The idea of Soul Mates takes the ideal of Courtly Love, developed during the Middle Ages when knights fought to win the favor of some fair lady, to a new, higher level. The romantic ideal of love was refined in the genre of romantic novels, beginning with the works of Jane Austin, until it attained an exalted metaphysical pinnacle as the concept of Soul Mate, in which the bond of love is created and sanctioned by God and an eternal Divine Order. Seen in such a light, anything that stands between you and your Soul Mate becomes a sin against Nature, Reality, Love, and Truth.

Clearly, a belief in Soul Mates meets the needs of many people. What are those needs? People need to feel special, and the idea of Soul Mates makes people feel special. People need to have their relationship choices validated so that they don’t have to question their judgment, because that would get in the way of abandoning themselves completely to the unique specialness of their love. In addition, contemplating the consequences of a poor choice gets in the way of the dizzying reality of the moment and the possibilities for future happiness it portends. Why not trust in the Power of Love? It feels beautiful, true, and right. Does it not show disrespect not to trust such a sacred thing?

The idea of Soul Mates not only makes you feel special; it validates your choice of partners. It has the additional advantage of justifying bad choices. When the relationship crashes, you can tell yourself that while this was a Match Made in Heaven, it wasn’t “meant to be” at this time. You are able to maintain both your belief in Soul Mates and the rightness of your choice of a disastrous partner.

This is also the thinking when your Soul Mate is already in a committed relationship. This complication does not change the fact that the relationship was Meant to Be and that Love Will Find a Way. It’s karma, destiny, and fate that you have found each other over all these centuries, out of all these millions of people; somehow life will change so that you will be able to be together to put the universe into the harmony, order, beauty, truth, and love that was Meant to Be. In the presence of such timeless, sacred love, how meaningful are the social vows of marriage? People do not understand the power and preeminence of Real, Divine Love.

How about multiple Soul Mates? What about when you are sure someone is your Soul Mate but then another person comes along and you are even more sure this one is your Soul Mate? You were mistaken before, but now you are sure. You know this one is really your soul mate. How do you know? It feels right; you’ve never felt like this; there is a powerful, spiritual energy not just from one but from several of your chakras to this other person. When you ask them about it, they feel it too. That’s proof. It couldn’t be that they are just saying what you want to hear so they can get what they want from you. It couldn’t be that they feel it too but that the feeling works to validate what they feel and what they want. No; it’s nothing like that.

Alas. When a belief is convenient, self-validating, and justifies doing whatever you already want to do, it is wise to take a peek behind the curtain. Is the Great and Powerful Oz really Great and Powerful, or is he a petty carnival operator making money out of generating mass delusion? Asking such a question smacks of cynicism and disrespect. Isn’t it cruel, like taking candy from a child? What harm is the candy? Why can’t one just leave well enough alone? Even if a belief in Soul Mates is a delusion, it is  harmless, is it not? Why not just let lovers in love be? Why spoil the fun? Why not just let people find out on their own?

What if a baby has a cigarette instead of candy? There are cases of two year olds becoming addicted to cigarettes or alcohol because their parents think it is “cute.” Like cigarettes and alcohol, the concept of Soul Mates is addictive. How else does one explain how effectively it has taken root in the popular imagination? How else does one explain why it has remained viable in some segments of culture for decades?

The problem with viewing Soul Mates as an understandable and harmless belief is that it allows you to stand by while lives are wrecked and children are raised in unnecessary adversity. Is it harmless if your daughter has children with her Soul Mate, who turns out to be an alcoholic, gambler,  and child molester? What are the consequences for your daughter? What are the consequences for your grandchildren? Are those consequences all in Divine Order?  Do you want to spend years of your life worrying about the welfare of your own grandchildren, who are being raised in circumstances that are abusive, but that you can do little to change?

The Drama Triangle is a psychological game played between people, as well as in your thoughts and in your dreams. It consists of three roles, Persecutor, Victim, and Rescuer. When you play one role you eventually end up playing the other two. It’s unavoidable. Soul Mates are Rescuers in the Drama Triangle. Gurus are a special variety of Soul Mate. Both lovers and Gurus come into your life to rescue you from loneliness, boredom, and insecurity, to show you the way to happiness, bliss and enlightenment. They give your life meaning it didn’t have before. What’s wrong with that? The problem is that you have fallen in love with your own idealization that you want and think you need. You are ignoring who the other person really is, because that’s not who you need them to be. You want and need them to be your rescuer.

But rescuers have a nasty habit of turning into persecutors. How come? At some point your Soul Mate’s behavior will be seen to no longer live up to your unrealistic, idealistic expectations for them. What Guru does not also fit this description? When this happens it is often experienced as rejection or abandonment. You may try many different means to get them to change, to become the person you know that they “really” are. But your well-meaning efforts will be experienced as non-acceptance and met with resistance. Prince Charming has turned into a frog or even worse, a warty toad.

Because this is so highly predictable it is amazing that most people manage to fool themselves into thinking that this time, with this person, things will be different. If you like living in the Drama Triangle, you’ll love believing in Soul Mates. You’ll love trading in last year’s model Guru for the new, improved, highly recommended Real and True Guru.

Here some questions to ask yourself. Does a belief in Soul Mates make poor judgment about relationships choices more or less likely?  Is a belief in soul mates likely to be true – that there is only one right person for you in all the universe and you have found them – or is it more likely that you are indulging in a delusion that validates your current feelings?

The inconvenient truth is that believing in Soul Mates is based on fear. It assumes that abundance does not exist in the universe, that this one lover or teacher that seems so special, so right, is the only source of deep, satisfying, complete love that you will ever find in the universe. Wouldn’t such a universe be narrow, petty, and impoverished? It also assumes that you have to settle for what you’ve got, because better is not going to come around. Is that true? How do you know?

It is hard work finding appropriate partners and spiritual teachers. You’ll  be disappointed and get rejected. You’ll make mistakes and then have to look at why you did so and learn from them. That’s difficult. No one likes being confronted with the fact that, despite their best judgment and strong feelings, they were flat-out wrong or just plain foolish in their choice in partners or spiritual teachers. It’s much easier to leave the choice to chance, magic, and delusional thinking and just pray that reality won’t catch up.

However, once you get the hang of it, it’s not so bad being wrong and foolish. I make a point of being wrong and foolish at least six times before breakfast, and then attempt to improve on my failure rate as the day goes on. Pretending you’re not stupid, ignorant, and mistaken takes energy away from enjoying life. Why not just admit to yourself and everyone else that you are a hopeless dweeb? They will not only be taken aback by your honesty but pleasantly surprised when you do something minor right, like remember their name. You can then learn from your mistakes instead of hiding them, as if they were bad or wrong. Mistakes are a good thing; they’re how you learn.

The truth about Soul Mates is that there is no perfect match for you; there is no perfect teacher, Guru or Master either. Everyone you meet is a fallible human being. The more you get to know your partner the more you will recognize just how screwed up they are, just like you. When you give your partner or teacher permission to be imperfect you are giving yourself permission to be imperfect. You no longer have to try to be someone’s Soul Mate. Instead you can just be you, which is both more unique and wonderful than any Soul Mate.

If you have an eleven year old child, grandchild, nephew, niece, or friend, why not talk to them about all this? You could save them years of heartbreak. You could save yourself years of protecting children from the disastrous decisions of stupid adults. Why not have them read this and ask them what they think? Help them think these issues through before they get blinded by teenage hormones. Love does not have to be blind. Reason exists to improve love. Objectivity and love not only co-exist, but need each other to make decisions that not only feel good, but stand the test of time.

If you want to learn the principles of IDL so you can help your family, friends and loved ones avoid unnecessary suffering, drama and to learn to wake up

Words that put you in the role of victim

“Can’t”

“Can’t” puts you into the role of victim because it says, “I am powerless, unable, helpless.” Do not use it. If you do, you will not only be telling yourself, “I am a victim,” you will be telling everyone else that you expect them to treat you like you are a victim. If you use “can’t,” don’t be surprised when people either try to rescue you or take advantage of your powerlessness. They are treating you the way you’ve told them to treat you.

People often use “can’t” to excuse themselves from someone’s request: “I would love to come, but I can’t.” Are you unable to come or is the truth that you don’t want to or you have another appointment? What’s keeping you from just saying you have another appointment?

“Couldn’t” does the same. It tells others and yourself that you are powerless. “I would have come, but I couldn’t.” No; you could have; no one was holding you prisoner. If you have a conflict, just say you have a conflict. Instead of using “can’t,” substitute words like, “won’t,” “choose not to,” “will not,” or “do not want to.” These may take some getting used to; they may feel too strong or powerful. That’s because you may not be used to feeling strong or powerful. Use them and you’ll grow into it.

Ask those around you to point out to you when you use the word “can’t.” It will help you to create a Drama-free culture at home and at work.

Words that put you in the role of persecutor

Always

“Always” puts you in the role of persecutor because it says, “perfection.” Perfection does not exist in reality. If the person you are talking to can find only one instance that disproves “always” they have grounds to dismiss what you are saying and stop listening to you. “You are always late,” can be disproved by only one instance in which the person was on time. “I am always thoughtful,” can be disproved by only one instance in which you were not thoughtful.

If you use “always” you will teach other people to expect you to be an opinionated, unrealistic, unreasonable person who doesn’t listen to others. If you use “always,” don’t be surprised when other people don’t want to share what they really think or feel with you, because they don’t want you to make them wrong.

Don’t use “always.” Instead use words like “usually,” or “mostly.” They communicate that you are confident, but not certain or rigid. They indicate that you believe you can defend your position but that it is not unchangeable.

Never

Like “always,” “never” puts you in the role of persecutor because it says, “perfection.” Perfection does not exist in reality, because there are instances that disprove “never.” “You are never reliable,” can be disproved by only one instance in which the person was reliable. “I am never unkind,” can be disproved by only one instance in which you were unkind.

People use “always” and “never” because they convey the intense feelings that they have. It feels like “always” or “never.” That’s the problem. Those feelings are reactions; they are too intense; they are inaccurate; they lack credibility, and to use words that express extreme feelings strengthens those extreme feelings while destroying your credibility and increasing your emotional reactivity. When you change your words to conditional and less extreme expressions, you will also find that you learn to have more control over your feelings. They will no longer rule your life, determine your happiness, make others so defensive, or cause you so much unhappiness.

If you use “never” you will teach other people to expect you to be an opinionated, unrealistic, unreasonable person who doesn’t listen to others. If you use it, don’t be surprised when other people don’t want to share what they really think or feel with you, because they don’t want you to make them wrong.

Don’t use “never.” Instead use words like “rarely,” or “infrequently.” Like “usually” and “mostly,” they communicate that you are confident, but not certain or rigid. They indicate that you believe you can defend your position but that it is not unchangeable.

Blame

Searching for someone to blame is a favorite defense for those who feel persecuted. They are saying, “I am in the role of victim, and there’s someone or something to blame!” Blaming is an avoidance strategy. It doesn’t solve any problem; it only wastes time while making your problem worse. That is because where there was one problem before, now there are two. The first problem is what you are attempting to avoid dealing with by blaming: “You left your underwear on the floor again!” The blaming creates your second problem: a snipe hunt that changes the subject without doing anything to solve the original problem. A better response would be, “What can you do to not leave your underwear on the floor in the future?”

South Africa set up a noble alternative to national and personal blaming when, after apartheid, instead of persecuting the malefactors, it set up a Truth and Reconciliation Committee. The idea was for wrong-doers and perpetrators to acknowledge their misdeeds, take responsibility, and take actions that demonstrated a desire to help their society grow into greater health. Isn’t that what matters? How does blaming anyone make anything better? Can you force anyone to take responsibility? Do you think you will feel better because you make someone else feel worse? Perhaps you will feel better because someone gets punished, but will anything get better? Aren’t you just reinforcing a culture of recrimination and blame?

When you blame others you are inevitably blaming the part of yourselves that they represent. You can’t blame someone else without blaming yourself. This means you can’t persecute someone else without persecuting yourself. Do you want to do that? Do you deserve abuse?

When you blame others you are making it more likely that they will eventually blame you. If you want to live in a relationship, family, and culture in which you are blamed and in which, instead of solving problems you remain mired in the suffering of the Drama Triangle, by all means, continue to use the world “blame.”

Fault

Get the word “fault” out of your vocabulary today. Why? It can’t be used without implying blame. Finding fault is not the same as objectively looking for mistakes, confusions, or deletions. Finding fault is looking for such things and then blaming. Instead of focusing on solutions, fault-finders have to tell others what they’ve done wrong. Why do they do this? They generally think they are performing a teaching function. They justify it as “feedback,” “information,” “help.” They see themselves as “helpers.” Go through the rescuer checklist: Was the feedback requested? Was the information helpful and appreciated? Did you stop finding fault when the other person told you it wasn’t helpful or appreciated? If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” then the information you are giving is not “feedback,” “information,” or “help.” It is fault-finding, and you are in the role of persecutor. However, you don’t see it that way because you don’t want to take responsibility for the fact that you are making yourself feel right or powerful at the expense of someone else – most probably someone you love.

If you need to criticize, ask permission. Say something like, “Something you did really irritates/upsets/concerns me, but I don’t want to get into the role of persecutor about it. I want to tell you so it doesn’t happen again, but I don’t want to make it your fault.” Wait and see what they say. They will probably reluctantly give you permission.

If you think this is too much trouble and just continue to point out the weaknesses and failures of others in a way they view as fault-finding, don’t be surprised when they lie to you about what they have done or not done in order to avoid your criticism. Don’t be surprised when they look for opportunities to find fault with you, as a way to take revenge for what they view as unfair attacks. Don’t be surprised when they distance themselves from you to protect themselves. Don’t be surprised when they are not there when you need them. Don’t be surprised when you find the same patterns of alienation of affection repeating with new relationships, because it’s not the other person who is the problem; it’s because you’re stuck in the Drama Triangle and you would rather find fault in others and yourself than get out.

Should

“Should” implies conscience, parents, God, church, script, obligation, permission from authorities, and guilt. If you enjoy feeling guilty, if you want to make someone else feel guilty, use “should” and “shouldn’t.”

This pernicious verb is often used to express externally imposed rules and laws. You “shouldn’t” jay-walk; you “should” brush your teeth. You “shouldn’t” fart in public; you “should” obey your parents. When you tell yourself you “should” do something, you put the full weight of some moral code on your shoulders. Everyone benefits from having a moral code. How about having one that you choose? When you act out of that moral code, how about doing so because it’s helpful, not because you “should?” Start asking yourself, “Am I doing this because it’s something that’s helpful to myself or others or because I “should?”

How about all those things that you have to do that you don’t want to do, like paying taxes, showing up in court, flossing, going to work, and obeying your boss? First, recognize that you don’t have to do any of those things; it’s just that the alternatives are worse. If you look at them objectively, you don’t do these things because they are in your own best interest. You are doing them for you.  Once you get clear on this, you can own the fact that you want to do them more than you don’t want to do them.

“Should” and “shouldn’t create inner resistance that makes it more difficult to do things you don’t want to do or have to do. Once you recognize that you have a choice and that you are doing whatever because it is helping yourself or someone else, your resistance will become a lot less. It may even vanish entirely. You will then spend your life doing things that make your life and the lives of others, more productive, relatively outside the Drama Triangle, rather than doing things you should do, and spending your life feeling oppressed, in the victim role of the Drama Triangle.

Notice that when you use “should” and “shouldn’t” you put yourself in all three roles of the Drama Triangle. You not only get to feel you are a helpless victim, but you get to find persecutors everywhere: work, municipal hall, police, other drivers, your parents, your partner. Even your kids become persecutors, because after all, you “should” help them with their homework and make sure they grow up to be good people. “Should” also has the function of rescuing you from guilt and shame since, if you do what you are expected to do, you are blameless. This mechanism has been used since time immemorial by parents to get children to behave. Once they have internalized the tyranny of “should” they will parent themselves, making the jobs of mom and dad, teachers and police much easier. Society uses it to great benefit to get citizens to obey laws so that society runs more smoothly and authority is not questioned, giving autocrats of all kinds a free ride.

Ought

Everything above regarding “should” applies to “ought” as well. However, “ought” might be a bit more compelling and have a bit more of the persecutor about it. Stop using “ought.” It’s toxic.

Must

“Must” implies, “Don’t think; don’t question; don’t doubt; just DO what you have to do.” “Must” provides a double bind. For example, if you are in the military, you “must” obey your superiors. If you don’t, very bad things happen to you. However, if your military superiors order you to do something illegal, like torture, and you get caught, you will go to jail, not your superiors.  If you “must” do your homework to pass a class, then you risk spending your life beating yourself with a stick, so to speak, to make yourself work. What do you get for that? In order to succeed you will keep yourself under constant stress. You will have no peace of mind.

When you use “must,” you put yourself in this same type of moral vice. It’s a guaranteed “lose-lose” situation, where you are going to end up feeling bad, regardless of what you do. When you use “must” with others, you are almost guaranteed to be viewed as a persecutor. You are also almost guaranteeing that the other person will resent you and will do whatever you want with passive or active resistance, meaning that it will not be done well. Parents typically find themselves in this situation with their children and wonder why.

What do you do when something must be done? How can you avoid these problems? With children, give them a choice they can’t refuse: “Would you prefer to do your homework or vacuum the house?” “Would you prefer to clean your room or clean the bathrooms?” With adults you supervise, just make it a matter of policy, part of their job description. With a partner, talk about the consequences if they don’t do it: “You don’t have to pick up after yourself if you don’t want to, and I don’t have to cook you dinner if I don’t want to.” Not too subtle. They will probably get the message. If they accuse you of blackmail, say, “What do you think would be appropriate consequences if you don’t pick up after yourself?”

But

While there are legitimate uses for this little word, when it is used in sentences it negates what has been said before the “but.” If you say, “I can be very thoughtful, but I can forget really important things,” what are you really saying? You are emphasizing that you can forget really important things. You are also teaching the other person that if they need to criticize you, they can simply remind you that you forget really important things. If you say, “I love you, but I can’t stand it when you are late,” what are you really saying? You are saying that your intolerance is more important than your love. You are also teaching the other person that if they want to get you mad, all they have to do is be late.

When you use “but” you are contradicting what you just said before the “but.” Not only is that crazy-making and confusing; it is a form of self-persecution or persecution of the other person. Sometimes we reverse these to lessen the impact of a criticism: “You are a real jackass, but I love you anyway.” This is a complement with a hook in it. You are still in the role of persecutor, making the other person into a victim.

These examples show that using “but” either mixes pepper into the honey of your words or is designed to make you appear truthful, honest, or loving by sugar-coating the medicine you are dishing out. In either case, it rarely works. It just sends a mixed message. What to do?

Why not simply eliminate “but” and use “and” instead?  Why not simply say, “I can be very thoughtful, and I can forget really important things?” Why not just say, “I love you, and I can’t stand it when you are late?” Why not say, “You are a real jackass, and I love you anyway?”

If you will make this simple change you will find that you are clearer and speak with more confidence. It will also be a small step to keep you out of the Drama Triangle.

Words that may put you in the role of rescuer

“Need” and “Want”

“Need” sounds like a perfectly helpful and honest word. You “need” to get things done; you “need” to do your homework; you “need” to set goals; you “need” to be respectful, you “need” to help others. When you “need” to do something, who are you doing it for, others or for yourself? You are doing it for yourself, not the other person because you are the one with the need. This is not the normal implication of the word “need.” It generally implies outside compulsion, something someone or something has imposed upon us.

When you say, “You need to clean your room,” you are posing as mind-reader. Do you know that your child needs to clean his or her room? Don’t you mean that you want them to clean their room? If that is the case, why don’t you say so? Probably because you want to sound “nice.” Instead, you are being unclear, dishonest in your motives, and using language that gets you stuck in the rescuer role of the Drama Triangle.

This holds true even when you say, “They need me to do this,” or, “You need me to help you.” What you probably mean to say is that they want you to do this or I want to help you to do that.”

Using need can also be an invitation for the other person to climb into the role of rescuer: “I need you so much!” “I need your help!” Do you need rescuing or do you want help? If you need rescuing, you’re saying you need to stay stuck in the Drama Triangle. If you say you want help, then you may actually get help instead of rescuing. Instead of using “need,” try using want. It may feel uncomfortable, because it is more direct. It is also more powerful. It expresses more confidence and an honest desire.

However, both “need” and “want” can be used to justify indulging in a craving and thereby jumping into the role of victim, with food, others, drink, or cigarettes in the role of rescuer. In such a case, a cognitive distortion is at work. That is because you don’t “need” a substance or activity that kills you; you don’t really want a substance or activity that kills you; it just feels like you do. By using “need” or “want” in this way you are strengthening your emotional and physical cravings. Instead, use words that reflect preference but with less intensity: “I would like some chocolate”; “I would prefer it if you would repeat what I said so I know I was clear in what I said to you.”

Because using “want” and “need” in these very common ways is a cognitive distortion, you need a substitute thought or statement, such as, “I don’t need/want this cigarette; my body/needy emotions need/want this cigarette.” The basic question to ask is, “Do I want/need this so much that it’s worth it to me to jump into victim role in the Drama Triangle?” “Do I want/need to be a victim?”

Notice that “need” and “want” put you into all three roles of the Drama Triangle. Because they imply compulsion, you risk being in the role of persecutor. If you feel persecuted by a demand associated with the need, you may be in the role of victim. If you are helping others because you “need” to, you are probably in the role of rescuer.

Is he joyful and happy? You bet!

Emotions are a common and powerful way most people keep themselves stuck in the Drama Triangle.

Fear

Fear is generally viewed as a persecuting emotion. People want to avoid it. Do you view fear as a persecuting emotion? When you feel scared or anxious, what do you usually do? If you are like most people, you will first try to avoid your fear; if that doesn’t work, you will fight it; if that doesn’t work, you will get even more scared. (Notice that these are the strategies that nations also tend to use.)

For example, when you feel persecuted by fear you experience yourself as victim. Powerless and helpless, you then seek rescuing: something or someone to make your fear go away. Because the fear is not a persecutor in reality, but only in your perception of it, you seek a cure for a problem that doesn’t exist, thereby marrying yourself to the problems inherent in your rescuer. It may be the problems of alcoholism, a love mis-match, the escapism of a vacation, or simply waking up out of a nightmare. The problems of your “rescuers” may in time be experienced as big a persecutor as you imagined your fear to be.

Notice that you get to choose whether you experience fear as a persecuting emotion or not. I didn’t cure my stage fright until I re-framed my fear as energizing me to do a better job of communication. When you assume your fear is a persecutor you guarantee you will view life in a hunkered-down position, from within the Drama Triangle.

Notice that when you feel fear you generally experience all three roles of the Drama Triangle. Fear is a persecutor, you are a victim, and you feel compelled to rescue yourself.

Anger

When we ourselves feel anger, it is generally viewed as a rescuing emotion. Why? Because we generally use anger to defend ourselves, to back off a perceived threat. When you get angry you don’t experience yourself in the role of persecutor. This is because your anger is justified in your mind. Somebody has done something to justify your defense from an attack. Anger is your defender, your savior, your rescuer. When you get angry, aren’t you usually rescuing yourself from some fear?

However, when people are angry at us, anger is generally experienced as a persecuting emotion. Anger means we are being attacked.

In both cases, these conclusions are often incorrect. if someone is not attacking you and you only think that they are, then your anger is misplaced, unnecessary, and abusive. You are in the role of persecutor. If the anger of the other person is not about you but is instead a reaction to their own fear, then you only create a problem where none exists by reacting with defensiveness.

Notice that when you feel anger you generally experience all three roles of the Drama Triangle. Anger is a rescuer, you are a victim of the consequences of your anger, and your anger at yourself or others turns you into a persecutor.

Sadness and grief

Sadness and grief are generally viewed as victimizing emotions. People generally feel that they can’t help but feel sad.  When someone you love dies, do you feel helpless and powerless in the face of your grief? When you feel depressed and alone, do you feel helpless and powerless in the face of your sadness?

While it is not easy to be sad or to experience grief without getting into the role of victim, it is not inevitable. Just because you feel sad or grief, it does not mean that you are a victim, although it certainly feels that way. You get to choose. For example, bad things happen every day to people and you don’t feel sad; people die unnecessarily every day and you don’t feel grief. Why not? Mostly because they are not important to you; they live somewhere else; you have never met. So there is no necessity for you to feel sadness and grief when there is loss, and there is no necessity for you to get into the role of victim. You only do so because you take the loss personally; it is as if you have lost a part of yourself. Even if you have lost a part of yourself, does that require a response of sadness or grief? No, but it is a normal response. Does that sadness or grief require that you put yourself in the role of victim in the Drama Triangle? No, and to do so only makes it harder for you to get over your sadness and grief.

Notice that when you feel sadness or grief you generally experience all three roles of the Drama Triangle. Sadness or grief cause you to feel you really are a victim; they feel like they are persecuting you. In a strange way, they are also rescuers, because they validate the meaning of your loss. Their presence says, “My loss is real; that person, pet, body part, home, or relationship was meaningful! To not feel grief or sadness is to deny the reality of the meaningfulness of what you have lost. Therefore, grief and sadness are powerful rescuers from meaninglessness, even as they create withdrawal from a meaningful, full life.

Confusion

Nobody likes to be confused. It creates a sense of powerlessness that puts us in the role of victim. Therefore, we avoid confusion or pretend that we aren’t confused when we really are. Knowledge, clarity, and wisdom become rescuers.

However, is the problem with confusion? Can you not learn to view your confusion as a wake-up call? Can’t you simply listen to it and figure out what information you need? If you view confusion as a persecutor, you become a victim looking for rescuers. If you view your confusion as just another wake-up call, then you don’t use it to pressure yourself into the Drama Triangle.

Notice that when you feel happiness or joy you generally experience all three roles of the Drama Triangle. Confusion becomes a persecutor; you get to feel justified in your role as victim; and you also feel justified in searching for a rescuer from your sense of persecution. Notice also that sometimes people retreat into confusion as a form of self-rescuing from difficult decisions. If you stay confused, you don’t have to choose; if you don’t choose, you won’t risk making a bad choice, and thereby avoid feeling even more a victim. Notice too that such reason causes you to stay stuck in the victim role in the Drama Triangle in any case.

Happiness and Joy

]How could such good and valuable emotions as happiness and joy possibly put you in the Drama Triangle? Don’t they help you get out of it? Happiness and joy are generally viewed as rescuing emotions. People seek experiences that make them feel happy and joyful. Why? There are many reasons, but a major one is that they don’t want to feel unhappy, sad, angry, or scared. In such instances, happiness and joy are being used as rescuers. As with all rescuers, they only provide the illusion of help. In time they fade, often leading to a painful despondency and a craving addiction for a return to the Lost Paradise of good feelings.

Happiness and joy are not in themselves rescuing feelings. The problem is that most people use happiness and joy to rescue themselves from some discomfort, insecurity, failure, or responsibility. Because the happiness or joy serves the function of avoidance, it is corrupt; it becomes a persecutor, trapping you more deeply in the Drama Triangle.

This is life on an emotional roller-coaster; there’s not much that is healthy about it, although it is very common and very understandable. It is healthy in three year old children, who are their emotions and their preferences.  While you may wish you could live your life as a three year old, how realistic is that? Happiness and joy are like good, strong, healthy horses in charge of a chariot in which you are riding; if you don’t keep hold of the reins and provide direction, they will drag you and themselves over a cliff.

Notice that when you feel happiness or joy you generally experience all three roles of the Drama Triangle. Not only do happiness and joy rescue you from a grey, boring, unhappy life; they can act as persecutors by blinding you to the reality of suffering of others. Seeing that suffering does not mean that you should lose your happiness and joy, but it does mean that you need to differentiate between happiness and joy that are rescuers and that which is not. In addition, happiness and joy can cause you to throw caution to the wind and make terrible choices in partners or actions.

The problem is not with any of these feelings. The problem is when they are associated, usually out of your awareness, with the Drama Triangle. These emotions then create bondage within the Drama Triangle, a psychological space in which inner peace does not exist.

Sadness and grief

Sadness and grief are generally viewed as victimizing emotions. People generally feel that they can’t help but feel sad.  When someone you love dies, do you feel helpless and powerless in the face of your grief? When you feel depressed and alone, do you feel helpless and powerless in the face of your sadness?

While it is not easy to be sad or to experience grief without getting into the role of victim, it is not inevitable. Just because you feel sad or grief, it does not mean that you are a victim, although it certainly feels that way. You get to choose. For example, bad things happen every day to people and you don’t feel sad; people die unnecessarily every day and you don’t feel grief. Why not? Mostly because they are not important to you; they live somewhere else; you have never met. So there is no necessity for you to feel sadness and grief when there is loss, and there is no necessity for you to get into the role of victim. You only do so because you take the loss personally; it is as if you have lost a part of yourself. Even if you have lost a part of yourself, does that require a response of sadness or grief? No, but it is a normal response. Does that sadness or grief require that you put yourself in the role of victim in the Drama Triangle? No, and to do so only makes it harder for you to get over your sadness and grief.

Notice that when you feel sadness or grief you generally experience all three roles of the Drama Triangle. Sadness or grief cause you to feel you really are a victim; they feel like they are persecuting you. In a strange way, they are also rescuers, because they validate the meaning of your loss. Their presence says, “My loss is real; that person, pet, body part, home, or relationship was meaningful! To not feel grief or sadness is to deny the reality of the meaningfulness of what you have lost. Therefore, grief and sadness are powerful rescuers from meaninglessness, even as they create withdrawal from a meaningful, full life.

My interest has been different, which is part of the reason the people interested in dream yoga aren’t particularly interested in my work, Integral Deep Listening, even though it is a form of dream yoga. Learning to do lucid dreaming and then lucid deep sleep can be beneficial, as we will see. However, focusing on it can lead to a downplaying of a much higher, more important priority: sanctifying the secular, becoming lucid in our waking dream. Which is more important, to wake up in our dreams and deep sleep or to live our waking life in an awakened state? We can do the former without the latter; doing the latter tends to naturally evoke the former. When waking up in our waking life becomes our priority, rather than seeking other, more glorious states of consciousness, the question becomes, “How do I wake up out of my normal sleep-like, dream-like state of existence in a sustainable way?” There are plenty of ways to wake up and experience states of greater wakefulness, but most are either not sustainable or are outright toxic. These include drugs, caffein, nicotine, conversion experiences, altar calls, romance, winning the lottery, exercise, movies, good books, demonic foods (like chocolate!), traveling, surfing, and various yogas (like kundalini and tantric). In other words, “How do I become lucid here and now, in my mundane, secular, ho-hum reality in a developmentally solid, authentic way?” “How do I sanctify the secular?” This is the million-dollar question. This is the core of spirituality, happiness, an inner peace.

This central issue tends to be overlooked or minimized by both religion and spiritual paths, East and West, because it’s a hard sell. It tends to reflect the feminine path, which is gradual, gestative, and developmental, when compared to the more intense, ejaculative, and state-focused nature of the masculine path. Of course the goal is androgeny – the integration of the two. Just as there is nothing sexy about androgeny for those who are gender-obsessed, here’s nothing really sexy about sanctifying the secular. It’s more exciting to just go straight for the Holy by inducing a mystical experience of some sort, not only by finding sat, cit, and ananda (being, consciousness, bliss) ourselves, but by groking it vicariously by learning about other people near death experiences and mystical experiences. In contrast, watching the grass of normal development grow is never going to become a major spectator sport. Kids don’t get off on watching themselves learn to walk and talk. They don’t say, “Gee, today I have a little more balance than I did yesterday!” “Gee, today I learned to ask for what I want!” Developmental growth is by nature gradual and hence not nearly as exciting as are state changes, which get much more attention than they deserve. Why? Because by nature and definition they do not last. They generate a roller coaster approach to life – highs and lows; addiction to highs, avoidance of lows. Drama. Let’s have mystical experiences. Let’s have sacred orgasms. And, of courtse, sacred orgasms are delightful! But in the context of – what? Addiction to the drama of state experiences is a sign of prepersonal through personal levels of development, the childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood of human consciousness. How you frame what you are looking for in life says more than you know about your level of development.

If we want to wake up we need to break our addiction to drama. When I use that word I mean the three roles of the Drama Triangle, Rescuer, Victim, and Persecutor, not drama per se.  Drama is the normal predicament of life. We get victimized. We need rescuing sometimes. Persecution is real. However, just because we get victimized that does not mean we are forced to play the unhealthy role of victim. That’s our choice. Because we sometimes need rescuing from disease, fires, floods, and bad governments, that doesn’t mean that we are wise to get into the role of rescuer. We aren’t, because the role of rescuer is sick and when we are in it we get sick. It makes us sick. Because persecution is real it does not follow that it is healthy to persecute either others or ourselves. That is abusive, and abuse is dysfunctional. Drama is a fact of life; the Drama Triangle is a choice. You don’t have to go there, and you won’t if you are wise. Waking up out of the Drama Triangle is a core definition of what it means to wake up. This is because the Drama Triangle is a functional definition of karma, dukkha, illusion, maya, and the suffering that delusion creates. The distinction between drama and Drama has to be made before we can learn to surf through the dramas of life without having them overwhelm us and drown us.

If you play one role in the Drama Triangle you will end up playing them all. If you become a professional rescuer (doctor, cop, social worker, etc.) and give more than you get, you burn out sooner or later. If you persecute others (always for their own good) you are persecuting those parts of yourself that they represent. If you play the victim you are saying you are powerless. You are giving your power to people and circumstances that you do not like or respect. Is it wise to do that?

Another problem is that these roles are states. We get temporary relief by blasting someone else with the sword of righteous indignation and knowing that we are telling them the truth. We are more interested in being right than being loving. We get temporary relief from the abuses and abusers of the world by going passive, hunkering down, retreating into hopelessness, helplessness, and powerlessness, playing the victim. We get to experience the power of whining and blaming. Wonderful! Perhipas we get a sense of usefulness and meaningfulness out of rescuing others. The definition of a rescuer is important to know, because rescuers are not helpers. Rescuers don’t wait for a request for help, don’t check to see if their “help” is genuinely helpful, and don’t stop “helping.” – they keep on keeping on. Helpers, on the other hand, wait for a request for help, check to see if what they are doing is helping, and stop when the job is done. Helpers also ask questions. Rescuers don’t need to ask; they already know what needs to be done. They may ask questions, use the answers to validate their preconceptions, and interpose their formulaic diagnosis and treatment: (“You’re bipolar; you need meds;” “Your economy is sick, you need privatization, elimination of trade barriers, reduction of government services, and austerity.” “You need to behave.” “You need to make good grades.”) Incidentally, the role of cop or fireman is not inherently a rescuer, because they function under a social contract that gives them permission to break down your door and hose the interior of your home, or put you in jail. Of course that doesn’t mean that what they do and how they do it doesn’t typically reek of Drama. It does.

Most of the literature on the Drama Triangle focuses on eliminating it in social circumstances – relationships. This is certainly the original intent of the concept as it grew out of Berne’s Transactional Analysis. IDL points out that this is not enough. The Drama Triangle must also be recognized and neutralized in our thoughts and dreams. We have three realms where we get into the Drama Triangle. The first realm is our relationship to our external reality, to others, to our environment, to our society and culture. The second realm is the interior world of our thoughts and emotions. The third is the realm of our night-time dreams. Clearly these three worlds overlap, but they are distinguishable enough.

It is not enough to break our addiction to the Drama Triangle in our relationships. When you “hurt my feelings” I am putting you in the role of persecutor and myself in the role of victim. Typically I respond within the context of the Drama Triangle. I go passive and feel hurt by playing the victim, or counter-attack by playing the persecutor, or attempt to rescue you, me, or our relationship by explaining or changing the subject. For instance I might attempt to rescue you by returning injury with love, like good Christians, Moslems, Jews, and Hindus are taught to do, or I might attempt to rescue you by explaining to you how you are either mistaken or don’t see the entire picture. I might attempt to rescue myself by avoiding you, by calling a friend and having a sob fest, by losing myself in a book or good movie, by getting something to eat (always a great option), or by simply going to sleep.  I might attempt to rescue the relationship by changing the subject or refocusing on areas of mutual agreement. None of these strategies stop the Drama because the “solutions” are all substitutions of one role for another. You stay in the Drama Triangle; you’ve just changed roles. However of the three realms of the Drama Triangle, working on stopping dysfunctional drama in relationships is relatively easy and highly productive. It will carve out peace in your life where there was none before and set the context for success at tackling the other two realms.

If I do manage to not fall into any of those three roles with you, does that mean that I am staying out of them in my own head? Not necessarily. I may still be persecuting myself with all sorts of obviously true statements of how incompetent, inefficient, unloving, I am. If I am persecuting myself with such thoughts and feelings, then I will also be in the role of victim, since I will be making myself feel helpless and hopeless. At the same time I may be constantly figuring out what to do or think to rescue myself from this self-persecution. Most people spend most of their waking  hours in all three of these roles. They live their lives in the context of the Drama Triangle. Indeed, they can’t even imagine what life would be like outside it. Can you? Do you have an inner life outside of the Drama Triangle? If you closely examine your thoughts and feelings,  you will probably conclude, as I have, that for the most part, you do not.

In time your interior Drama Triangle made up of thoughts and feelings of persecution, victimization, and self-rescuing, will poison your love relationships. You’ll mess up your relationships with your kids. You’ll blow it with those you are trying to help. This is how true love and soul mates turn into true disaster and soul hates. How does one keep this from happening?  You may become a good student of cognitive-behavioral therapy and learn to recognize and stop cognitive distortions, because you know that how you think determines how you feel. If you are a good meditator you will learn to observe your thoughts, and therefore disassociate from your mental tendency to persecute, victimize, or rescue  yourself. The result is that you will be less anxious and less depressed. You won’t jump into the Drama Triangle so much or so easily. This is a major improvement! You cannot have peace of mind and be in the Drama Triangle at the same time. When you get it out of your relationships and your thoughts you are much more likely to experience peace of mind.

Let’s say you work hard at getting out of the Drama Triangle in your relationships. Let’s say you recognize that you will always fall back into it if you don’t get out of it in your thinking as well, so you work hard at that. But what about your dreams? What about that two and a half hours every night, spread out over the eight hours that you are sleeping, when you relapse into drama? This is the reason why most therapy doesn’t stick. You go home and regress into replaying old home videos on youe internal DVD player all night in your dreams. It starts with the dream incubation that you do as you are falling asleep, as you go to sleep worried or numbing yourself our, lost in some TV show or video. Then in your dreams the soap operas start. Your old home videos produce dramas that validate why you should continue to feel the way you did when you were six and why you should continue to function with the world view you had Way Back When.  The work you did at that therapy session gets undone. The accomplishments and successes of the day get reframed in terms of your childhood insecurity and your innate narcissism. Take a look at a cross-section of your dreams, focusing on the emotions you feel during your dreams and the conclusions that you end up drawing within them. Notice that you tend to regress into the drama of your childhood cultural scripting when you are dreaming.

This is why dreams are generally regressive when seen from our normal waking perspective. As you read that last sentence, remember it is coming from someone that has spent their life believing and knowing that dreaming is supportive, important, and anything but regressive. The key to understanding this seeming contradiction is the phrase, when seen from our normal waking perspective. Unless there is some process of reframing what is going on in dreams, the Drama Triangle is reinforced while your are dreaming. It then has undesirable effects on your waking emotions, thinking, and relationships. Dreams don’t stop having an effect just because you forget them. They reverberate throughout your consciousness by setting an emotional tone, a perceptual reality, and an approach to cognitive problem solving that limits you in what you see and experience in your waking life. The drama in your dreams keeps you dreaming and asleep in your waking life. Therapy is undone; you wake up feeling not so super without knowing why; reactivity is reinforced; a bias toward seeing the world in the same old not-so-creative-way is reinforced. This is because of how our waking identity normally interprets dream events and the emotional and cognitive conclusions it draws from them while we are dreaming. It is not because dreams are inherently regressive. They are not. We know this when we take the perspective of other characters in the dream. Most of them are not supportive of our regressive perceptions and conclusions. On the contrary, most personify emerging potentials – they are more awake, alive, balanced, detached, free, and clear than we are. Consequently, they serve as good role models, and their advice is not to be dismissed out of hand.

So why not just pray? Why not just meditate? Why not just think happy thoughts? Why not just keep doing what you do – work at being a good, helpful person who takes care of the responsibilities on your plate today? Use whatever tools work for you.  Emphasize tools that incrementally, developmentally, wake you up in an authentic way from within, that avoid the roller coaster and speed up the development of your selectivity regarding drama. That is the major criteria to consider which tool to use: how effective is it at waking me up out of the Drama Triangle in the three realms today?

It is both important and extremely effective to surround yourself with perspectives that are relatively out of the Drama Triangle. This is a major reason why people join monasteries and form spiritually-based groups. While it is both important and necessary to surround ourselves with those who are relatively out of Drama in our waking world, it is insufficient. We need to surround ourselves with such perspectives in our internal spaces as well, or we will project our interior confusion and misperceptions onto the people and events of the external world. How do we keep from doing so? When you interview the personifications of your life issues and your dream characters you will generally find you are dealing with authentic perspectives that are relatively out of Drama. The key here is authentic. The dream characters you interview are intrinsic to your own inner compass and express your own emerging potentials, regardless of where you are on your developmental path.  No one has to convince you of this; you will feel it when you do IDL interviewing.

Waking life is by nature like a dramatic dream in which you are attempting to awaken. The goal is not to stop dreaming, but to be lucid in that life dream. It is not enough to just wake up within it, because that means to colonize the dreaming state with the stunted level of your current waking development. When you become lucid in dreams and change or manipulate the dream, instead of waking up by listening to and learning from the dream drama, you merely export your waking biases and misperceptions into the dreamscape, conquering it and manipulating it. This is the basic problem with most approaches to lucid dreaming. With lucid dreaming we infuse the dream with greater self-awareness, which is good if our self-awareness is evolved enough to listen rather than merely control. However, this is generally not the case.  For most of us, the self that wakes up in a dream is itself sleepwalking through life. That “awake” self is itself developmentally arrested. It’s like putting a drunk behind the steering wheel of a car. There are legitimate uses for dream lucidity, such as using them to develop confidence in dealing with fears, in practicing life skills in the fail-safe circumstance of a death-free dream reality, and in creating healing possibilities that do not exist in waking life. All of these are good; still more important is to learn to interview other characters in your dreams while you are dreaming in order to benefit from their perspective. More important than lucid dreaming is to learn to meditate in your dreams.

Awareness is the core of consciousness as opposed to unconsciousness. Consciousness, as wakefulness, is awareness aware of itself. Unconsciousness, as deep sleep, is awareness unaware of itself. Anything that cultivates the witness, where you develop objectivity, learning to watch yourself immersed in the drama of your relationships, your life, your thoughts, your feelings, and your dreams – is good. Meditation and the assimilation of perspectives of those people and interviewed emerging potentials that are relatively objective are all important in this respect.

What you will also accomplish, at the same time, is infuse your life dream with greater luminosity. Luminosity is the core of deep sleep, of unconsciousness. It is formless, high causal and non-dual empty, open, all-inclusive pure awareness. Metaphorically, it is interstellar space, where there is no language, space, or time, because there are no dualities by which to generate such distinctions. People usually associate all-inclusive pure awareness with beingness, God, consciousness, or pure consciousness. This is a mistake, muddy thinking that results in a misperception of the real potential of what it means to wake up into luminosity. This is why Buddhism makes consciousness itself, or pure beingness, one of the five interdependent conditions that create identity. The other four are senses, feelings, thoughts, and images. In Buddhism, apart from the interaction of these five, there is no self. There is no identity. This deep sleep like, deep space like luminosity is the plenum out of which all consciousness, beingness, and divinity arises. It is the source of creativity, not creativity itself. It is the source of the organizational matrices that generated the Big Bang. It is the nothingness beyond the oppositions of something and nothing. Luminosity is an excellent word for a space that is brimming with emerging potentials, wanting, waiting to be born. That is what negentropy, life, and evolution is all about. It isn’t about us any more than we are about our hands or our feet or our words. These are mere tools for the manifestation of whatever that is wanting to come into expression.

You want to infuse the dream of waking life with this luminosity at the same time that you are infusing it with greater self-awareness. This integrates both heightened wakefulness and heighted “deep sleep” into the dream state of normal life. When you do so, you developmentally awaken in a balanced way. The dream of life becomes gradually a game, not to be taken seriously, but handled with compassion, wisdom, confidence, acceptance, inner peace, and objectivity, core qualities that can be associated with the round of every breath. Life becomes humorous, not in a trivial way, but in your own tendency to take yourself, others, and the drama of life seriously. You see that and instead of reacting, you smile about it. It’s a humor that is cosmic, because it laughs at itself.  This sets you up to be naturally innoculated against Drama on all levels while enjoying the preciousness of the slow, gradual developmental pace of natural unfolding, rather than always trying to push the river out of some deep down fear that you may be wrong – that there really might not be a God, a soul, a life after death, cosmic justice or a cosmic plan. When you can live happily without rescuing yourself with such comfortable metaphysical assumptions that have little to do with reality, you are moving beyond your fear of death, of non-existence, and the frantic search for a savior, god, or spiritual practice to rescue you.

All of us are trying to become more awake. However, we are our own worst enemies, primarily because of the way we generate Drama in our relationships, thoughts, feelings, and dreams. We enjoy life more, find inner peace, and wake up more when we identify when we are in Drama in any of these realms and opt out. Simply choosing not to play is good enough. How others respond to that (generally with discomfort because they have to adjust to a different you), is, in all compassion, not your concern. Just tell them that you are trying to learn to stay out of the Drama Triangle and ask for their help. Explain to them what it is and ask them to tell you when they see you playing the rescuer, victim, or persecutor. This will educate them and encourage them to buy into the radical shift in culture that you are attempting to bring about for yourself in your world.

You are asleep, dreaming, sleepwalking, 

lost in the drama of your life script,

trapped in identification with the perceptual matrices of your physical, emotional, and mental realities.

You wake up as you ask, 

“Is this a dream?” 

see everything as a wake-up call, 

and act on your priorities today – 

moving you from delusion and mental fuzziness to clarity and thence to luminosity.

You are addicted to the past and future.

You move into the here and now as you 

name the contents of your mind, 

stop monkeying around in the five trees (thoughts, feelings, imagery, sensations, and states),  

and become the core processes and qualities of the round of your breath,

moving you from personalization to cosmic humor.

You have lost your way.

You find and follow your inner compass as you

remember, become, and follow the recommendations of your emerging potentials

and act on their recommendations today, 

integrating your inner and outer worlds 

and moving you from fear-based scarcity 

to trust-based abundance.

Luminosity

Cosmic Humor

Abundance

Three qualities that point you toward the sacred.

While women in the higher ranks would have undoubtedly made a huge difference toward reducing the crisis in her Church, Wilber’s levels of development indicate that anyone of any gender will tend to support their present level of development and its institutions.  We see that in women supporting genital mutilation in Africa, women supporting the Third Reich in Germany, and in women socialists, communists, lawyers, and CEO’s.

The underlying issue behind the crisis of the Catholic Church, from an integral standpoint, is the level of consciousness of a group.  Whatever it is, it tends to self-perpetuate.  This is particularly true at the early personal stage, when group identity IS personal identity and personal identity IS group identity.  So whatever group or groups you identify with at this level of development, their perpetuation is equivalent to your perpetuation, whether it is church, company, ethnic group, gender, family, or nation.  So the solution isn’t more women in leadership, although it is greatly needed for many reasons; it’s figuring out how to raise the developmental level of individuals, groups, and cultures. That’s point number one.

The second point is broader.  What I see when I try to get an overview of the news: the crisis of faith with the Catholic church, the crisis with trust in financial institutions now being highlighted with Goldman-Sachs’ civil and criminal charges, and with the environmental crisis going on in the gulf, is a historic swing brought about not by ideology but by upwelling events, toward more regulation, accountability, and transparency of all institutions, businesses, and individuals in places of power.  While there is and will continue to be major warfare about how much regulation is too much, there is no doubt that the pendulum is swinging back in the other direction after about a thirty year experiment in testing the limits of lassiz-faire everything.

People and institutions and governments have conclusively demonstrated that they cannot be consistently trusted to respect and act for the common good when their personal interests lie elsewhere, whether it is nationalism, maximizing profits, or spreading their ideology.

No doubt many individuals, organizations, and businesses will be unfairly hurt by this swing toward more regulation.  It is the classical conflict between the good of the many and the rights of individuals which we in the U.S. often equate to the debate between Jefferson and Hamilton. There is no one right answer, and every instance has its own uneasy stasis or balance point between these two extremes.  But for better or for worse, there is no doubt that the pendulum is swinging globally toward increased accountability, transparency, and regulation.  From my perspective, it’s about thirty years overdue.  Why has it taken so long?

No one likes to do much upstream prevention.  It’s not a priority, it interferes with more pressing concerns, and it costs time, money, and resources.   It seems that we have to have environmental, social, and personal calamities in order to put into place the mechanisms necessary to prevent disaster.  But if the crisis is big enough, it is too late, and the environment, the body politic, or the individual dies.

How does this issue of regulation and prevention look from the inside out?  On a personal level, we are dealing on the one hand with our trust in our own judgment, which is based on a lifetime of experience, and on the other, with our need to listen to our broader interests, whether represented by spirit, a spiritual teacher, or our own intrasocial community, as we do when we interview self-aspects with Integral Deep Listening.  Both perspectives are vital.  Regarding the first, out trust in our own judgment, there is a reason spirit evolved frontal lobes.  The importance of executive decision making by our individual waking identities cannot be overstated, and to passively allow life to decide for us risks becoming a slave to our addictions and to our social scripting. We run on inertia, refusing to take the risks necessary to evolve.

On the other hand, if the decision making of our waking identity is all we listen to, our self-governance becomes an autocracy, a dictatorship.  The good of the many (our many self-aspects that are not given voice by our waking identity) is repressed in favor of the the immediacy of our thoughts and feelings.  The result is a lack of internal consensus in decision making, leading to worsening internal conflict, which manifests eventually as broken relationships, failure to achieve our potentials, accidents, and illness.

We have to really dig into current events to get to this level of analysis, but I think this is where the gold is:  when we work at and find a functional balance between the good of the internal many and our waking concerns we are more likely to manifest that balance in our relationships with others and with our environment.  The point is that the nature of your inner work determines both your perspective and your level of development and therefore the choices that are available to you in how you deal with both your personal problems and those of the world.

One form of power is economic. We all need to have money; how we make it and what we do with it says a lot about who we are and what we value. Every dollar spent is a vote for something or someone and a tacit witholding of support for other things and other people. Consequently money and its uses is an undeniable expression of personal power; there is no getting around it. Even if we disdain money and avoid dealing with it, like Buddhist monks, we still have a relationship with money and economic power. Essentially, we choose to put that power in the hands of others.

A perennial theme in spirituality is the corrupting power of politics and the corruption of politics through the introduction of money. Capitalism is often held up as a prime example of the corrupting and corrupt nature of money. At the time of this writing, March 2012, one story in the news is the whistleblowing resignation letter from an Executive Director head of Goldman Sachs U.S. equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Goldman Sachs is the premier money-churning financial house in the world. The resignation letter states, “I attend .?.?. meetings where not one single minute is spent asking how we can help clients. It’s purely how we can make the most possible money off them. It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping off their clients…If you make enough money for the firm, and are not currently an axe murderer, you will be promoted into a position of influence.’ In Rolling Stone magazine in 2009, writer Matt Taibbi famously described Goldman Sachs as ‘a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money’.

A lot of people are pointing to a cascade of evidence, of which Smith’s whistleblowing is the latest, that capitalism is inherently corrupt. But the problem is not capitalism. Power  itself is inherently addictive and therefore corrupting, whether it arises in a capitalist, socialist, communist, or libertarian. Everything that lives has its own quotient of power, of life force. Too much of it on any level and things get out of balance and there’s death. Too little of it on any level and things get out of balance and there’s death. Therefore, a better model is homeostasis – the balancing of conflicting, opposing forces that create a solid, stable status quo on which higher levels of order can be built.

Since the founding fathers lived before modern biology and the development of the concept of homeostasis, this is not what they had in mind in the creation of the checks and balances of government. Still, the US constitution is an application of homeostasis to the realm of political power. There is little doubt that the system of checks and balances on the financial sector has broken down to the place where it has undercut its credibility in the eyes of various sectors: bank customers withdrawing their funds, high end ivy-league graduates choosing not to go into the field,

the public presentation of terribly bad role models: Romney, for instance. This erosion of trust, confidence, and respect is continuing and perhaps even accelerating at present.

People go into business with noble goals. They are generally altruistic, more along the lines of a 1950’s model of business – focusing on excellence of product, trusting that if you fulfill the needs of your customer the money will follow. The problem is that when the world was less interconnected you could externalize your costs easier and stills satisfy your customer. Doing so was not considered exploitative. Your focus was on your customer – not on how the people in your supply chain were being treated or what environmental damage might be done by your industrial processes. No one cared; there were not the feedback systems to let you know that there was a problem, and therefore there were few, if any, consequences.

But the difference is also from the types of business that financial firms are allowed to do now that they couldn’t in the 50’s. Back then, Wall Street was a “ bunch of undercapitalized private partnerships. And the way it made money was taking companies public, raising debt for them, raising equity for them, advising them on merger and acquisition deals, and advising them on how to manage their money. There was very little trading. Very little risk for them.”

Former Goldman Sachs director Gus Levy has referred to that model as “long-term greed,” which meant, “treating your clients right.”

Going from that definition, the diagnosis of the problem with capitalism today is “short-term greed:” maximizing profit at the expense of long-term customer relationships, based on the need to off-load investments that are a problem or not so lucrative. This id associated with a rise in the derivative trading part of the business, something that didn’t exist in the 50’s for these firms. Today people in the financial sector are more likely to be stereotyped as greedy, exploitative, selfish, power-hungry manipulators – all the bad stereotypes people put on capitalists/financial sector types.  As Smith also notes in his resignation letter, “These days, the most common question I get from junior analysts about derivatives is, “How much money did we make off the client?” It bothers me every time I hear it, because it is a clear reflection of what they are observing from their leaders about the way they should behave. Now project 10 years into the future: You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about “muppets,” “ripping eyeballs out” and “getting paid” doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.” Now the feedback systems are such that the greater environment, the governments of other nations, workers half a world away, are all “customers” in the sense that they impact your bottom line in various ways they didn’t before. This is a new reality businesses in the 1880’s, the 1920’s, and the 1950’s did not have to contend with as much. Those issues have always existed, but today they are too large to dismiss or ignore and public awareness of the internal workings of corporations is far greater than ever before and increasing steadily, as funds are set up to encourage people to report criminality. This is a huge difference that makes doing capitalism as it was done in the 1950’s much more difficult.

Short-term or long-term greed aside, the unquestioned assumption of capitalism is the Gordon Gecko motto of the film Wall Street: “Greed is good.” Is it? If not, why not? Since Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” the basic justification for capitalism is selfishness. If everyone is looking out for themselves the welfare of all is best promoted.  Therefore, greed is good. This was the editorial response of both the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. Of course, one can always blame the victim, which is the argument that Forbes uses in an editorial: “If what Smith is saying today is true, then the biggest problem remains the “muppets.” Not Kermit or Gonzo, but the investors that Smith claims continue to buy garbage from Goldman. Until those clients start to take responsibility for themselves, Goldman will remain incentivized to sell stuff to them.”

Some people look back at the “good old days” of pre-derivative banking and say that finance was then, as now, just as predatory as the rules allow, and then some. It wasn’t because investment banks weren’t publicly traded or that bankers of 40 years ago had more scruples, James Shaft of Reuters argues, but that heavy regulation prevented the kind of excesses that investment banks engage in now.

However, there is an important difference between selfishness and self-interest or self-concern. If we don’t make it, then everything we do is a matter of selfishness, meaning that we either need to feel guilty or predatory, and so people choose one or the other or swing back and forth between the two. But self-concern may not have anything to do with selfishness. In fact, what looks like selfishness may not be selfish at all and what we label as self-concern can be selfishness rationalized. Much of the abuse of power in the financial, governmental, and personal realms boils down to a confusion of these two very different concepts.

Is a swing to non-capitalist remedies the answer? The drama I have been watching has been around the question, “Will the financial/business sectors allow themselves to be held more accountable in various ways to the public, which goes against their basic instincts, or will they continue to pursue policies that are beneficial for stockholders and executives but seen as exploitative by a majority of the broader audience?” If they choose the first, at least in the short term they limit their profits and their power; if they choose the latter, they maintain power in the short-term while losing their long-term credibility in the market place, and increasing the likelihood that they will die and be replaced.

This same issue is very much the same for us as individuals. When are we over-reaching? When are we not minding the road signs? When do we need to set greater limits on ourselves to keep from self-destruction through our addiction to a path that has been proven to work? When do we need to ignore limits and press on, regardless?

This brings us to the Kahn Academy. One young guy is rethinking and remaking education world-wide. Instead of lessons being taught at school by teachers and practice done in homework, he flips the model. You look at a video of the lesson at home the night before and do monitored practice “homework” at school where you can get help when you have problems. This radical approach did not come from an educator, but an escapee from the financial sector who has three degrees from MIT. The system did not reform itself; it is being reformed from someone who was free to think outside the box and now is assembling the real time test score data in California public schools to validate the approach. So what does that have to do with capitalism, dream politics, and Integral Deep listening?

This is a basic reason I interview dream characters and encourage others to do so – as well as the personifications of their life issues. Many of them represent your personal equivalent of Salman Kahn. Either we as individuals, businesses, financial institutions, and governments listen to internal wake-up calls and modify our lives accordingly or external factors tend to smack us awake (or dead). This is a fundamental, universal principle. We can either look within as individuals, businesses, institutions, and governments and adjust, reform, expand, and include, or we can fossilize in habitual patterns of living life, doing business, and governing. When we do so we become shaped and controlled by more agile external forces that we often neither see nor understand.

Just last night I had a dream that literally laid out exactly this dilemma. I died, giving me an opportunity to wake up through understanding a dream, thereby avoiding an externalized physical smash-up and death.  As an example, here is that dream and what I did with it:

I am in a race. It is also a story and I am watching the race. It is both. I am in the lead. Someone is announcing the lead and it is considerable – a minute and a half or so.  It is dusk. I approach a place where the running  course is flooded. Rather than running through the deepening water I run up a cascading stream to the right, perhaps thinking I can get to the source of the water and then cut around and get back on the course. I do get to the top of the water, but then the landscape is worse than a lava field. There are big crags of rock extending for some distance. I continue, jumping from one to the next, keeping my speed up, not concerned that I may not have a next craggy boulder top to jump to. Certainly if I had slowed down or walked I wouldn’t have been able to get through that area at all. Finally I reach a point where I can go no further; there is a high, verticle cliff below me. So I simply jump into the air and allow myself to fly, to float, to be lifted up higher and higher into the sky. High up, I look around and there is a majestic scene. I am high above the edge of a large lake below. It is clearly the interior of a giant volcanic crater with high craggy cliffs glowing orange in the twilight. I must be at least five hundred feet up in the air, perhaps a thousand. I realize that I have lost my forward motion and that I am now going to fall. I don’t feel scared. I relax into the fall. I know I am not far out enough to come down into the water, but will land on the rocks at the water’s edge. I simply let go and relax. I hit the ground and die. The scene changes to some young lady who is monitoring the runners from some central control area. She has stopped getting any life readings from the front runner. There is a monitoring cable. She pulls it in and it goes nowhere – broken off.

Was this a nightmare? It didn’t feel like one. I was not scared at any point. I used to run and it felt very good to be running again. I was more interested in maintaining my intertia, my momentum, my pace than I was at being slowed down by running through deepening water.  I made a choice that led to a literal dead end. There was no fear, and there was no drama, in the sense that dying did not wake me up; however, it did push me out of role, in that I did not stay dead, but instead the scene changed to someone monitoring the death. This might be seen as a form of avoidance of the experience of death, or it may have simply been a practical end to a story, which is what it felt like in the dream. However, I realize now that I could have stayed dead and experienced that in the dream. This realization has given me an idea. Why not incubate, while dropping off to sleep at night, dying in dreams and staying dead? As such, I will either be in a clear meditative state in my dreams or experience different versions of what it is like to be dead. That is, I will dream different stories about what that experience is like.

My assumption is that running through the water would indeed slow me down but that I should have taken that path, because maintaining my speed by taking another path led to a dead end and a death – the end of that race, that story line. Does the water personifies some sort of emotional life complication that I need to wade through instead of avoiding?

One writes such assumptions before proceeding with an interview to clear them out of the way so they are less likely to influence the interview out of awareness. At the same time, they serve as a “pre-test” against which to guage the interview. Does the interview confirm these assumptions or not? If it does not, then the implication is that a novel perspective has been accessed.

Here is an example of a short interviewing process, which anyone can do but is easier once you are familiar with the complete IDL interviewing protocol:

So water, are you there to slow me down?

No. I’m just busy being water. 

I’m thinking that in the dream I was too impulsive and should have waded through you, staying on course, or waited for instructions from the race people, instead of brashly heading out on my own. What do you think?

Well, I don’t care much. But you can dream the other alternative and see what that is like for you. Different outcomes, different lessons to be learned.  In the first you got to jump boulders, fly, see a magnificent view, and die without dying, which opened up to you the idea of practicing dying in your dreams. That’s not bad. So you can imagine taking the other path and see what happens…

OK. So here goes: I am running through the water. It is slowing me down. I look around for some instruction about what to do from people supervising the race. The ones that are there are as confused as I am; they don’t know what to tell me. But I figure either the other runners will encounter the same circumstances or, if it is cleared up by the time they come along, the obstruction for me will be taken into account by the race authorities. But I decide to just include this as part of the experience of the run and keep on going. So now I’m bounding through ankle deep water, with water splashing everywhere. I see ahead that it gets deeper; there is a broken pipe, I think, at the low point, but I see that the path climbs on the other side and I figure it will take me slowly out of the water. So I slow down more and get into the water up to my knees. I’m definitely not running now, but I’m still exerting myself, and keeping my cardio at about the same pace, though using some different muscles pushing my legs and feet through the resistance of the water. I get past the low point, and the water offers less resistance until I get out of it, pick up speed, and continue on my way…

So water, what part of me do you most closely represent or personify?

I am any resistance that comes up in your life. It could be your emotions, a problem you aren’t solving, like the slow slog to learn German, a physical limitation, like losing weight or aging, someone disagreeing with you or giving you shit. It doesn’t matter what it is – any form of life resistance. The choice is, do you stay with it or look to avoid it in some way? You’ll learn either way, but you need not to be afraid of either. From my perspective as water, the dream is telling you that you need to err on the side of slogging through instead of avoiding, even though both teach you stuff. 

This is a good lesson, because sometimes I get tired of slogging through life challenges, feeling like it’s too hard, too much resistance. I need not to listen to those voices or impulses too much, but perhaps remember running, the water, and thinking about coming out of it on the other side. But at the same time I can still practice taking the other route: dying in my dreams and experiencing what happens.

So, how does this relate to the future of capitalism and financial markets? Companies, financial institutions, and governments are always getting internal wake-up calls, just like you and I are. In fact, they are getting so many that sometimes it is hard to tell which ones are important to listen to and which can be safely ignored. Whenever you have a pain do you go into crisis, thinking you might die? Probably not, because you know that most pains you get are not life-threatening. In fact you have learned that it is safe to ignore certain types of aches and pains, such as a side-stitch while running or the normal soreness of muscles when you exercise them. The problem is that like individuals, financial, social, business, and governmental institutions can become numb to all the warning signs, and ignore them, rather like I did the danger of running off the course just in order to keep up my speed. When the forces of institutional inertia, either on a personal or a social level overwhelm our ability to listen, respond, and adapt, disaster becomes more likely. Smart politics in both our sleeping and waking dream involves figuring out how to open ourselves up to new sources of innovation from within. This reduces the likelihood that external sources turn us into dinosaurs.

What are corporate examples of deep listening? Examples of internal reform that comes to mind is Wal-mart’s efforts at greening its supply chain and Apple’s heat on Foxcomm, resulting in some (but not enough) reforms that respect the needs/rights of line workers. A governmental example of misperceiving an internal wake-up call is 9/11. It was seen as a statement of external threat instead of the result of a dangerously skewed misperception by the nation itself. Because this delusional misperception was continued, there was no response to 9/11, only a reaction that confirmed and deepened the delusion, leading to attacks on elements that were not the cause of the problem, leading to a serious bleeding of national resources and international capital. A governmental example of hearing and creatively responding to an internal wake-up call is Portugal’s response to its national problems of drug abuse through legalization and the setting up of rehabilitation programs. Both drug abuse and related crime plummeted, saving the nation in both money and human resources.

When integral deep listening is used to hear wake-up calls and respond to them in a constructive way dream politics increases political and personal capital. It not only saves precious resources, but channels them in more constructive ways that benefit the development of the individual, business, or government as a whole.

The capitalistic model is here to stay, because the impulse behind it represents important and fundamental aspects of human nature. People need money and the power it brings; people also need the discernment to use that money and its power wisely. With integral deep listening that becomes more likely; without it, wake-up calls get louder, more violent, and more external. Interviewing emerging potentials like the water in the above dream help to determine the right mix of limits and accountability structures for various types of markets. It makes sense for business people, bankers, and people in government to assume that their night-time dreams are already showing them what not to do and suggesting better alternatives about the concerns they take to sleep with them – how to deal with a financial crunch, how best to market a new product, how to deal with work relationship issues, or how to best resolve the competing demands of home and work, suppliers and customers, lobbyists and electorate. IDL claims that accessing and utilizing this creative problem solving process can speed up both your learning and growth process regardless of your external circumstances. This is a testable hypothesis. You can conduct your own experiments and collect your own data. Nothing here needs to be or should be taken on faith. In time, with enough people conducting such experiments you will be able to say, “According to the feedback of my emerging potentials, the approach to power/capitalism/governance/relationships that I am using is likely to produce growth and success.” Your choices will be based much more on the wisdom of your inner compass rather than on the vagueries of financial markets, the culture of your workplace, the dramas of your family, or the structure of your government. Your happiness and inner peace, as well as your success, will be experienced as increasingly independent of what others or outside events do or do not do.

In a democracy, “deliberation is necessary so that collectively-intelligent decisions are created instead of dumb politics. Neutral, objective, quality information is the basis for solid deliberation. Curating information — sorting out intellectual quality and truth claims or communicating across boundaries — is akin to governance through deliberation.“ Deliberative mechanisms for making decisions weigh consequences and balance trade offs. A lack of deliberation means that unmediated participation and information enhance governance by the “dumb mob” of your waking identity – not a good strategy for personal, relationship, or collective success.

How is your waking identity a “dumb mob?” Your sense of self is made up of the social scripting that you learned as a child. That social scripting is in turn made up of various roles that were modeled for you as a child: walker, talker, eater, communicator, student, child, manipulator, persecutor, victim, and rescuer. The rescuer role includes all the roles in which you are addicted to particular patterns of thinking, feeling, and doing. These “protective guilds” make up over ninety percent  of your awareness. Because all of this scripting and role identification is pre-programmed and habitual, it is “dumb.” While an outburst of anger, fear, or love feels freely chosen, if someone could monitor your thoughts, feelings, and actions for three months they could predict almost everything that you are going to think, feel, and do right now, today. This is not autonomy, spontaneity, or free will. It is not consciousness, unless sleepwalking and life as a cultural zombie is considered awareness. Your reactionary, impulsive, mindless roles are preferences that express your choices. They have “votes” in your consciousness. Your patterns of preference largely elect your waking identity – the consciousness that governs your life. There is little negotiation or consensus building that goes on; instead one cabal after another stages a coup and takes its turn in the rulership of who you are. First the parts that are hungry rise up and take charge. Their rallying cry is, “Let’s EAT!” Everything stops and makes eating a priority. Then another faction rises to take charge. It may be the “Let’s WORK!” collective; everything shifts to getting you dressed and transported to your chair at work.

Doing Integral Deep Listening interviews with your emerging potentials is like enfranchising a smart mob to counteract the chaotic and often self-destructive leadership of the dumb mob that is normally in charge of your life. It is not that you has to substitute one for the other; the influence of the smart mob provides a context that turns your dumb mob into a component of a healthy broader solution.

Here is an information technology definition of government: “governance is an open-ended operating system based on what works. The most adaptable will survive.” Gardels states, “in our age, the advent of social networks and the transparency of shared networks challenge all hierarchies from monopoly of the mainstream media to professional knowledge protected by credentials, such as doctors, to dictators protected by force.” The intrasocial, or interior cultural/social, correlate that is disclosed by IDL interviewing is an increase in personal transparency, as the priorities of normally unrecognized aspects of your broader identity are exposed in an intrasocial network of shared communication. The result is that the monopoly your waking identity attempts to maintain over your sense of who you are, your actions and goals, is increasingly weakened and diminished.

But what is the quality and usefulness of the result? Are intrasocial voices simply analogous to “dumb mobs,” the term given to “the age of the amateur” and the passionate populists of the blog mobs created by the unmediated spread of information via Google, Wikipedia, and the World Wide Web in general?  Systems that adapt to the new transparency, or harness it, can survive. Those that resist will ultimately lose trust, and thus allegiance, and fail. Dumb mobs represent the world of the “unknown expert” whose 10,000 hours of work and practice is all the qualification required to gain authority and respect. This breakdown is what has also enabled the leaps of innovation coming from “the dorm rooms” (see Facebook) “and edges of society” (see Occupy everything). This has been accompanied by the breakdown of intermediaries and the control of information by the credentialed. Plato and Aristotle railed against democracy in the 3rd century BC because of the damage they saw these “dumb mobs” could do to society. For Plato democracy undercuts meritocracy; for Aristotle, it is rule by and for the needy. Both think goverment is best directed by those with enough time on their hands to make the pursuit of virtue a priority instead of the struggle to feed and raise a family that preoccupies most humans.

Your intrasocial community is not a dumb mob that is irrational and disorganized, the creator of bizarre dreams and frightful nightmares. This is a misperception based on the intrinsically skewed and biased perspective of your waking identity. If the top of an iceberg were to look into itself below the water, the refraction of light off the surface would generate an inherently distorted reflection. This is what you experience in dreams; you mistake the refracted image you see for the reality beneath the waterline of your awareness.

Integral Deep Listening is a disruptive technology that undermines the “protective guilds,” the intermediaries and institutions that habitually control waking information and the power your waking sense of self abrogates to itself. IDL is a disruptive technology in that it augments vision, memory and attention in ways that threaten the monopoly your waking sense of who you are has on the governance of your life and world. IDL augments creative vision by broadening your perspective; it augments your memory by highlighting the priorities of your inner compass, your “deep history.” It augments your attention by selecting out priorities for your waking awareness that are integrative in that they are  representative of your greater identity.  Your waking identity, as the perennial creator, supporter, and protector of the “protective guilds” of your waking preferences, is the  determiner of your priorities, as well as the repressor of alternatives to them. It resists the loss of control which listening to your emerging potentials, via IDL interviewing and application of the resulting recommendations, represents.

Interviewing your emerging potentials brings down the “fire from heaven” of insurgent, disruptive technologies into your consciousness. The vested interests of those protective guilds that maintain  your status quo self-definition and life balance resist the loss of control as long as the “insurgents” – your interviewed emerging potentials – persist in their influence. When you are confronted with such insurgent, disruptive influences, your first phase response is usually conflictive and destructive. The forces in this phase are centrifugal — pulling apart and fragmenting. An analogy on a social-historical level would be the religious wars in Europe after the Guttenberg press was invented.

For the world economy, social structures, and cultural networks of meanings, those systems that adapt to the new cyber-induced transparency, or harness it, can survive. Those that resist will ultimately lose trust, and thus allegiance, and fail.  “The rigid, such as the autocrats in Egypt and Tunisia, are brittle and break. The more flexible, such as the medical profession, which have turned patient information websites to their advantage, thrive.“ On an intrapersonal level, the same thing is occurring. In order to manage the massive amounts of complexity and information pounding structures and processes of order everywhere, you need to transcend and include earlier, older, and less culturally scripted definitions of who you are. You must respond to the outer multiplicity by finding and evoking a multiplicity of interior awarenesses, of emerging potentials, if your waking identity is not to ultimately fail by losing the trust and thus the allegiance of your greater identity.

Somewhere in between the two extremes of authoritarian hierarchy and the chaos of dumb mobs, autocratic China is headed in two directions at once. On the one  hand China is in danger of becoming a ‘hyper-surveillance state’ that seeks ‘total information awareness’ of the activities of its subjects. The personal and individual equivalent is obsession and paranoia. This is a waking identity analogous to Chinese government as viewed by the dissident artist Ai Wei Wei, who sees a state that is always wanting to know where you are, what you do and who you talk to in order to be able to “crush” you at will. Yet China is also a state demonstrating an opposite powerful presence. It is itself subject to the surveillance of the microblogging population in a kind of ‘monitory webocracy’.  IDL allows something equivalent to be born in the evolution of human consciousness. Interviewed emerging potentials can be seen as analogous to China’s microblogging population, creating an interior monitoring web that can, should, and needs to provide necessary feedback to the top down government of waking awareness, your personal Bejing. Like the hierarchical meritocracy of China, your waking identity is an efficient system “but fails ultimately without feedback loops that provide reliable information, clogging the meridians of the body politic.” Just as “social media can become an organic part of the Chinese body politic and thus improve good governance,” so the feedback of your emerging potentials can become an organic part of your body politic and thus improve good governance over your life.

Tearing down is a centrifugal process; you may fear that if you listen to emerging potentials they will destroy the foundations of your life and dismantle your ego. Won’t you “decompensate,” melting down into a mindless, unconscious mass of incoherent ectoplasm? If emerging potentials can be disruptors of the authority and institutions that your waking identity has painstakingly built and protected over decades, what might be their role in reconstruction? “After the centrifugal phase of pulling down and pulling apart, the next turn is a centripetal phase which pulls together and builds up new institutions based either on new authorities or conceptions of authority.” Various psychological responses are possible.  Traditionally, and most likely, “new elites are installed and (pyramid-like) hierarchical institutions re-established with a different set of strong rulers and experts.” Think Egypt, the governmental structures of republics like the US or Germany (President/Prime Minister, Elected representatives, federal, state, and local bureaucrats). “Complexity requires more hierarchy for efficiency’s sake. Yet innovation must retain its own space or efficiency will kill it off.” Intrasocially this either means reimposition of another, reconstituted waking authoritarianism or the highly unlikely possibility of governance by a “possessing” dissociated personality. The second possibility the “monitory webocracy” analogy, emerged as a governmental model in post-enlightenment Europe.  “…a diamond shaped structure can form where most people are neither rich nor poor and conflict and competition, ritualized by rules, take place in “arenas” such as courts, markets, science and democracy…Unlike the top to bottom power structure of the hierarchical pyramid, where legitimacy is invested in the rule of the worthy and the expert, the diamond model’s legitimacy arises from a “reciprocal accountability” of its participants.” This alternative is made possible by the introduction of the concept of inalienable human rights and their codification as social law. On an intrasocial level it is made possible by Dream Sociometry and other forms of IDL interviewing. The reciprocal accountability is seen in triangulation, the comparing of findings among waking experts, common sense, and various interviewed emerging potentials.

The pyramid power structure is what Wilber’s integral calls “agentic,” or vertical-hierarchical, pattern of organization. The diamond structure is integral’s  “communal,” or horizontal-heterological, pattern of organization. While development as a whole tends to be hierarchical, with each successive level transcending and including previous ones, agentic and communal styles tend to alternate up the developmental ladder. The act of inclusion in “transcend and include” is itself a heterological impulse. The understanding of a multiplicity of states and perspectives, in addition to your current waking state and perspective, is a heterological, communal awareness, that tends to lead to a broadening of awareness. These two movements have also been called “ontogenetic” and “phylogenetic,” with ontogenetic activities “organized and carried out through centrally designed institutions to shape the development of society, while the phylogenetic response is evolutionary, like self-organizing bacteria lacking foresight but responding to the environment.” “Political authority today is ontogenetic and cyberspace is phylogenetic. The health of human society depends on the balance.”

Increasing societal complexity depends on both more hierarchy to manage that complexity and on more feedback loops of reciprocal accountability. IDL creates a smarter “management” in your waking identity because it expands your perspective as you listen to and incorporate the feedback and perspectives of other, previously unrecognized or ignored voices.

“Since social networks and shared knowledge continuously challenge elites and credentialed meritocracy, it is likely in the future that a new “agile meritocracy” whose transient power rises and falls based on reputation and performance — will replace entrenched elites.” We see this model happening with intrasocial reality. As one begins practicing Integral Deep Listening to emerging potentials they discover and interact with intrasocial networks of meaning. This is particularly evident with Dream Sociometry, in which a number of emerging potentials are interviewed at the same time, preferences are tabulated and displayed as networked intrasocial relationships in a diagram called a Dream Sociogram. This input continuously challenges the world view, preferences, and perspectives of your entrenched waking “elite” identity, slowly replacing it with a credentialed meritocracy, which was an ideal of Plato and Confucius alike, coming from very different cultures and societies. The power of these representatives of intrasocial meritocracy rise and fall based on their reputation and performance. The reputation of these emerging potentials is based on their ability to score higher than you do on one or more core process or quality associated with wakefulness and enlightenment. Their performance is based on the observable improvements to quality of your life as their recommendations are objectively measured and verified.

Waking identity will never be replaced, only perpetually expanded and thinned. This is because “it takes an institution.” Governance requires stable, dependable structures and processes. Some of these can only be supplied by a waking identity that does sensory-based reality testing. The input of emerging potentials is more like crowd-sourced authority, which is good for innovation, protest, and issuing wake-up calls; they provide transient leadership, although the values that they personify are a lasting, dependable foundation for good social and intrasocial governance. “It is a libertarian illusion to believe that distributed networks of amateurs or “unknown experts’ can self-administer a society based on rational self-interested decisions. Retail sanity does not necessarily, or even usually, add up to wholesale rationality. As often or not, retail sanity can add up to wholesale madness. It was the distributed networks of financial experts that instigated the Wall Street meltdown. It was up to the stodgy old “drunk uncle” institution of the US government to salvage the system.” This is much less likely to be the case with the collective wisdom of emerging potentials. Why? The retail sanity of other people is less sane than your intrasocial emerging potentials. This is because people tend to score lower in core qualities and processes of awakening and enlightenment than do your own emerging potentials.

“…the nation state is too small for global problems and too big for local problems. In a networked world of distributed power it would make more sense to seek change from the bottom up, from the city to the subnational level, than from the nation state or the level of global summitry. This is especially so as the world has become mostly urbanized with an archipelago of megacity regions with 20-million-plus inhabitants each, especially in Asia. Megacities are the network nodes where people live and work (or are unemployed), where they play and pollute.” When you consult emerging potentials you are seeking change from microcosm to macrocosm, from inside out, and from the microsocial to the macrosocial. You are seeking change based on core intrinsic values rather than internalized, scripted, cultural values that do not, cannot, and will  not recognize your unique expression of universal values.

“Already dense with feedback because of physical proximity, the intensified feedback loops of social networks can make cities even more intelligent.” Similarly, the feedback loops of interviewing emerging potentials, checking out their recommendations against your waking common sense, the recommendations of other emerging potentials, and the recommendations of respected others will make the “city” of your consciousness not simply more intelligent, which is nothing to write home about, but more wise, with more compassion and inner peace.

The quotes in this article are taken from Democracy and Smart Mobs, Nathan Gardels’ summary of themes emerging from a brainstorming session on governance and social media held by the Nicolas Berggruen Institute in Palo Alto on March 4, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-gardels/democracy-and-smart-mobs_b_1335570.html

HENDRIE WEISINGER, The Power of Positive Criticism

Strictly speaking, negativity is not a cognitive distortion, but it is so fundamental, in that it supports all cognitive distortions, and it is so pervasive, in that it is found in all cognitive distortions, that it deserves special attention. Negativity is not necessarily a sign of irrationality, pessimism, cynicism, or any particular cognitive distortion. For example, if you evaluate the pros and cons of a move, investment, relationship, food choice, invitation, or activity, and decide against it, you’re not being negative in a cognitively distorted way. You might in fact say that you are positively against some choice. Making fun of yourself in a self-depricating way is a relatively harmless type of negativity that is used by confident, successful people. An example is Woody Allen’s famous quote, “How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?” Or, when asked, “Do you know a good plastic surgeon,” you respond, “Would I look like this if I did?”

The problem with negativity is not in saying “no” or finding reasons not to do something; it’s when these reasons are based on irrational fears – as most negative reasoning is – or when negativity is expressed more than necessary or in ways that are not necessary.  Have you noticed that when you make a negative pronouncement or use negative language that others around you are more likely to use them as well? For instance, if you say, “This project isn’t going to work out,” you make it more likely that colleagues on the project are going to think or say something similar, thereby making failure a self-fulfilling prophesy. If you use abusive language, like calling someone “stupid,” or a government “corrupt,” you make it more likely that those around you will use that same language. This may be exactly what you want to do. However, be very careful about this, because what you are creating is an echo chamber. You are generating a culture of negative values that will reinforce not only your perceptions and world view, but a negative world view. So what? Negative thinking, perceptions, and world views put sawdust in the machinery of creative problem solving. It puts  breaks on growth by sowing doubt, skepticism, pessimism, cynicism, resistance, avoidance, confusion, and general constipation. If you don’t want to be surrounded by negative thinking, be very careful about what you say and how you think.

It is likely that you are much more negative than you think you are, you just have not recognized a lot of what you think and say as negative. For example, thoughts and expressions of doubt are negative, and these are common in language: “I don’t know;” “Do you think I should…?” “Maybe…” “Perhaps…” “Sort of…” “Kind of…” These  common negative speech qualifiers are like raindrops; alone they don’t do anything, but together, and over time, they erode mountains. If you want to erode your resolution, goals, plans, and purposes, use them.

Breaking your addiction to negativity

You have good reasons why you’re negative. It feels right, true, and honest. When you think, “I’m stupid,” “She’s a fool,” or “It won’t work,” you don’t feel or think that you are being negative. If someone points out to you that you are, you will defend your words as “cautious,” “realistic,” or “necessary.” You think being negative is smart because it keeps you safe or because it tells the truth about people who are dangerous because they can’t be trusted.  Are such beliefs cognitive distortions or not? They probably are, and you are not seeing it. If being negative doesn’t keep you safe but only gives you a soothing, comfortable feeling of safety, it’s not smart; it’s putting you into a state of deeper self-delusion. Your negativity is deluding you into self-destruction. If being negative tells a truth about someone that is not necessary to tell, then what you are doing is trashing the part of yourself that other person represents. Is that smart? Is that helpful?

The alternative to negativity is not to be unrealistically positive. It is not to “think happy thoughts.” It is not to be unfailingly cheerful or insufferably optimistic. That feels phony and unrealistic. People will think you are putting on a show for you and will wonder how bad it will be when your “inner demon” finally surfaces. Don’t be afraid to be honest about your dark side, but emphasize discussing it rather than demonstrating it, explaining it rather than acting it out with a useless show of drama. Negativity is meant to be used as an occasional garnish, spice or accent. If you yell all the time you have to yell even louder if you want people to hear you. If you curse all the time you have to curse even more if you want people not to tune you out. If you are negative a lot you have to be even more negative to get people to notice. However, if you rarely yell, you don’t have to be very loud very often to get attention; if you don’t curse, when you do it will have the force of a thunder-clap; if you are seldom negative, when you are it has both force and significance. Think of negativity like surgery: You don’t want to go under a surgeon’s knife if you don’t have to, but when you do you want it to be quick, effective, with maximum impact combined with minimal pain.

Do not be afraid of being negative. Be very afraid of habitually voicing negativity or thinking in negative terms. Start watching what you say and how you think. If it is fear-based, there is about a ninety-five percent chance that it is negative. You then must ask yourself, “Is this fear realistic?” “Is thinking or expressing this negativity necessary, helpful, or genuinely funny?” When you reduce negativity in your life you will find you have more energy, more focus, and more satisfaction with your life, even when you are surrounded by problems, challenges, and difficult people.

The basic importance of the Drama Triangle lies in the unavoidable fact that if you play one role you will eventually end up playing all three, meaning that sooner or later you will find yourself in the role of Victim. There is neither intimacy or peace within the Drama Triangle; it fills life with superficial, inauthentic, and painful excitement, creating a delusional reality that causes needless, completely preventable suffering. Integral Deep Listening (Dillard) expands the interpersonal context of the Drama Triangle to include the two intrapsychic realms of waking cognition and dreams and demonstrates how taking any of these three roles in the Drama Triangle in either of those two realms fuels and manifests as interpersonal expressions of the Drama Triangle. This interpersonal space includes national and international political events, such as diplomacy and war.  A major reason why both war and the Drama Triangle continue is because humans commonly and persistently justify jumping into the Persecutor role. War has not been eliminated from human culture because humans habitually take the role of Persecutor, not only in relationships but in normal thought processes and even at night when asleep and dreaming. Consequently, this familiarity breeds a common psychological excusability for abusive, unethical, unlawful, and criminal conduct on the part of leaders and soldiers. Extrapolating from our own experience, we accept and even expect a double standard on the part of our government.

By examining the justifications for war and discrediting them you can identify your own justifications for persecuting yourself and others. You can start to wake up out of the persecutor role of the Drama Triangle in each of the three realms. The first is the interpersonal realm of work, friends, loved ones, and enemies. The second is your internal waking world of cognition—your thoughts and feelings. The third is your dream world, in your relationship with those “others” that you encounter in that “intrasocial” realm.

This line of reasoning largely borrows from the spade work done by Robert Higgs in his article, “War Is Horrible, but…” (Higgs, 2012). This phrase implies that war is acknowledged to be the abuse and persecution of others that it is. However, until fairly recently it was still socially acceptable for mainstream culture to glorify abuse. Theodore Roosevelt could write that war is manly and invigorating both for nations and for the soldiers who engage in it. Morris justifies war as a means to keep nations and their citizens from “getting soft.” (Morris 1979) Chris Hedges has argued that this cultural ennobling of abuse still exists in his War Is a Force That Gives us Meaning (2002). I agree, judging not only by advertising for military recruitment but almost all war movies.

How is abuse justified within the Drama Triangle? Looking at the social realm first, consider the legal justifications generated by John Woo for Bush II to attempt to protect the U.S. CIA, Military, Defense Secretary, leaders of the National Security Council, Vice President, and President from prosecution and conviction for either doing or authorizing actions that were clearly against international law. They would be roundly condemned by the US government if these obscene measures were used by another government against U.S. citizens. (ACLU) The basic argument is that abuse is a lesser moral wrong in the face of greater social dangers, such as a terrorist setting off a nuclear explosive in a U.S. city. The argument is that the abuse of a few, regardless of how cruel and vicious it is, can never compare to the value of the many lives that are thereby saved. A second, associated argument, still used by many Democrats and most Republicans to excuse Obama’s killing of civilians, including women and children, with drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, and probably elsewhere, is that the government knows how to control and direct abuse, forgetting that by such an example future Presidents as well as foreign leaders are justified to use similar means based on the same rationalization.

These excuses and justifications for jumping into the Persecutor role of the Drama Triangle show up in your personal life when you scream at, name call, or hit a child, partner, co-worker, boss, or enemy and claim that you are thereby stopping them from doing some unspeakable act: setting the house on fire, pedophilia, torturing animals, hitting their younger siblings, cheating on their partner, etc. Your argument, like those made by Woo, is that the pain you inflict is necessary for the greater good when in fact it is obviously simply an excuse for unacceptable behavior.  Parents often use the second argument, that as adults and parents they know how to control and direct the abuse they inflict upon their children, conveniently forgetting that they are teaching their children that this is what good parents do, oblivious to the possibility that they themselves will one day be grandparents and will have to witness their bad parenting being inflicted on their own grandchildren by their own children.

These excuses and justifications for jumping into the Persecutor role of the Drama Triangle also show up in the cognitive realm when you justify self-abuse as a lesser evil. Consider the mentality of habitual wrist slicers and those who either attempt or succeed at suicide. Consider what you say to yourself and how you feel when you believe aggression and abuse are appropriate means of defending yourself against some inner threat: your addictions, loss of self-control, and self-blame for your abuse of others. If you drone attack yourself with shame, guilt, and name calling perhaps you will magically stamp out the blemish on your character; you will rub away the scarlet “A” that you wear in your mind. But of course all you are doing is amplifying and thereby reinforcing bad behavior. You are making self-indulgence in the Persecutor role of the Drama Triangle more likely in your thoughts and feelings by your example to yourself. Shame does not eliminate shame; it reinforces it. Guilt does not diminish guilt; it amplifies it.

These excuses for jumping into the Persecutor role of the Drama Triangle show up in your intrasocial universe when you either act in abusive ways or perceive the actions of characters in dreams as being abusive to you. Let’s say a dream gargoyle is roasting you over a spit. That’s pretty abusive, isn’t it? Doesn’t that justify being in the role of Victim or jumping into the role of Persecutor, or, most likely, jumping into the role of Rescuer by waking up or by “switching channels” with your dream remote? But what are you actually doing? First, you are reinforcing the Drama Triangle by choosing a response that keeps you a prisoner within delusion. Even if you woke yourself out of the dream, your escapism reinforced the fear; you are likely to have the same dream or a similar one again. The more fearful you are in your dreams the more fearful you are likely to be in your waking life. Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome provides plenty of evidence for this reality. This is a good decision if you like the Drama Triangle and enjoy self-inflicted, totally unnecessary and useless suffering. However, if you think you deserve peace of mind you will choose a more confident, wise, and compassionate response in your dream. It really doesn’t matter what that response is, as long as it is not jumping into one or another role of the Drama Triangle. This is real, authentic, genuine dream lucidity, as opposed to lucid dreaming. You can lucid dream within the Drama Triangle but dream lucidity precludes choosing to be in the Drama Triangle in your dreams.

Let us imagine that you have evolved to the point where you no longer justify abuse toward others or yourself as a noble or necessary preventative. You can still say, “Abuse is horrible, but…” and then go on to inflict damage on your life, yourself, and your intrasocial community. Higgs has compiled some interesting examples of such rationalizations. These can also be used to demonstrate how and why they are cultural and personal cognitive distortions, that is, examples of irrational thinking and dangerous delusions. Higgs refutes each one, in a way similar to cognitive behavioral therapy (Burns, 1980), in which a rational antidote is developed for each irrational belief, as a way of undermining both the anxiety and depression that lead to self-destructive behavior. Each of Higg’s fourteen excuses for waging war is followed by how each keeps you stuck in the Drama Triangle and how to avoid such a fate.

“War is horrible. But no one wants to see a world in which a regime with no regard whatsoever for international law—for the welfare of its own people—or for the will of the united Nations—has weapons of mass destruction.” (US deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage [2003]). Higgs points out that this statement, used to justify the unjustifiable, indefensible campaign of “shock and awe” against a non-aggressing country (Iraq), was simply “bellicose propaganda.” Although Higgs doesn’t come out and directly make the point, those same conditions apply much better to the perpetrator of those attacks, the United States. The Iraq war was in direct violation of international law and the U.S. government knew it. Its leaders created lies as pretexts which they sold to the  media, international community, and to citizens. The war showed callous disregard for the welfare of those U.S. citizens who were either killed, maimed, or psychologically destroyed by the experience of participating in atrocities. The record clearly shows that the United States will defend the United Nations when that institution serves its own ends. When it does not, it ignores, disrupts, or undermines the United Nations at will.

Where is the equivalent of this rationalization found in daily life? You use it when you first create a threat where there is none and then use your fear to justify the abuse of others. For example, you believe co-workers are gossiping about you and so start a campaign of character assassination. As an employer, you see your worker’s demands for higher wages or unionization as a threat to the survival of your business. As a result, you may do something like Ronald Reagan did to the striking airline traffic controllers: fire them all. Of course, those Federal employees were not a threat to Reagan or to the government, but by using the “shock and awe” of mass layoffs, he served notice to both public and private employees everywhere not to push their case against management. He served notice to employers by his example that the Federal government fully supported the abuse of employee rights. This in turn set an example for such ham-handed unwillingness to negotiate to carry over into disputes of all kinds—between partners, parents and children, parents and teachers, setting one element of the body politic and the social fabric against another, using abuse in such a decisive fashion that opposition is repressed, where it will smolder and simmer, gaining strength, developing strategies that will be harder to control. If you think it’s fine to do such things with your family, your associates, or your competitors, you are using one of the same rationalizations that your leaders can, have, and will use to justify killing your children, grandchildren, or your children’s children’s children.

If you tell yourself, “I’m breaking the rules of good behavior! I need to punish myself!” and then proceed to do so by putting yourself into a depressed mood, worrying and punishing yourself with needless, unproductive anxiety, or by otherwise inflicting “shock and awe” upon yourself, you are in the Persecutor role of the Drama Triangle in the second realm, of your waking cognition. You do so because it is for a time a successful adaptive strategy. You will feel relief and less stress; you will have a personal experience equivalent to CNN superimposing the image of a flying American flag over the scenes of Baghdad being turned to rubble. You have violated the norms of good behavior. You deserve this mental and emotional abuse, and you celebrate its success in stomping down the demons within you.

Intrasocially, persecutors are easily viewed to be deadly threats that are transgressing norms of appropriate behavior. For instance, if a man is chasing you and shooting at you in a dream, you immediately conclude that you are dealing with a deadly threat. At the least, it is displaying a disregard for cultural norms of decency and justice. The man is also showing no respect for another human. Consequently, you are completely justified in shooting it, turning a dog loose on it, or strangling it—in short, anything and everything that might work to stop it. However, there is a problem here and it has several dimensions. First, the dream is a delusion. You think you are awake when you are not. Because you are dreaming and in a delusional state, you think you are threatened when you are not, in fact, threatened. You think you are a Victim in the Drama Triangle faced with a Persecutor when in fact no such threat exists, just as most citizens have experienced themselves throughout history in the face of government calls to war. You do not know this during most dreams, with the exception of some lucid dreams, but you do know it when you wake up, get your bearings and think, “I was dreaming!” Citizens often do this in the aftermath of war. They do things like create the United Nations and host the Nuremberg Trials, declaring, “Never again!”

When you start looking at your response to personal, intrapersonal, and interpersonal abuse as a self-created dream,  you can see that Armitage was validating a similar delusion, but on a social and cultural, international level, where one plays for keeps. In dreams there isn’t real tissue damage; in war, there is. While the consequences are disastrously more severe in waking life, the premises are no different. In both cases threats are manufactured based on delusion and misperception. The dream misperception has to do with the fact that you do not know the motives of the person who was chasing you and shooting at you. Maybe he was trying to get your attention to warn you about something. Maybe the bullets were made of chocolate. It was a dream. Why should you assume that your assumptions about what is happening in the dream are the only real, true, or appropriate explanations for what is going on in the dream?

Scaring yourself within the Drama Triangle at night in your dreams, whether you remember them or not, plants the seeds for doing the same in the other two realms. You are validating, through “skull practice,” the emotional and cognitive predispositions for waking abuse. You are planting the seeds for those same delusions to be acted out as international Drama Triangles, reaching the pinnacle of abhorrence in the delusion called war. If you want to end war, you need to eliminate the Drama Triangle in all three realms of your personal life.

“War is terrible, war is horrible, but war is also at times necessary and the only means of stopping evil.”

Higgs makes the important and obvious argument that there are other means of stopping evil than war, and that they need to be considered and used first. You use this rationalization in the three realms when you jump to the worst case scenario, the catastrophic expectation, and use that to justify a response of maximum force. Examples: as a parent when you spank a child for bed-wetting or bringing home a bad grade, as a lover when you divorce someone you’ve caught cheating, something that Hillary Clinton could have done and many thought should have done, but with wisdom and grace, did not. You do this in the cognitive realm when you respond to overweight with starvation diets or to your drinking not only by becoming a tee-totaler, but a Carrie Nation-type crusader against the evils of alcohol. You do this in the intrasocial realm when you return perceived evil with evil actions: gouging the eyes out of a monster; setting someone else’s house on fire; shooting someone in your dream. The implication is that if you want to do away with the international pestilence of war, you need to look in the mirror and take Pogo’s statement to heart: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”  You need to follow Gandhi’s advice and “First be the change you wish to see in the world.”

“No news shows [during World War II] were showing German civilians getting fried and saying how sad it was. It was war against butchers and war is horrible, but it’s war, and to defend human decency, sometimes war is necessary.” (Ben Stein [2006])

Higgs points out that threatened, self-styled victims do not typically humanize their persecutors. Why not? Because it is difficult to justify jumping into the role of Persecutor if you see your enemy as a Victim. The first thing a military must teach recruits is loyalty to the “Team,” — the unit, platoon, brigade, commanders, the nation., and secondly, and strongly implied by this first premise, is the dehumanization of the enemy.  “They” are an “it,” a “war machine,” “gooks,” “towel heads,” “insects;”  no epithet is too low or vile to describe one’s persecutor. Higgs also points out that it is much easier to kill innocent civilians if they are not only nameless and faceless “collateral damage,” but if they are lumped together as manifestations of human (or sub-human) indecency.

To state that war is war is like saying “abuse is abuse.” This only works when there is  no adult supervision. In the absence of parental authority there are no consequences for indecent behavior and so it becomes relatively easy to say, “This is just the way humans are.” This is exactly what you do to excuse yourselves from self-persecution, whether by destroying your relationships, self-criticism, or acting badly in dreams. It’s just the way humans are. Humans are abusive. No, they are not—not when there is appropriate adult supervision. The presence of abuse anywhere on the spectrum, from dreams to war, is not only a statement of the lack of adult supervision but a plea for it. The individual, corporation, the banker, the culture, the nation is basically saying, “I’m too immature to control myself. I need a strong parental figure to keep me from being my own worst enemy.” This is one way of thinking about the role of government, to provide adult supervision so children play fair. War is an abrogation by government of its responsibility to provide such supervision. You feed war when you abrogate your responsibility to yourself and your world to demand peace in all three realms. Like any child, no nation or populace will frame it this way. Instead, they will live and act within the Drama Triangle, feeling fully justified in whichever role they happen to be in at the particular moment of their history.

Higgs also makes the point that using war to defend against indecency is to use the height of indecency against indecency, thereby “invariably magnify(ing) the malignity that it purports to resist.” This is the nature of the Persecutor role wherever it manifests in the three realms. That one can and does excuse it in the international arena raises the question, “How much more so is one excusing it in the interpersonal, cognitive, and intrapersonal realms?” In other words, is not such a person not only admitting that they are a persecutor of others and themselves, and that they see no problem with that? If that is the case, what does that say about the credibility of such a person? Shouldn’t such an admission clearly and immediately brand them as a social outcast, a dangerous person, as someone who has no problem hurting others or themselves?

Of course, the common response is to vigorously deny any connection between these realms. Just because President Obama allowed the perpetrators of great financial swindling go unprosecuted and even promoted one of them, Timothy Geithner, to one of the highest offices in the Land (Secretary of Treasury), does not mean that he is not a loving father or does not want to extend the social safety net to a greater number of citizens. But if one sanctions murder and assassination of civilians (drone war and more traditional terrorism world wide by the military and special forces) and corruption in the role of Commander in Chief, a role that most parents would be proud to have their child attain, what does that say about how deeply immersed not only Obama, but the citizenry at large, is in the Drama Triangle? This disconnect between public and private realms is first and most fundamentally a convenient failure of personal responsibility. By not pointing that out, by not holding leaders accountable, citizens like you and me are saying such double standards are excusable. You can love your family and cheat your customers while exploiting your employees and exploiting the environment until it is depleted, because different realms, different social roles, play by different rules. What the Drama Triangle does is make the point that “No, all these theaters of human activity are bound by one and the same fundamental dynamic.” You can’t make up the rules as you go along and be free of the consequences.

“War is horrible, but slavery is worse.” (Winston Churchill)

Higgs points out that this is not necessarily so, and one can conjure up all kinds of historical instances to support that stance. He also notes that slavery is rarely the outcome of wars and that the U.S. has never fought a war in which that was a likely outcome. Even the Revolutionary War, if the Americans had lost, would not have reduced its inhabitants to British slaves, but rather to British subjects, as in Canada, India, and elsewhere.

What people fail to recognize is that war makes them slaves of the Drama Triangle. You can’t do war without becoming a slave to it. Interpersonally, personally, and intrapersonally, you cannot do abuse and persecution, whether of another or yourself, without making yourself a slave of the Drama Triangle. When the obvious reality of this statement hits home, the next step is to ask, “Why would I want to do that?” The healthy answer is, “I don’t.” The next step is learning to recognize it in the three realms and to swear off it, to avoid any and all invitations to play. Citizens who do this will inoculate themselves against war propaganda. They are less likely to assume predator career roles and “promotions” that pay them for playing the Persecutor.

“You may think the Iraq war is horrible, but there may be some times when you can justify [going to war.]” 

Persecution is always justified in one’s own mind. George II justified attacking Iraq as an exercise in “democratization.” In his mind he was somewhere between a Helper and a Rescuer when he was dropping those bombs, scattering those uranium enriched munitions, and torturing people. Persecutors never see themselves as Persecutors. It’s a self-preserving blind spot, because self-identification as a Persecutor generally means that I have to take responsibility for my actions and beyond that, I might even have to change my behavior. This is also a reason why geopolitics resists analysis such as this one that reduces external monstrosities to internal ones. It’s easier and much more fun to project responsibility onto others than to look in the mirror.

Because of the inherent, built-in resistance to owning your persecution of yourself and others, it is recommended that you do two things. 1) Always assume you are in the Drama Triangle, in one or another of these three roles; 2) Err on the side of assuming that you are in the role of Persecutor, because you are going to have the most resistance to accepting responsibility for this role of the three. While there is manipulative value in owning that you are in the Victim role, in that you get to deny responsibility, and while there is considerable justification that comes with being in the Rescuer role, (“My intentions are so good!”), it’s much harder to generate rationalizations and justifications for playing the Persecutor. Of course, you do so all the time, and that is the purpose of Higg’s article on a level of national consciousness and it is the purpose of this article on more germinative levels.

“War is horrible, but sometimes you need to fight.”

Higgs points out that rarely has the U.S. actually needed to fight. I would add that the corollary here would be “The Drama Triangle is horrible, but sometimes you need to fight.” What this clarifies is not only that you can’t wage war without being in the Drama Triangle, but it indicates that you easily make excuses for staying in it. Again, you can always justify both going to war and staying in the Drama Triangle, but you will degrade yourself while robbing yourself of authenticity, intimacy, and peace in either case. What you need to fight for is peace of mind, intimacy, and authenticity. The war you need to fight is the struggle to stay out of the Drama Triangle. If you wage that war you will largely immunize yourself from getting sucked in to the justifications for drama in any of its manifestations, including warfare.

“Of course war is horrible, but it will always exist, and I’m sick of these pacifist [explicative deleted} ruining any shred of political decency that they can manage.” 

This one is humorous in its irrationality. Since when is war “politically decent?” Since when is peace “politically indecent?” Higgs points out that just because war has always existed there is no cause to believe man cannot outgrow it, just as he had a belief that astrology is scientific, in the inevitability of some cancers, or the divine right of kings. The same is most certainly true about the Drama Triangle. You can outgrow your addiction to it in all three realms, but first you have to recognize it. Then you have to understand that it is your arch enemy, not external enemies or the government. Then you need a plan that involves vigilant persistence.

To apply Higgs second point, even if evil cannot be eliminated for good that does not mean that giving in to it is justified. Even if you are probably destined to find yourself in one or another aspect of the Drama Triangle, that doesn’t mean that you cannot or should not work to reduce the severity, duration, or consequences of your relapse. You can always become less asleep and more awake. You can choose not to sleepwalk your life away on a path of destruction.

Higgs third point is that if everyone was a pacifist there would be no war. Integral Deep Listening teaches that inner peace is an antidote to the Drama Triangle, particularly the role of Victim. If you don’t experience  yourself as a Victim, you are much less likely to jump into the role of Persecutor. Therefore, the more that you cultivate your peace of mind in any number of ways, such as exercise, laughing, meditating, or interviewing emerging potentials that have more peace of mind than you do, as you learn to do in IDL, the less likely you are to wage war or to condone it.

“Every war is horrible, but freedom and justice cannot be allowed to be defeated by tyranny and injustice. As hideous as war is, it is not as hideous as the things it can stop and prevent.”

Higgs says, “This statement assumes that war amounts to a contest between freedom and justice on one side and tyranny and injustice on the other.”  Can anyone believe such a simplistic reductionism once they recognize it for what it is? This is a Manichean world view, in which God, light, and love are on one side while Satan, darkness, and hate are on the other. This mind set is associated with a category of primitive mental illness called “personality disorders.” It is primitive because it reflects the normal, dualistic, overly concrete thinking of a two year old. It is a mental illness when it is displayed by adults because it splits not only the world into good and bad but oneself as well. The result is that you are perpetually at war not only with the world but with yourself. So this way of thinking effectively throws you into outer darkness. There is no possibility of peace of mind within a world view so constructed. It is a sign of psychological maturity to be able to see, tolerate, and appreciate contradiction, diversity, and that which first appears threatening. If you can’t do so, you’re in the Drama Triangle. You need adult supervision.

Fortunately, such is at hand. You can associate with people who do not split the world into black and white but instead know how to tolerate and appreciate ambiguity. You can learn IDL so you can associate with emerging potentials that have more confidence, compassion, wisdom, acceptance, inner peace, and objectivity than you do. You can learn how to recognize a cognitive distortion when you hear it and challenge it, activating your common sense and putting it to work to keep you from spending your life dancing with tar babies.

You enslave yourself when you lower yourself to the tactics of your enemy. You make yourself into them. It is like responding to a name-calling four year old with name calling. Because one human is immature, does regression to his level make either more humane?  Because your foe is unjust, does an unjust response inspire your opponent or neutral others to support you? If your enemy represents a part of yourself, then when you see him as such, whether in waking life, in your bad habits, or in dream monsters, you are at war with yourself. You have turned yourself into your own enemy. Nobody has done that to you. That is your own choice. Is that wise? If not, do you recognize you can, at any time, make a healthier one?

“I grant you the war is horrible, but it is a war, after all. You have to compare apples to apples, and when I do that, I see this war is going well.”

You use this argument when you think, “My prostitution of my values by taking a crappy job where I work for a predatory company and help it cheat people by selling them unhealthy or worthless products is not as bad as being a prostitute or working for the mafia.” You use this argument when you think, “Calling myself stupid, lazy, or a failure isn’t so bad,” when you know that you wouldn’t tolerate it if someone else called you, your partner, or child such names. You use this argument when you wake up from a nightmare and think, “It was only a dream!” In each case you are excusing enmeshment in the Drama Triangle as acceptable and as “not so bad” as it could be. This may be so; and the net result is that you stay stuck in the Drama Triangle.

“[Certain writers] agreed that war is horrible but said that the Bible gives government the authority to wage war to save innocent lives.” 

Higgs points out that a “just war” waged to save innocent lives is a convenient and commonly used excuse for killing a lot of innocent people, Christian or otherwise. Appeals to Biblical authority are only as effective as one’s belief in the Bible (which parts?). And what is to keep your enemy from making the same appeals with the same degree of legitimacy? Saying God is on your side is a convenient justification for doing whatever you want to do, nothing more. Lloyd Blankfein, chairman of Goldman Sacks, the financial derivative firm found guilty for defrauding investors for millions, if not billions, framed his occupation, before the U.S. congress, as “God’s work.”

There is plenty of Drama Triangle in the Bible. In fact, it is difficult to find parts of it that are not in the Drama Triangle. There is precious little guidance in the Bible about getting out and staying out of the Drama Triangle. If there were, might not more Jewish, Christian, and Islamic adherents would be out of it? The Bible gives not only governments, but you and me the authority, reasons, and excuses to stay in the Drama Triangle.

“War is horrible, but thank God you have men and women who are willing and able to protect your people and your freedom.”

Some of these rationalizations are crazy; some are scary. This one is scary crazy. Higgs makes the excellent point that each war that the U.S. has waged has left its citizens more disenfranchised than before the war.  Taxes were raised during both WWI and WWII. After each war the tax level remained elevated before being raised again by the next conflict. Suppression of freedom of speech increased with each war and was not completely regained afterward. The War on Terror has resulted in further erosion of human rights and freedom by the government.  The implication is, if you want to know who your enemy is, you only need look in the mirror. Just like the government, you externalize your own fears, thereby both amplifying and making them impossible to resolve without getting rid of the external world. Krishnamurti stated this concept concisely: “War is the spectacular and bloody projection of your everyday living. You precipitate war out of your daily lives; and without a transformation in yourselves, there are bound to be national and racial antagonisms, the childish quarreling over ideologies, the multiplication of soldiers, the saluting of flags, and all the many brutalities that go to create organized murder.”

Higgs states, “War, whether real or make-believe, serves to justify huge increases in government spending, taxing, borrowing, and exertion of power over private affairs, and such government surges attract opportunists galore while doing little or nothing to improve people’s real security or to protect their freedom.” Similarly, playing the role of Persecutor within the Drama Triangle, whether in the public or private domains, whether awake or dreaming, serves to justify huge increases in your expenditures of your precious life energy. You tax yourself, borrow from yourself, and impose crazy rules and behaviors on yourself, all in the name of protecting yourself from victimization by largely self-created, delusional threats. Assume that 95{be93f16b5d2e768a85ea81ebc8356f268811d3908838ae6233aa33d012b25ec9} of what you do, think, and feel is within the Drama Triangle, and that none of that is doing anything to improve your security or enhance your freedom.

“War is horrible, but some economic good came out of World War II. It brought the United States out of one of the greatest slumps in history, the Great Depression.” 

Even if this were true (it isn’t: government spending that created jobs ended the Great Depression, not the war), it is rather like arguing that electro-shock treatment is a good thing because it sometimes relieves depression, or witch-dunking is a good thing because sometimes witches repent as a result. Sometimes major chaos will reorder societies and individuals in improved ways, but might not those improvements have been derived by other means? Again, you will always be able to justify why you needed to indulge yourself in one or another role of the Drama Triangle, whether in communication with your child, your boss, or in a dream. However, the net result is that you remain stuck in it, a victim of your own stupidity.

“War is horrible but whining about it is worse. Either put up or shut up.”

Do you need to know and offer an alternative to the Drama Triangle to get out of it? No. It’s like a bully teasing a kid to get him to fight. The kid doesn’t have to fight. He has choices, and if a kid doesn’t have to fall into the Drama Triangle, you don’t have to either, not at work, not in your family, not in your thoughts, not in your dreams. You get to choose. Because you have this choice, you are not a Victim. Because you are not a Victim, you have no whining rights. your job is not to rescue others from the Drama Triangle. You can ask them to help you stay out and maybe in the process they will wake up and learn how and why they keep themselves stuck. You can even do this in dreams. You don’t have to respond to dream threats by feeling threatened. You don’t have to rescue yourself from imaginary threats by turning them into snowflakes, waking up, or changing the scene. As you share with others how and why you fall into war with yourself and ask them to help you to stop, the more you will gain allies in creating a culture that is not based on war, that is, on the Persecutor role of the Drama Triangle. Instead you will be creating a sub-culture that is based on peace and on amplifying the power and effectiveness of that peace within that sub-culture and within each of its members.

“Of course war is horrible, but at present it’s still the only guarantee to maintain peace.”

This is a total lie, fabrication, and delusion. Much worse, it’s a self-contradiction, which means it is irrational. War maintains war. Peace maintains peace. Higgs discusses how this statement may be used to promote the belief that preparations for war are necessary. But the same still holds true; what you prepare for you tend to attract. If you protect yourself against getting your heart broken you will either withdraw defensively, increasing the likelihood that you will be ill-prepared for your next love relationship, or, if you harden yourself against rejection but still date or interact with a partner, you are more likely to break your own heart by sealing it off from the chance of getting it squashed again.

From the above discussion I hope you will take away a clearer sense of how easily, how often, and how completely you delude yourself with rationalizations, justifications, and excuses for staying in the Drama Triangle, with that you stay at war with yourself. If you are at war with yourself you will attempt to escape it, to “win” it, by externalizing that war, thereby finding and creating enemies and persecutors outside yourself, where none existed or exist. If you resist this urge and refuse to perceive anyone or any situation in your outside world as a Persecutor, you will also find yourself persecuting yourself less. You will find the drama in your dreams dying down and dying out; you’ll sleep better and wake up refreshed. In short, you will find that you are in less conflict with yourself.

If you want to speed this process up, you will not only work at staying out of the Drama Triangle but at working at building its antidotes. This is done in IDL by interviewing the personifications of your life issues and your dream characters to get in touch with emerging potentials that score higher than you do in the antidotes for drama.  Essentially, the antidotes are related to the processes and qualities associated with each stage of the cycle of each breath you take. Your abdominal inhalation can be associated with the process of awakening and the quality of confidence that you see in the sprouting of a blade of grass or in a newborn. Your chest inhalation can be associated with the process of aliveness and the quality of compassion that you see in a life that is dedicated to service beyond its own needs to stay alive. The pause at the top of each breath can be associated with the process of balance and the quality of wisdom, of the type that comes when you reflect on the lessons of your life and learn from them. Your chest exhalation can be associated with the process of detachment and the quality of acceptance. Your abdominal exhalation can be associated with the process of freedom and the quality of inner peace. The longer pause at the bottom of each breath can be associated with the process of clarity and the quality of witnessing the drama of your life with objectivity. This cycle is a microcosm of the cycle of each day of your life and of the arc of your entire life. It is the cycle of civilizations, of human evolution. Inner peace and witnessing are the natural antidotes for Victimization within the Drama Triangle. Develop them and you won’t experience yourself as a victim. Compassion and acceptance are the natural antidotes for Rescuing within the Drama Triangle. Develop them and you won’t burn yourself out trying to rescue yourself or others.  Confidence and Wisdom are the natural antidotes for Persecution within the Drama Triangle. Develop them and you won’t persecute yourself or others.

Think about it. If you feel confidence, are you afraid? No. If you are not afraid, do you need to defend yourself by persecuting anyone or anything? No. If you are wise, you will see how giving into your fear only keeps you trapped in the Drama Triangle. Therefore, these qualities are not only antidotes to Persecution, but in the social-political macrocosm, antidotes to war. Clearly, because the roles of Victim and Rescuer create the role of Persecutor sooner or later, all six core qualities need to be developed, and IDL does this in a balanced, integrative manner.

Just as Higgs recommends that the burden of proof for constructive alternatives to war be placed on the adherent of war, so you need to look at when, how, and why you get into the role of Persecutor. You need to take responsibility for how you avoid taking responsibility! You abuse yourself. Stop. If you don’t, you will keep abusing others, whether you mean to or not. If you abuse others you are by your example, inciting a culture of war. Stop abusing yourself by waking up to when and how you are in the Drama Triangle and by learning to cultivate the antidotes to each of the three roles. You have a lot of help. Find others that stay out of drama. Interview parts of yourself that don’t do drama. Use your common sense to see through your rationalizations and justifications for staying stuck. You can awaken the entire world out of drama. But it starts with you. Howard Zinn said, “How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?” Persecution is terrorism. Self-persecution is to terrorize yourself. If you look at it this way, perhaps you will sustain the conviction to grow up and stop war in your life, inside and out.

References

American Civil Liberties Union http://www.aclu.org/national-security/memo-regarding-torture-and-military-interrogation-alien-unlawful-combatants-held-o

Armitage, Richard. 2003. Speech at the U.S. Institute of Peace. January 21. Available at: http://www.acronym.org.uk/docs/0301/doc12.htm.

Berne, E. Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy; 1961

Burns, D. D. (1980). Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy (preface by Aaron T. Beck). New York: Wm. Morrow and Co (hardbound); New American Library, 1981 (paperback). Revised and updated, 1999

Dillard, J. Integral Deep Listening.  http://www.integraldeeplistening.com

Hedges, Chris. 2002. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. New York: Random House.

Higgs, R. 2012 War Is Horrible But…http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=912 Independent Review, Fall 2012.

Karpman, S. Fairy tales and script drama analysis. Transactional Analysis Bulletin. 7(25), 3-4. Karpman, S. (1968)

Morris, Edmund. 1979. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Ballantine.

Stein, Ben. 2006. Out of Disproportion. American Spectator, July 21. Available at: .

Historically, most people never question or outgrow the world view they grew up with.  They think like their parents, family, and culture do.  Blessed is the person who is not only allowed, but encouraged, to question their world view.  This is what education, and university in particular, is supposed to do, and which succeeds in some cases. However,  society does not have a lot to gain by you doing too much questioning.  If you do, you may question its legitimacy, which threatens the prevailing social order. Therefore you will find many tacit and implicit barriers to questioning your current world view, both externally and internally.  Consequently, even those who pride themselves for their independence from the world view they grew up with are often merely reactionary; instead of thoughtfully and carefully considering many possible alternative world views, they simply either embrace the current definition of rebellion (smoke, drink, get tattoos and piercings) or simply do the opposite of what their culture wants (drop out; take up pursuits that annoy people; go avant-garde with new age, art, or music).   Today, the internet constantly challenges our present world view by questioning our assumptions about who we are, what is real, what is right, and what is important.  It presents us with remarkable first hand testimony of alternative realities and amazing possibilities that can change our lives. This is the basic reason why the internet is one of the most revolutionary, transformative, and positive developments in human history.

While many people change jobs, spouses, friends, and geographical locations, such changes are relatively minor when compared to a shift in one’s underlying world view.  Your world view sets the context in which you see and experience everything.  Your reality is conditioned by your world view, and most of us cling to ours as the foundation of our security and our mental stability.  Therefore, it is unusual for anyone, even today, to change their world view more than once.

World views are notoriously difficult to change.  When confronted by new information, we fit it into our world view.  As Thomas Kuhn has shown in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in order to change a paradigm we must experience strong cognitive dissonance that comes from being confronted with experiences that our current world view just doesn’t explain.  For most people, this doesn’t happen.  They either ignore the discrepancies or incorporate them into their world view.  An excellent example is the continued ability of science to ignore and discount the consistently statistically significant findings that shows that minds can know and alter data and events at a distance.

What can be done about this?  Transpersonal approaches, notably that of Ken Wilber, building on an idea from Charles Alexander out of the Transcendental Meditation tradition, tend to believe that world views change with meditation.  Wilber has said that adults, who normally do not advance much in developmental levels, can move ahead two or more developmental levels with regular, genuine meditation.  While this may indeed be the case, our world view is an important determiner of our developmental level, and world views are remarkably resistant to change.  I have a good friend, Mike,  an intelligent and generous fellow, who illustrates this point.  Mike grew up in a family of brokers and investors.  His father lost his bakery in the ’40’s and blamed it on Roosevelt and The New Deal because the government appropriated the space for the war effort.  Mike is a millionaire retired investor who spends his time meditating and going to meditation workshops.  He is a lucid dreamer and something of a yogi.  He has experienced altered states of consciousness of various types and is a long time devotee of Ram Dass, Hanuman, and Ram Dass’ guru, Maharaj-ji.  However, Mike also believes in Reaganomics, the Laffer Curve, and Trickle-Down economics.  He believes in small government and lower taxes.  Essentially a libertarian, he is in my eyes a social Darwinist who believes in predatory capitalism and views its subsequent social inequalities as natural and acceptable.  As a successful professional gambler (he would find that term misleading and disparaging and sees himself as an investor), he has life experience that divides the world into winners and losers, and has no problem with that model.  It has worked for him and there is real world data to support it.

Mike’s world view at its roots has not been changed by years of meditation, as taught by Tibetan lamas.  If his has not, how much less likely is it that those, like you and me, who do not meditate four hours a day, or who are not so exposed to radically different world views will change theirs?  The answer is, “Not very likely.  In fact, unlikely.”

Most people think they have changed their world view when they have changed some part of it.  For example, when you discover the opposite sex in your adolescence, find Jesus, meet a genuine psychic, have a great teacher in college, learn a new profession, or have a mystical experience your world view can change radically.  However, what is generally the case is that part of your world view changes or else you have a temporary change of your entire world view.  A permanent change of your world view is much less likely.  Why?

To change your world view, you first have to be unhappy with the one you have.  Secondly, you have to be open to the possibility that there are other, more encompassing world views.  Third, you have to be exposed for an extended period of time to a genuinely transformative alternative world view.  Fourth, you have to be personally secure enough to deal with the threat that a new world view always poses to the assumptions on which you have built your life.  Fifth, this has to be a lasting change, or else you will have a temporary opening, like a near death experience, drug high, or religious conversion experience, and simply snap back into your habitual world view.  Mike, for example, while open to the possibility that there are other, more encompassing world views and exposed to several, was not unhappy with the one he had nor was he , in my opinion, personally secure enough to deal with the threat that a new world view would pose to some of the basic assumptions of the culture of his childhood. How often does anyone find themselves in circumstances that fulfill all these criteria?  Generally if it happens, it is either by accident or because of good luck, because our waking sense of who we are is generally a fierce defender of the status quo.  It thinks its world view is better than all the alternatives, or it would change.

If there is anything special about my life that can benefit others, it probably comes from the fact that my world view has been overturned not once, not twice, but three times.   Each change set the conditions and provided the foundation for the next change in my world view.  In retrospect, I think this is why it has often been difficult for me to bridge where I am to others: there are a number of intermediate transitional steps that a person needs to have taken or be willing to take for another world view to make sense to them or to have any relevance at all.  Each time my world view has been transformed, the result has transcended and included my previous world view.

Everybody has a ground zero world view, the one that they grew up in.  As Santayana famously said, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”  As most people do not learn from their personal history, they spend their lives repeating it.  They remain stuck in the world view unconsciously assimilated in their childhood and youth – their religious, food, national, racial, friend, and recreational preferences.  I had grown up as a loved, introverted, fairly spoiled child of “Ozzie and Harriet” middle America ’50’s reality.  I don’t remember seeing my mother or father angry or scared.  I only remember seeing my father sad once, when I was in my 20’s. My parents were both natural optimists and positive thinkers. As a result, I have never had many problems with anger or sadness, but I have had plenty of problems with other people who have them, because I never learned how to deal with them as a child.  I never experienced or had to deal with anyone who had a serious addiction as a child either.

I felt loved unconditionally by my mother, my father, my two sisters, and Sadie, the black maid who was a surrogate mother to me. I was self-critical and not particularly gifted.  I was not good at sports, got my feelings hurt easily, was emotionally reactive, and felt a lot of guilt.  I was lazy, an undisciplined student, and my inability to do math was a thorn in my side throughout my school years.  I did not fit in and didn’t know how to.  What was the worst part of all that was that I thought all that was somehow special or different.  I didn’t realize that everybody else was all these things, more or less, too.

Because I had everything I wanted that money could buy, it was clear to me that making money or having financial security was not a solution; I was going to have to figure out who I was. I was intellectually curious and did a lot of reading about history and animals.  The Bible stories in the Presbyterian Sunday school that I attended probably scripted me to be interested in dreams like my namesake, Joseph, who interpreted dreams for Pharaoh.  God was loving and Jesus was a loving parent figure.

In retrospect, because I wanted to be liked, I tried too hard to be nice and came across as superficial and phony.  Because I was afraid of failure, I didn’t take many risks.  I didn’t ask many questions in class, I didn’t challenge my peers, I didn’t go out for sports.  I kept my head down.  It was probably the biggest mistake in my life.  If I had it to do over, I would be a big risk taker, fail a lot more, learn from my mistakes, and try again.  Also, I would know that it takes hard work to be good at anything and be much more determined and persistent.

Basically, my childhood world view was that if something went wrong it was probably something I did or said.  Carl Jung would call this being introverted; I would later learn that it is also called having an “internal locus of control.” The advantage of this perspective is that you take responsibility for what happens to you.  The disadvantage is that you take responsibility for far too much – you personalize things that people do or say or that happen in the world that have nothing to do with you.  I now view that perspective – taking responsibility for everything – as narcissistic and grandiose.

The three world views or perspectives that sequentially transformed this childhood world view were those of the Edgar Cayce readings, Nagarjuna’s Buddhist Mahayana Madhyamika, and that provided by a consensus of my own self-aspects, made available through an interviewing protocol I developed, first called Dream Yoga and then Integral Deep Listening.  To that I would add a couple of major influences, my encounter with Transactional Analysis and the integral approach of Ken Wilber.

My world view was overturned for the first time when I was thirteen, in 1963 when I was immersed in the world view of the Edgar Cayce readings for five weeks while on a trip to the Middle East with Hugh Lynn Cayce, the son of Edgar Cayce, and about forty-five New Age intellectuals, most of whom were professionals, like Ida Rolf, the founder of Rolfing, and Bill and Gladys McGarey, founders of the ARE Medical Clinic in Phoenix Arizona and the American Holistic Medical Association. I had the enormous good fortune of having a mother and father who were open to all things metaphysical, largely because my father’s mother was a fan of Unity and had a large metaphysical library.  I grew up with them having prayer/Ouija board sessions weekly in our living room.  There was a belief in life after death and the ability to contact deceased people. I don’t remember metaphysical ideas being discussed; it’s just that I grew up in a culture that was open to such things.  I had no idea what an extraordinary gift that was at the time.

My trip with my parents and the ARE group to the Middle East for five weeks when I was thirteen, combined with much reading of books about Cayce’s trance readings, and the attendance of many ARE workshops in Virginia Beach, Virginia, Texas, and Kansas City, Missouri, taught me that from the perspective of spirit, there is no death.  Your present circumstances are largely conditioned by choices made in past lives. While one can learn a lot about themselves by studying who they have been, both in your formative years and in past lives, I learned from the readings and Hugh Lynn the focus needs to be on who you are now and where you want to go.  The Cayce material taught me that the healer is within, that there is an inner, divine intelligence that heals and guides us. It also taught me that the universe is a loving, supportive place and that my destiny, as that of all people, is to become one with the divine.  It also taught me that the purpose of life is to be of service to others.  Regarding dreams, it taught me that a very important source of life guidance lies within and that because dreams deal with repetitive patterns, they are predictive, and that this predictiveness can be and sometimes is precognitive.  Regarding meditation, it taught me the importance of a daily practice and a devotional, “I-Thou” approach to transcending my thoughts with a loving, prayerful heart.

After absorbing these concepts throughout my adolescence I could never go back to a sectarian conception of God or the idea of a personal savior.  I was a believer in precognition, medical clairvoyance, astral travel, and the ability of the mind to create reality.  I never, however, gave up the idea of the physical resurrection of Jesus.  I still believe that the most likely explanation for the physical evidence of the Shroud of Turin is that it was Jesus’ burial shroud and that the image on the linen was created by the dematerialization of his body.  I view Jesus as a great pathmaker for humanity who was the victim of the limited world view in which he lived and whose life and values were grossly misunderstood and distorted by Paul, with the result that what we call Christianity bears little resemblance to the reality of the actual life of an amazing Jewish mystic of the 1st Century.

The consequence of my immersion in the Cayce world view during my adolescence was that I did not have much in common with my peers.  I wasn’t comfortable around most of them and the friends I had liked me as a person but didn’t understand who I was.  When they did start to perceive the genuine differences, they faded away, because our lives were based on different assumptions.  I did not have a group of like-minded thinkers around me in the years from 1963 to 1969, with the exception of my family and friends I made at ARE conferences and camp.  This was a lonely time for me, but I was filled with the conviction that I was on the right track, because I had felt so validated by the many smart and successful professionals I had met through the ARE.  My adoption of this world view was not the result of rebellion against anything or a forced emersion; it was a slow, self-initiated immersion in an entirely different mental-emotional culture, based on very different premises.

The second upheaval I experienced occurred when I was nineteen during my sophomore and junior years in college at SMU in Dallas, Texas, in 1969-70. In my studies of comparative religion I encountered the world views of Hinduism and Buddhism, and in particular the world view of the great Mahayana Buddhist mystic and Philosopher of India in the 3rd century AD, Nagarjuna.  What I learned about Hinduism put the world view of the Cayce readings in a broader perspective for me.  I now saw it as a form of Christian Vedanta with a large hunk of Blavatsky and subsequent related occult schools thrown in: a belief system that made sense once you bought into its basic assumptions.  Advaita Vedanta is the metaphysical position developed by the Indian philosopher and mystic Sankara who taught the unity of Atman (the eternal soul) and Brahman (God).

I still had no doubt that Cayce was an extraordinary medical clairvoyant and that the loving heart of the readings raised the level of awakening of just about anyone that came in contact with any part of them.  However, I was not a believer and saw many parts of the readings that were conditioned by the assumptions made by the world view of the readings, which I saw did not transcend and include that of the Buddhist world view, which I found remarkable and subtle.  I did not become a Buddhist, but I did subscribe to a number of basic Buddhist teachings. I agreed that everything was impermanent.  I agreed that everything was interdependent in its existence and that therefore there were no individually existing beings, only things that appear to be so, but which, on closer examination, are not.  This included the concepts of soul and God.  I agreed with the Buddhist teaching that what we call soul or self is comprised of five categories of experience: form or matter, sensation or feeling, perception or cognition, volition or intention, and consciousness itself.  These are all interdependent, and when they dissipate, there is no more self-sense.   Many Buddhists fudge on this, saying that consciousness is not a skandha but something bigger and permanent. They basically equate it with an eternal soul or the Hindu Atman, but this is not the position of the  Buddha nor is it an accurate understanding of the teaching itself.  It has not been mine.    I accepted the ideas that there is no permanent, absolute, or real anything including an eternal soul or a permanent, unchanging God.  I accepted these ideas because they made sense, and I didn’t want to base my life on a belief system that was irrational.  I knew that if I was ever going to get to a belief system or life perspective that was trans-rational, it would have to be built on beliefs that were rational.  The direct experience of sunyata, or emptiness, was very important for me.  The idea of the interdependence of all things seemed to me to be much more satisfactory than the idea of a dying-resurrecting savior god.

From Nagarjuna I learned how to silence my thoughts with his four-fold negation.  The result, when put into practice, were states of mental clarity I had never experienced before.  Here is how the four-fold negation works.

Ask yourself, now, the following questions:

“Am I my body?”

The answer is, “No.  I can observe my body, so I am not just my body. I am also my feelings and my thoughts.”

Am I not my body?

The answer is, “No, my body is an undeniable part of who I am right now.”

Am I both my body and not my body?

The answer is, “No.  I cannot be both my body and not be my body at the same time.” (Because there cannot be both something and not that same thing at the same time.)

Am I neither my body nor the absence of my body?
The answer is, “No.  I cannot be neither something nor its opposite.” (Because there cannot be neither something nor its opposite at the same time.)

You can do this for your feelings, your thoughts, and for any concept, such as causation, as Nagarjuna did.  If you do so, you will thoroughly, completely demolish any rational reason to believe anything, to feel anything, or to do anything. The result is a shifting of your brain into neutral.  You aren’t A.  You aren’t the absence of A.  You aren’t both A and its absence. You aren’t neither A nor its absence.  A doesn’t exist; neither does non-A.  Both A and non-A do not exist and neither do A nor non-A.

Now why in the world would anyone ever want to do such a thing?  It’s because it undercuts belief in Magic Pony Dust – the dust you put on your Magic Pony to make it fly.  It kicks the baby bird out of its nest, causing it to learn that it can fly.  Anything that can’t get through Nagarjuna’s middle way, through the eye of this needle, isn’t real and won’t last.  If you base your life on things that you think are real and permanent but are not (think relationships, financial security, and health), you will experience pain and suffering when they someday vanish.  I saw this very, very clearly, because I had an amazing, astounding teacher.  I would have to say that not only do most people not grasp this concept, they don’t want to and have no interest in doing so.

If you practice this four-fold negation with whatever comes up during your meditation, your mind shifts into neutral, what Nagarjuna called sunyata, or “emptiness,” which is a state without own being and of complete interdependence.  I practiced doing this in my university years and it revolutionized my experience of the world.

Because my network of friends from the ARE were either not familiar with the Buddhist world view or were basically new age Vedantists of one stripe or another, I drifted away from the ARE.  My basic assumptions about life were now different, although we still shared a core of the belief that the universe is loving and supportive and that our destiny is to become one with it.

All of this caused me to live in the world of ideas and mystical experiences, a world most people dismissed as impractical if they had either the time or inclination to consider it at all, which few had.  I had studied philosophy, psychology, and comparative religion in college, rather than pursue some practical course of study, because I was very clear that I needed to understand the world views of the wisest people who had ever lived if I wanted a firm foundation for whatever else I did with my life.  To me this was very practical; from the point of view of making money in the world, it was not.  I did not experience myself as an intellectual, although I know now I very much was.  I was not much of a conversationalist – I did not talk much about these concepts with others, nor did I seek out others to discuss or debate these ideas with.  I lacked confidence in myself and in my ability to express these ideas clearly to others.  For the most part, this was a dialogue between myself, books, and teachers, except when I actually taught them in seminars, or classes.

However, neither Cayce nor Nagarjuna gave me confidence or got me past introversion, self-criticism, self-doubt, and guilt.  In retrospect, it is fair to say that a lot of my introspection was out of fear of going out; I could be safe and feel secure working in these inner dimensions; outside it was a wild and scary world with a lot of rejection and failure that I didn’t know how to deal with. Also it fed a lot of narcissistic specialness; I could feel I was special, unique, even “better,” because I knew all this shit others didn’t.  Now it’s amusing to me to look at how narcissistically self-absorbed I was.  I still had a lot of that profile into my early and mid-twenties.

Immersion in the world view of Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis in my mid-twenties that slowly leveraged me out of the majority of my self-criticism, guilt, personalization, and self-absorption.  It did this by my adaptation of its choice-based approach to health and growth: that you get to choose what you feel, what you think, and who you think you are, but in order to do that you have to make different decisions than the ones that you have been unconsciously saddled with from your youth in the form of your scripting.  I found this approach liberating, and in my subsequent years as a therapist, I used it a lot to help people.  I was never much of a hand-holder.  I was more of a short-term therapist, encouraging people to look at the choices that they had made and helping them to make healthier ones. This is not a particularly warm and fuzzy approach, and I could have made a lot more money as a therapist over the years if I had adopted another approach, such as one of Rogerian unconditional positive regard.

Part of the problem was that I was a natural believer in clear thinking.  I thought that feelings were basically untrustworthy, that I could get someone to like me but that didn’t mean I was good for them.  I wanted people to like me because I listened to them and made sense, not because I made them feel good.  In fact, by this time in my life, I saw that I was often of more use to people if I made them feel bad for the right reasons than if I made them feel good for wrong or temporary, or superficial reasons.  Still, I have never considered myself as a cold, mental person.  I think I come across as a warm, caring person, and I think that’s basically the sort of person that I am.

My third transformative world view began when I was thirty-one.  It could not have happened if I had not been by nature an eclectic thinker that had explored so many different approaches to philosophy, religion, and psychology.  I had taken training in Gestalt and found it too directive, as I had hypnotherapy.  I was very wary of the need of others to give their power away to parent figures and how seductive and corrupting that power was for those authorities themselves.  A psychic had once told me a story – I don’t know if I can give it any more credence than that – that both identified and then attempted to explain the origins of this tendency within me.  He said that I had been a fire-and-brimstone preacher in early America but had come across an early translation of Hindu scriptures and had been so taken by the concept of reincarnation that I started preaching it from the pulpit.  The result was that I was tarred and feathered and carried out of town on a rail – tied to a piece of wood.  The idea was that this experience had so smashed my grandiosity that I was compensating for it this time around, swinging far to the other extreme of not wanting to be an authority to anyone about anything.  This worldview development resolved that problem for me.

When one of my graduate school teachers exposed me to the psychodrama of JL Moreno in 1978-9, I was not so impressed or interested, although I took trainings and learned the method.  I also learned a lesser known methodology designed by Moreno, Sociometry.  In it, individuals in a class or a group are asked to list their preferences regarding some task: “Who would you most like to study math with?” I decided I could apply this approach to dreams by listing and becoming different dream characters and imagining what my preferences were within a dream as this or that specific character.  So I would become clouds, spit, dogs, chewing gum, tables, monsters – whatever showed up.

The results astounded me.  I had worked with dreams for years.  I knew the research and various approaches.  I had taught dreamwork for years.  I had never come across anything like what I was experiencing.  What amazed me was how autonomous these various self aspects were.  They had no problem disagreeing with me and could defend their views, which I found to be generally as legitimate, and often more legitimate, than my own.  At the same time, there was no personality fragmentation going on.  On the contrary, the more I became these self-aspects, the more I seemed to become them and they became parts of a larger me.

I experimented with this approach for several years before gradually using it with my clients.  I found it made a major change in my self-acceptance.  Most of these self-aspects accepted me a lot more than I did.  What was I to make of that?  Slowly I grew in self-acceptance as I continued the process.  This approach was not suitable for all clients or all issues, but there were some for whom it made a huge difference.  I found that it was very effective at reducing anxiety and phobias in particular.

This was by far the most profound of the changes in world view that I experienced in my life.  What I found were parts of myself that have qualities that I lack, the confidence, compassion, wisdom, acceptance, inner peace, and ability to witness that I want and need to heal, balance, and transform my life.   In addition, I found parts of myself that are awake, alive, balanced, detached, free, and clear in ways that I am not. I became many parts of myself that do not do drama and know how to avoid getting caught up in it. They also often represent perspectives or world views that I have not yet grown into.  By listening to them I defuse interior conflicts that cause disease and suffering while supporting the birth and growth of my greater potentials.   Meditation is high-octane fuel for these self-aspects and when both integral deep listening and meditation are combined, growth is speeded up in a profound, natural way.

It remains to be seen if the dream of my life will be fulfilled or not: to empower many others, particularly children, by teaching them how to find and listen to their own inner compass, and to follow it.  Whether I succeed at this or not, I know that this is the destiny of mankind, and I feel fortunate to have found it for myself and to be able to share it with others.

I try on other world views regularly, every time I do an interview of a dream character or a life issue of my own, or with someone else.  There is no one right or best world view.  If there was, the world would be a stagnant place.  Wisdom and compassion involve the ability to see, shift into, and use the appropriate world view for the particular task or situation.  This is not the same as shifting into this or that role; it is about shifting into the world view that any particular role embodies, and staying away from those that do not support an internal consensus of your developmental path.

My world view at the age of sixty is about incorporating the qualities mentioned above into my everyday experience.  It is about living an integral lifestyle that balances body, mind, and spirit.  It is about smiling at the drama of my thoughts and emotions.  It is about appreciating the amazing abundance of life.  It is about working hard to get out of my own way so I can hear others more clearly and be more alive in the present moment.  I see worries about other people, money, and sex as not only a waste of time, but pretty funny, with the joke on ourselves.  None of it matters.  No one else cares. The universe doesn’t give a shit.  The challenge is to get over yourself and enjoy today so you can be something other people need.

My continued growth with my world views is now conditioned by the AQAL model of Ken Wilber.  In the mid-1980’s I discovered the writings of Ken Wilber, which I immediately saw were exceptional. I read everything I could find by him at least twice.  I would not say Wilber’s model changed my world view as much as it provided me with a model by which to determine the relative value of world views.  Is a world view balanced?  How inclusive is it?  How transformative is it likely to be?  Consequently, I have attempted to evaluate my own evolving world view, those of others, and those of the self-aspects that I interview in terms of Wilber’s AQAL model.  Here are the basic concepts from Wilber’s writings that have been most important to me.

A world view needs to be integral. “Integral” refers to addressing body, mind, spirit, and interpersonal life domains. More specifically, it addresses prepersonal, personal, and transpersonal stages of development, various states of being, including waking, sleeping, and dreaming, different levels of development in areas like thinking, empathy, communication and artistic abilities, and the four quadrants of every situation: interior individual thoughts and feelings that create our consciousness, interior collective values and interpretations that create our culture, external individual behaviors that create our persona or outer personality and life, and our external collective interactions that create our social relationships.

A world view needs to avoid the pre-trans fallacy. “Pre” refers to prepersonal levels of development that are pre-rational, irrational, faith-based, belief based, and generally the product of environmental and cultural scripting.  All animals and children are at prepersonal levels of development. Our adult beliefs are generally from this level.  “Trans” refers to transpersonal levels of development that are trans-rational or arational, and are based on, but transcend and include, clear thinking, logic, objectivity, and rationality, and are empirically repeatable.  Any belief that is based on rationality is at least personal and may be transpersonal. Any belief that is not rational, that is, not based on clear thinking, logic, objectivity, rationality, and is empirically repeatable is prepersonal.  So astrology, tarot, psychic statements that cannot be verified, religious beliefs in the virgin birth, the trinity, the previous incarnations of Buddha, the vision quests of shamans, etc. are prepersonal.  Homeopathy is prepersonal, as are beliefs in nationalism, capitalism, and most economics.  Some things like astrology and economics masquerade as personal and rational by using rational methods, but are based on self-validating systems of belief.

A world view needs to differentiate between states and stages. Just because you experience a state does not mean you are at a particular stage of development.  Just because you remember past lives, have lucid or precognitive dreams, or practice meditation does not mean you are at a transpersonal level of development.  Children and criminals can do these things.

Understanding the AQAL model does not mean that you are transpersonal anything. You can teach the AQAL model to smart children and most adolescents. While they will be most fortunate to learn it, all they have is a heuristic tool by which to understand their experience at the level of development that they are at.  It is a conceptual model that does not equate to any particular level of development.

All four quadrants need to be considered and balanced in any healthy world view. Most people have biases.  They think they are more highly evolved than they are. They reduce higher stages to their level or lower because they cannot conceive of higher stages because they haven’t experienced them, regardless of what states they have experienced.

Don’t jump to conclusions about your level of development or that of another person. Just because a person is highly developed in one line (say empathy) does not mean that they are developed in other lines or at any particular stage of development.

Contexts determine enlightenment. Culture matters.  The broader and more inclusive your cultural context, the greater the possibility of an expansive enlightenment.

If you don’t have a genuine integral life practice, you’re not in the game. An integral life practice is about moving all the world view conceptualization stuff into the real world.  It’s about putting up so you don’t have to shut up.  It’s about balanced development.  It’s about demonstrating that you have more than intellectual discipline.  Read descriptions here.

Dream Yoga/IDL is not based on Wilber’s writings or the integral AQAL model.  It’s based on the sociometric methods of JL Moreno, as mentioned above. However, Wilber’s model is the best around today that explains what it means to wake up in a developmental sense.

You can support and encourage the expansion and transformation of your world view by interviewing your self aspects, many of which have world views that transcend and include your own.  If you do, over time, you will evolve into a world view that is uniquely yours and uniquely appropriate for who you are in the world and what you have to give to the world.