wisdom you put IDL to the test. You get to decide whether you are in the right place at the right time more of the time or not. You get to decide whether your decision-making gets better, worse, or stays the same.
Detached/Accepting
In order to be productive at anything in the real world, we have to detach from a lot of important stuff. Emails go unanswered, children go to day care, primary relationships suffer, spending priorities must change, exercise, diet, and meditation commonly go by the board. Doing IDL interviews teaches us what the trade-offs for detachment are going to be. How much is our health going to suffer long-term in exchange for financial security and career success? Is it going to kill us? Do we want to pay that price? Is there a way to do both and avoid the bullet? We don’t know, but perhaps there are self-aspects that do.
Normal acceptance is often thought of in terms of forgiveness, forgetting, or such phrases as, “shit happens.” Much routine acceptance is built on a practical calculation: “Do I have the time, money, and energy to fight this?” If the answer is “no,” we “accept” it. If the answer is “yes,” we don’t. Many of your self-aspects don’t make this calculation. Their acceptance, or lack of it, is not based on either time, energy, or money, like ours is. Instead, it is based on the absence of space-time and fear-based conditions. That does not mean that their perspectives are always useful, right, or appropriate; what it does mean is that they are generally hugely more accepting than ours are. When you become in specific circumstances in your daily life self-aspects that score high in acceptance you apply an important aspect of IDL to your world in a practical way.
Free/Inner Peace
Freedom in our everyday lives is a dream of the end of financial, time, relationship, and health pressures. Because we are all subject to all of these pressures to one degree or another, we are constantly manipulated by external voices that claim they can and will reduce them. What if you were no longer subject to such pressures? Wouldn’t you be relatively free of victimization by such manipulative marketers, advertisers, and special interest groups? Wouldn’t your decisions then be more likely to be much less a matter of compromise and much more free?
While such pressures are never going to go away, listening to parts of ourselves that aren’t subject to them can make a considerable, substantial difference. It frees us up inside and in our relationship to all those outside pressures.
Such freedom has many dividends that money can’t buy, and that time and health can’t bring. Chief among them is inner peace, the “peace that passes understanding,” the peace of near death experiences, the peace of deep meditation. There are parts of yourself that have that peace right now. Becoming them is an ever-present option. When you do, you experience that inner peace. Do you believe that? Are you listening to them? Are you becoming them? No, for the most part you don’t believe it; your 10% above the waterline iceberg self that’s above the waterline thinks it knows better. How’s that working for you?
Clear/Witnessing
Clarity in our waking lives is generally about our priorities. Are they clear? That means, “Do we have a plan?” “Is it reasonable?” “Are we following it?” It is also about understanding and mutual understanding: “How am I doing?” “Do I know what I need and how to get it?” “Can I separate my needs from my wants?” “Am I communicating clearly with others?”
While such definitions of clarity are helpful and perhaps even essential for our waking life, IDL demonstrates that this definition of clarity often fails to produce the practical results we need in our daily lives because it is too limited. This is because it addresses only the priorities of a minority of the constituents of our overall intrasocial identity: those that constitute waking identity, the tail that thinks it is wagging the dog. Therefore, our plan neglects the priorities of internal constituencies that have the ability to determine our happiness. Because we do not consult them, our priorities , while reasonable enough from a waking perspective, may not support our overall good. Consequently, following our waking priorities may put us into direct conflict with the priorities of our greater self, as occurs when we chronically put career before our health. How can we understand our needs if our definition of how we are doing excludes the majority of who we are? How can we accurately assess our needs when we are ignorant of the needs of a cross-section sampling of our self-aspects? If we can communicate clearly with others but don’t communicate with the majority of ourselves, what does that imply about our clarity? What does that imply about our long term ability to communicate with others?
Such issues are a reflection of a lack of objectivity that is provided when we get a broader view of who we are and what we need. Such witnessing is something normally provided by a combination of real world feedback and our common sense. Our boss tells us if we’re late or doing a good job. Our spouse tells us if our efforts at communication, time together, and taking care of home responsibilities are up to minimum standards. Our bathroom scales and our mirror tell us whether we need to change our diet and get more exercise. Our common sense tells us when we need to get some sleep, shut up and listen, drive more slowly, and pay that bill. However, what we lack is triangulation: a third source of objective witnessing that is vital. This is supplied by objective, yet subjective, internal perspectives, particularly those that score high in witnessing. They are subjective because they are internal and they are objective because they do not have the vested interests in time, space, health, success, status, security, and money that you and I do. They are not infallable, but when combined with the other two sources of objective witnessing the result is a foundation of objectivity that is much stronger and much more reliable for directing every day life decision making. Identify a self-aspect of your own that scores high in witnessing in an IDL interview. Become it when it recommends you do so. Follow its recommendations for life change. See what happens. Test the method yourself.
Organizational Applications
While individual members of any organization have internal self-aspects from dreams and life issues to interview to develop new depth in the six core qualities and processes, organizations do not, at least not in the same way. While organizations are built on dreams and are dreams (or nightmares) in many ways, they do not dream, per se. However, they do have life issues and the events in their corporate lives can be interviewed as if they were dreams. Examples of corporate life issues include profit and loss, employee management and training, hiring and retention, access to resources, and environmental awareness, among many others. One can always interview corporate feelings around plans, successes, and failures. Examples of interviewing corporate life events as if they were dreams include interviewing the perspectives of workers, potential buyers, and competitors. This is done by individual members of the corporation and their interviews are compared to get a collective “ice core” from the internal consciousness of the corporation.
From the above descriptions the reader has a pretty good idea of our conception of what “normal” expressions of the six core processes and values look like, so we will here focus on what is different about the IDL approach.
Awake/Confident
An organization is waking up, from an IDL perspective, if it is transforming, not simply due to the inputs of internal systems and the feedback of external forces such as consumers and suppliers, but in consultation with self-aspects of corporate issues, as explained above. This added dimension of input will provide a corporation of an added source of confidence regarding its direction as well as a massively expanded access to creativity, so necessary to maintain a vital role in the marketplace.
Imagine an organization where management and workers are encouraged to become self-aspects that personify high confidence and to follow their recommendations regarding work. What might the result be? Imagine an organization where all participants were encouraged to dream about life issues regarding the company, to do interviews around those dreams and around the company’s issues, and to share those with each other. To do so implies a work environment in which private information is respected out of a desire to support a congruency between work and personal, spiritual and secular worlds. Such a degree of openness and trust is almost unimaginable in today’s business climate, but culture changes, and IDL clarifies a powerful and fundamental developmental vector that successful corporations will move toward.
Alive/Compassionate
The result of such a radical program should be more aliveness, as demonstrated by a heightened level of listening to all inputs, and a greater respect for same. The consequence of greater aliveness is more to give – access to more resources, both internal and external. This translates into an expanded ability to be of service, a corporation with a heart, which in today’s world, is almost contradictory. People would not nose into each other’s business even as they had access to it, because IDL is not projective or interpretive. It is not a form of therapy asking workers to parent each other. What it would do is encourage questioning among stakeholders, not so much of each other, but of self-aspects. Once these become known, they can be asked about work challenges and issues, while at work. Let us say I have a high-scoring alligator self-aspect that I respect and that you know about. Let’s say we are at work and I am stumped about some problem. You might turn to me and say, “May I ask your alligator a question?” If I say “yes,” you then could say something like, “Alligator, if you were _____, how would you deal with ______? Why?” If the alligator doesn’t make sense or you think is just proposing some unrealistic non-solution, confront it. Don’t ever follow the advice of a self-aspect that doesn’t earn your respect. However, by never putting self-aspects to the test by applying their recommendations, you never give them a chance to do so.
Balanced/Wise
A balanced company is mindful of all six processes and qualities and defines its goals and growth not in terms of profit or even customer satisfaction, but in congruence with those core processes and qualities. This is not only balanced but wise, because together they create a strong inner compass for the company that will keep it from embarking on projects, making expenditures, or discontinuing efforts without using this yardstick, based on the self-scoring of various self-aspects of corporate life issues.
Detached/Accepting
Such a yardstick will generate detachment toward issues that bedevil the typical corporation. That does not mean that they will not be taken seriously or go unaddressed; it means that they will have lower priority. Salaries, production issues, and product development will be secondary to the balancing of inner peace, witnessing, compassion and the other qualities and processes. This is as it should be, as everything in our life is secondary to the priority of our round of breath. Once we grasp this, there can be a corporate acceptance of altered priorities, necessary to align efforts with a solid, lasting foundation.
Free/Inner Peace
Once a corporation defines itself in terms of such values and processes it will experience freedom from the stress and anxiety that typically accompany normal threats to its existence and self-definition that bedevil corporations. There will be greater inner peace within the corporation conjoined with assertive vitality and enhanced creativity.
Clear/Witnessing
The pursuit of these values and processes through the implementation of recommendations that come out of IDL interviews of life issues is predicted to increase corporate clarity and objectivity.
Thinking About Technology
We began this essay by asking, “How do we create technologies that do not destroy us?” IDL generates ongoing growth in the interior quadrants designed to keep up with the ever-increasing pace of development in the exterior quadrants. As noted above, this internal growth is absolutely necessary if we are to keep the dissonance between external competencies and internal immaturity from becoming so great that a meltdown of the exterior quadrants becomes inevitable. It does so by practically and concretely accessing a larger, more inclusive, definition of any conscious holon and helping it to find, listen to, and follow its inner compass. The result is an increased likelihood that technologies will not outpace the containment capabilities of a particular society or culture because they will co-evolve with the core processes and qualities.