6

What’s Wrong with Where We Are?

Are We Running out of Time?

When I began developing SCM and the 9 Summits of Transformation I wanted to focus entirely on our compelling future – not the complex problems threatening our survival. A primary tenet of SCM and the 9 Summits is the perspective that problems always show up coupled to opportunities. Problems always provide us with opportunities to evolve. My inclination is to take a positive outlook on our future; after all, things have generally gotten better over the span of the five Epochs. I think we should be optimistic; however, this optimism for the future must become a catalyst for bold action and not become a form of denial. The perfect storm is brewing for global catastrophe...or for a beautiful new wave of human potential. Which path will we walk? That depends on what we do now.

It would be irresponsible not to bring to light some of the glaring issues facing us now and the urgency with which dramatic change has to come about. The current unbalanced and competing Life Altitudes of pre-modern, modern and postmodern consciousness (Epochs 3, 4 and 5) – along with the shadow elements deep in our unconscious minds, habituated by our lower brains – are producing many of the problems that could lead to our destruction. We all know the challenges: climate change, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, new infectious diseases, disappearing water supply, pollution, overpopulation, poverty, government gridlock, etc. The shadow elements of our minds coupled with the lower primitive survival-based human brain create destructive patterns of thought and behavior. As we now know, the lower primitive survival brain does not want to change.

If we don’t take bold action now, we may still survive. A small percentage of our species probably would live through any type of global catastrophe and start over. The question is, do we want to wait for catastrophe and hope for the best? Or can we quickly gather the wisdom to advance our brains and consciousness and change directions without crisis? Do you have a sense that the species may be in trouble? That we could be running out of time and that our way of living is unsustainable?

Do you feel it in your own life? Overwhelmed? Not sure why you are doing what you are doing? Not enough time? You may even feel deep down that the life you are living is unsustainable. The level of complexity in our world has exceeded our physiological as well as our current cognitive capacity and this overload further activates the lower stress brain. I have come to the unshakable conclusion that changes need to happen fast; I have been feeling it deeply. It seems as though we have all been in one massive case of denial.

Our world today is made up mostly of the latest three Life Altitudes to emerge in evolution, traditional (Epoch 3), modern (Epoch 4) and postmodern (Epoch 5). Not everyone has grown to Epoch 5 and that is OK. Healthy representations of all the lower Life Altitudes form building blocks for the higher Life Altitudes to rest on. Development is envelopment. However, most concerning at this point in history is that all three of these Life Altitudes currently have deep pathological elements in them.

Of particular concern is the dysfunction that appears to be growing within Epoch 5, as it is the leading edge that is called on to make the seismic shift. From one perspective that is how we would expect it to be as evolution follows pathology, chaos and the inability to navigate current life conditions. The problem is that we need to make the leap now, as the stakes of the game have never been this high; we need to help evolution across this chasm. SCM and the 9 Summits of Transformation are positioned to be part of the ushering in of the new world.

As mentioned earlier, the stages of development (Life Altitudes) are building blocks of the mind...you cannot skip them, just as molecules become cells and cells become organisms...you cannot skip the earlier altitudes of consciousness. Since the evolution of consciousness and culture – at least so far – is catalyzed by growing to the point where it sees and feels what’s ‘wrong’ with its current perspective. As a precursor to evolution, life conditions present themselves that cannot be solved from the current level of consciousness (Life Altitude). This mis-match between life conditions and the resources in consciousness available to navigate those life conditions can lead to a new emergence.

However evolution can be messy, and as the transcendence to a new level occurs there is a tendency to reject, not just the outmoded elements of the previous altitude, but to reject all of it, thus negating important building blocks of the emerging new Life Altitude. When cultures evolve they most always lose or reject something that needs recapturing. This transcend-and-reject pathology, now appears to have deeply imbedded itself in the leading edge Epoch 5 Life Altitude. This could spell much trouble for the potential leap into Epoch 6.

The pathologies now hijacking the gifts of our leading edge Epoch 5 occurred, because we transcended, yet didn’t always include. This led us to throw out many of the enduring truths and building blocks of Epoch 3 and 4. Many of us that now source our values and identity from the egalitarian nature of Epoch 5 went too far and started to see ‘equality’ to mean, ‘I get to do whatever I want to do and nobody can tell me not to’, which in reality is regression to the egocentric nature of Epoch 2. It was a quick sleight of hand that led our narcissism to masquerade as postmodern values. You can see it around you if you look closely. This is what happens when we rightfully dislike Epoch 3’s ethnocentrism and extreme dominating authoritarian tendency, but fail to see its good elements, of healthy responsibility and accountability: we allow the ugly outmoded elements of even earlier Life Altitudes to creep in.

We threw out the baby with that bathwater and jettisoned the structure and discipline and personal responsibility that are healthy features of Epoch 3. And what about Epoch 4? It is easy to see the materialistic achievement orientation of Epoch 4 as creating income inequality and environmental destruction (which are very real issues from the pathology of this altitude) and we then negate all forms of needed progress, success and evolutionary drive, and slip back to regressive, irrational narcissistic tendencies that are starting to dominate what should be our leading edge Epoch 5. This failure to integrate Epoch 3 and 4 leads to a lack of drive, a lack of critical thought, a lack of accountability and a lack of discipline.

Due to this repression we see within our higher Epoch 5 Life Altitude an overextension of rights and the underextension of responsibility. All hierarchy is despised, not understanding that there are healthy and unhealthy versions of hierarchy. Unhealthy versions dominate and repress people, healthy versions, such as a ‘holarchy’, which honors as it transcends, and includes what came before....like a molecule does with an atom and a cell does with a molecule. This is also how the Epochs should unfold. Our disdain for ALL hierarchy leaves us paralyzed in consensus. Unable to move past complexity and gridlock we allow apathy and nihilism to set into our lives. We must reclaim the enduring features of lower Life Altitudes and move into the radical new orientation of Epoch 6.

During our work in the upcoming 9 Summits we will reclaim the enduring truth and features of our previous worldviews so that we can then create the foundation for the next seismic shift in consciousness and culture to occur through us.

We now can either await the arrival of the next Epoch and run the risk of being too late, or we can, for the first time in the 13.8 billion-year history of the earth and 4.5 billion-year history of life, through a high degree of consciousness and intuition, participate and promote the very evolutionary process that created us!

The attitude that somehow our global problems will just work out because they always have, didn’t work for the Mayans, Babylonians, Romans or Khmer. These once-advanced thriving civilizations are all dust today. In fact, not only are most previous civilizations gone, 99.9% of all the species that have ever roamed the earth and sea are now extinct.

Shadow Elements and Lower Brain Loops

I mentioned above a pathological tendency to transcend and negate, instead of transcending and including the positive features of previous Epochs. The 9 Summits will help you reintegrate these enduring positive features to form a healthy foundation as you seek to grow beyond your current Life Altitude.

I now want to turn our attention to how specific negations or repressions during the course of a life-time become ‘shadow elements’ that hide out in our unconscious and wreak havoc on our lives, arresting our ability to healthily grow into higher Life Altitudes.

Below the conscious threshold these shadow elements influence our lives and cry out for acknowledgment in very damaging ways. The shadow produces symptoms in mind or body or spirit to get our attention, it cries out as it expresses itself through our negative behaviors, bad habits, addictions and avoidances. All this adverse energy expenditure is because something hiding inside of us is cut off from our higher potential. Through my decades of work in personal transformation I have come to see this shadow element as a huge problem, and one that has not been well understood or dealt with.

Psychologists have long known that alienation of parts of our psychological being frequently occurred during development. What are not as well-known are the biological/physiological elements of this fragmented self-alienation. Alienation and repression occur during development as an outcome of transcending one Life Altitude for the next, without integration of all appropriate aspects of the previous level.

In addition, the inability to consciously process and integrate certain key life events and experiences also lead to ‘shadow elements’. This happens when the lower brain attempts to process information or experiences that are beyond its rudimentary survival strategies and fear-based associated consciousness. The lower brain simply cannot adapt to information or experience that is incongruent with its limited repertoire of options.

Through the lower brain we do not have the neurological flexibility to deal with all of modern life’s demands, complexities and incongruences. Often what we are exposed to through a lifetime is not effectively dealt with and undigested experiences become imprinted by the amygdala and hippocampus (our lower mammalian brain) and habituated by the basal ganglia (our lizard brain). Later, as new life experience comes into your lower brain, as it unconsciously does, it is being colored or filtered by this stuck energy.

The repressed shadow energy stays below the surface and yet often seeks to express itself (but without higher brain awareness) in unconscious and unhealthy ways. The stuck energy of the shadow creates and plays out both psychological, as well as physiological dissonance. This dissonance from the repressed shadow energy is unsustainable and will express itself through symptoms. Our shadows require us to exert enormous amounts of energy that burn us out as we attempt to pursue healthy lifestyles and virtuous lives. The shadow often hijacks our best intentions and can halt our progress on the spiritual path.

SCM and the 9 Summits of Transformation create peak states in your brain, and consciousness that equips you to locate and resolve the shadow energy dynamics. The shadow’s resolution depends on your ability to generate awareness of it through higher brain/higher consciousness states where it, the shadow, can be floated into an empowered change-oriented state and the shadow energy used to fuel your growth and evolution as it is integrated!

Much has been written about the ‘shadow’ or repressed unconscious and I don’t want to belabor the point here. My main focus is on how those ‘shadow elements’ or un-metabolized repressions are in a loop with lower brain physiology, and how to change that dynamic and set us free. Integral Metatheory would insist on the acknowledgement of this relationship between the upper left dimension of mind/consciousness (even repressed consciousness) and its linkage to the upper right dimension of body/brain.

The ‘lower’ repressed unconscious shadow is in a continuous reinforcing feedback loop with lower brain physiology and until that loop is destabilized it is very challenging to integrate the repression. The 9 Summits provide a way to discover your shadow elements, destabilize the lower brain loop through SalutoGenic mechanisms, and bring the shadows into higher brain physiology where they can be metabolized, integrated and even used as fuel for growth.

EPOCH 5 and its ‘Cultural Creatives’ – Poised to Transform the World

At the beginning of the 21st century the sociologist Paul H. Ray and psychologist Sherry Ruth Anderson, identified a group of people that they coined ‘cultural creatives’. Today these cultural creatives are over 80 million strong in the USA and many times that number worldwide. If you are reading this book there is a strong probability that you are one of them and identify with the values and worldview of this group. The cultural creatives make up a large portion of what we are calling the 5th Epoch of consciousness and culture and are the likely candidates to make the leap up and create the next Epoch.

Who Are We?

According to Ray, Core Cultural Creatives have both person-centered and green values, are seriously concerned with psychology, self-actualization and self-expression, and like the foreign and exotic. They enjoy mastering new ideas and are socially concerned, advocate women’s issues and are strong advocates of ecological sustainability. Green Cultural Creatives have values centered on the environment and social concerns from a secular view, with average interest in spirituality, psychology or person-centered values.

In addition to having an eco-centric (ECOcentric, as in care for all sentient beings not EGOcentric) perspective and inclusive value system, if you are amongst this group (particularly the core cultural creatives) you are also likely either a practitioner of or recipient of alternative medicine, yoga, meditation, new thought or some type of self-help technique or non-denominational spiritual practice. And after years of pursuing these approaches I will bet that you are frustrated, because your life is not like you thought it would be. Something is still missing. Many victories have been won by the cultural creatives: equal rights, awareness to environmental issues, honoring of other cultures etc... But something else has happened...the movement has now gone flat. There is no consistent vehicle or effective leadership to carry this movement forward. How can we take the inclusive values of this group (our group) and provide the ‘activation energy’ needed to overcome our inertia? How can we fully align these beautiful values with the evolutionary impulse – the universal principle that has been called “spirit in action” – that drive to create and change and emerge in an upward vertical direction?

How can we simultaneously preserve equality, the environment and at the same time promote growth? How can we honor past traditions but never compromise our need to evolve and go beyond? Let us reach back down and pull up into our being the building blocks of earlier Life Altitudes and take a solid foundation forward as we emerge into the radical awakening of Epoch 6. I believe SCM and the 9 Summits of Transformation are a way forward.

I believe we can change, and I believe that ultimately what’s best for the world in the long run is also what’s best for us (our highest selves) as individuals in the short run. We need to align ourselves with our compelling future. That future is at least in part already available within your slumbering higher brain. The path to a new world need not be perilous and overwhelming, but instead can be rewarding and joy filled. It simply requires that we live from our greatest potential. There is a way.

The pursuit of our own self-actualization must be prioritized and to do so we must engage our higher brain and higher heart. This is how we find meaning. This pursuit of authentic joy by all of us at the leading edge can be the catalyst for widespread social change. Yes, global crisis is a real possibility but so is seismic positive global transformation. We must wake up now, find our essence and commit to a life of excellence. Doing our unique part and giving our special personal gifts creates a life on purpose. Enough lives lived from higher capacities – showing up on purpose – leads to new cultures and large-scale change.

SCM and the 9 Summits help us discover our essence, our Highest Self, as an evolving unitary being – and helps clarify what our purpose in this body, at this time on this planet, actually is. When we are in alignment with our highest potential (and the Higher Brain/Higher Heart is leading the way) we are fulfilled and live a Fearlessly Authentic and Enlightened Life. In this higher way of living and being, what’s best for the personal you, is in perfect alignment with what’s best for everyone else in the world.

In the next chapter we are going to get a feel for the contours of this newly emerging world view, a world view that is not yet fully articulated and not yet fully created. The creators of this next Epoch will be the cultural creatives who are ready to make the leap. Are you one of them? I believe if you have gotten this far into this book you are.

For this aim I am going to consider everything above Epoch 5 as Epoch 6. Many evolution of consciousness theorists consider what I am calling Life Altitudes 1 and 2 (or Epochs 1 and 2) to really be stratifications within one major epochal shift. Likewise, many consider what we are calling Epochs 4 and 5 to be one major epochal shift and that postmodernity is simply the upper reaches of the modern Epoch. I believe when we are considering what is still an emerging world view or world views we need not create too many demarcations or we run the risk of losing potency in the dissection. So I am going to handle Epoch 6 in the same way that many evolution of consciousness theorists refer to Epochs 4 and 5, as one seismic shift.

Truth be told we could probably create sub-stratas and further divide all of our previous epochal shifts but that would minimize the point of stepping back, taking the view from 50,000 feet and seeing where the large seismic shifts in consciousness and culture occurred, and rest assured, there have been times of large seismic shifts in consciousness and culture. The coming Epoch 6 appears to be a seismic shift that is greater than the sum of all previous Epochs combined. I am not going to make an attempt at articulating an Epoch 7 but I will subdivide Epoch 6 into a phase one and phase two that I will call ‘emergence’ and ‘ascension’.

I want to consider both phases as Epoch 6 because my intuition is once we emerge into the new atmosphere of Epoch 6 a sort of scaffolding in consciousness is created that allows for our very rapid ascent and the way we see future Epochs changes radically.