Integral Theory: The Farther Reaches Of Human Nature
My Heartbreak and Spiritual Awakening
It all started with a heartbreak.
My confidence shattered. My self-esteem crumbled. My sense of worthiness plummeted to an all-time low.
Having already been fairly depressed prior to the event, I entered into the darkest time of my life at the age of 16.
Throughout the next year, I spent many of my days feeling like I wanted to pop out of existence, to simply vanish.
At times, I did not care whether I continued living or not.
At the worst of my depression, I researched methods on how to unalive myself, although I was not taking the idea of doing so very seriously.
Much of the time, I wanted to leave everyone and everything I knew behind, to set off on some grand adventure, with no agenda or destination in mind, with no technology or anything binding me to my familiar world, similar to how Chris McCandless in Into the Wild left his entire life behind, without saying a word to anyone he knew.
While I was not aware of this at the time, what I really desired in these moments was transcendence.
Transcendence of the stories, narratives, and habitual thought patterns that were keeping me shackled to feeling like I was an incapable, unworthy, inadequate person.
Transcendence of the crushing weight of existing within the confines of ego, within the illusory self that had been constructed through years of social and cultural conditioning, that had kept me separate, disconnected, and cut off from my true nature.
My desire to unalive myself, to vanish, or to set off on some grand adventure without telling anyone was never about wanting to physically die or to geographically escape.
At the core of it, I was yearning for freedom, for Love, for God, my true nature, which is something that can only be found beyond the confines of ego, beyond the constructed boundaries of self and other.
What I didn’t yet understand was that the very pain driving me towards self-annihilation was also the doorway to the sacred.
The heartbreak had cracked open my ordinary state of consciousness, revealing a greater degree of wholeness beneath.
After the worst of the suffering had passed, I found my mind to be more open to new perspectives, along with an intense inspiration to alleviate the suffering of others, which was quite different from the more rigid, ego-centric orientation towards life that I held to in the past.
About a year after the heartbreak, I probably would have described myself as agnostic, as opposed to the staunch atheism I had adhered to in the past.
I developed a deeper interest in psychology, philosophy, and politics, and eventually started to intake more spiritual perspectives relating to Buddhism, meditation, astral projection, and psychedelics.
And then, approximately 3 years after the breakup, I had a powerful spiritual awakening that changed everything.
Having been heavily intaking Buddhist perspectives at the time, I initially interpreted my experience as an enlightenment/nirvana.
The boundary between self and other dissolved, revealing my eternal, infinite nature. I saw myself as everything that ever was, is, and will be.
I saw reality as a beautiful, perfect creation.
I felt interconnected to the entire human family, planet, and universe, seeing it all as one, singular, unified being.
There was a deep knowing that all of the suffering I had experienced in my life, and especially the heartbreak, had led me to this sweet moment of reconnection with Myself.
In this, there was also the knowing that all of the world’s suffering was leading towards something, that through the war, the slavery, the genocide, the political polarization and the immense wealth inequality, the collective human heart was being cracked open, and that we are (very) slowly yet surely, becoming a more loving, conscious, and wise species.
Several of these transpersonal experiences took place over the course of 4-5 months at the age of 18 and 19, profoundly reorienting the direction of my life, revealing to me my life purpose, which put simply, is to love.
Even though these experiences were beautiful, heart-opening, and soul-nourishing, they also were extremely difficult to integrate, and brought forth intense periods of inner turmoil, unstable energy, self-doubt, and loneliness.
It is important to note that these transpersonal experiences I had gone through were only states of consciousness, it was not something I continually experienced as my everyday, baseline mode of consciousness.
And so, there were times where I felt at one with everyone and everything, where I viscerally felt my interconnectedness to all of life, yet there were other times where I fell back into the shackles of my ego, feeling depressed and isolated from the world.
Due to the instability of the energy, a worried part of me thought I was psychotic, while a deeper, more intuitive part of me knew that my realizations had brought forth, and was continuing to bring forth, more peace and harmony into my own life, and greater Love into the world.
And so, due to me being a highly cognitively-oriented person, I needed something more concrete to help me understand my experiences.
In addition to teachers and mentors that would help me along the path, I also needed research and frameworks to make sense of it all.
And then it happened.
I watched Leo Gura’s several hour long series on Spiral Dynamics Integral Theory, which led me to reading the book Spiral Dynamics, which led to me discovering Dr. Susanne Cook-Greuter’s The 9 Stages of Ego Development, and eventually Ken Wilber’s various books on Integral Theory.
These Integral frameworks are essentially syntheses of most all the human developmental psychological research that has been conducted throughout the field’s history, and in reading them, a key insight was revealed to me that put my experiences into an entirely new context.
A key insight of these integral theories is that human maturation unfolds towards ego-transcendence.
What this means is that human development naturally moves towards increasingly complex, expansive, and free ways of being where we transcend the ego’s limited view of self and reality while still retaining it’s healthy functions, allowing for greater peace, harmony, wisdom, love, and joy to elicit within us and express itself throughout the world.
In this, the ego does not simply disappear, but rather is transcended from being the center of our experience and identity, for consciousness comes to inhabit a far more open, free, and expansive awareness of reality.
The Farther Reaches of Human Nature
Again, in me being a very cognitively-oriented person, I needed these frameworks to help me make sense of what I was going through, and help me more clearly orient towards where I was going.
Other people who are not as cognitively-oriented may be able to navigate the choppy waters of spiritual awakening without the aid of conceptual frameworks. But for me, without clear sensemaking maps, I can feel quite lost.
Through grasping these truths about human development, I came to understand my transpersonal experiences as giving me glimpses into the farther reaches of human nature, providing intuitions about the direction that human consciousness is evolving in, towards one that transcends the separate self-sense, allowing for a more open, flexible, loving, interconnected way of being to come forth, as opposed to the rigid, defensive, territorial, egoic structures that have defined humanity throughout our species’ history.
One of the key points that Integral Theory makes is that all human worldviews, value systems, and belief structures evolve in an increasingly expansive direction from ego-centric to community-centric to nation-centric to world-centric, and eventually to what Ken Wilber describes as “Kosmo-centric”, where one’s circle of concern expands beyond the planetary scale to embrace the entire cosmos, in which one comes to identify with the vast, infinite, creative intelligence that permeates all of reality.
In looking at some of the main models of human development, you can see how they all point towards this very expansion of consciousness:
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs culminates in the “Self-Transcendence” tier
Don Beck’s Spiral Dynamics culminates at “Stage Turquoise”, where individuals experience a more expansive, holistic, interconnected reality.
Robert Kegan’s Constructive Developmental Theory points towards the “self-transforming” mind, where one sees through the egoically constructed nature of self
Dr. Susanne Cook-Greuter’s The 9 Stages of Ego Development culminates in the “Unitive” stage, where the ego is no longer experienced at the focal point of one’s experience of reality.
Do you see the underlying similarities?
It is an intrinsic feature of human consciousness that development unfolds towards ego-transcendence.
If you’ve had a glimpse of the transcendent through, say, a deep state of meditation, or a psychedelic experience, or even a soul-touching moment when you witness a beautiful vista in nature or when you see thousands of stars dazzling in a clear night sky, or in a moment of blissful love-making with your partner, you are experiencing firsthand what the mystics, sages, and now developmental researchers are pointing towards.
In these moments, the usual boundaries of self begin to dissolve, and you taste something vast and ineffable – a direct experience of your interconnectedness and oneness with existence.
What makes these developmental theories so helpful is that they help us recognize that these states are not merely anomalies, accidents, or random happenings.
In actuality, these experiences point towards the farther reaches of human nature, providing a sort of preview for consciousness at the highest stages of human development.
And so, recognize that the impulse towards transcendence is not merely a personality quirk that only a select few have, it’s actually woven into the very fabric of human nature, and in each and every moment, whether we realize it or not, our soul is yearning for wholeness, for freedom, for transcendence.
On an individual level, consider that the musical festival attendee who dances until dawn, could really just be seeking that moment when their individual identity dissolves into the collective experience of the crowd and the music.
Consider that the workaholic who keeps striving for the next achievement, could unconsciously be hoping that each new achievement will finally bring the sense of completeness and wholeness their soul is yearning for.
Consider that the hopeless romantic who is looking for the “one” to complete them, could really just be seeking a taste of union and ego dissolution through romantic love.
On a collective level, if you’ve taken a decent glean into human history, you can see that the entire story of the human species is basically one of seeking, struggling, fighting, and yearning for freedom against the forces that keep consciousness limited, confined, and suppressed.
Think:
Slaves rising up against their masters
Women fighting for equal rights
Colonized people fighting off imperialist forces, demanding freedom
Workers organizing against their exploitation
Time and time again, the story has always been a move towards greater liberation, freedom, wholeness, Truth, and Love.
The people who we call heroes, such as Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, MLK, Mother Teresa, Joan of Arc, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, and many, many others are each considered heroes because they embodied and fought for this fundamental human yearning for liberation and transcendence.
On the other hand, the people who are deemed evil and villainous by history, such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Leopold ll, Pol Pot, Heinrich Himmler, and Benito Mussolini, are remembered in this way because they represented the forces of contraction, suppression, fragmentation, and division that limits human consciousness.
Each of these figures sought to confine human consciousness within rigid ideologies, to fragment our inherent interconnectedness through hatred and division, and to crush the human soul’s natural yearning for expansion and liberation.
And so, it should be clear that what is good, true, and beautiful to a human is something that is aligned with the arc of evolution, something that unites and connects us, something that liberates us into greater freedom, and something that ultimately reminds us of Who We Truly Are.
Bringing The Transpersonal Into My Life
Now, to relate this back to my own personal story, it was through learning these frameworks, and seeing its connection to the history of humanity that I was able to recontextualize my experiences.
I no longer saw these transcendent experiences as random happenings.
I no longer saw them as just another state of consciousness, or just an experience that occurs “in the brain”, or just something that happens when you ingest certain substances.
I came to see these transcendent experiences as something profoundly sacred, for within the experiences there was an inner knowing of accessing something powerfully deep, true, and beautiful, something that felt more real than real, as there was this sense of: This is it! This is it! This is what it’s all about! This is Truth.
These experiences put me in touch with something that was beyond the boundaries of who I believed I was, into a place far more expansive, into a place beyond space and time altogether.
And through learning these frameworks, I was finally able to grasp, in a conceptual manner, what these experiences were really pointing towards.
And ooh, I needed that.
In the several years since these initial experiences ensued, my life has undergone a profound reorientation.
I went from a disgruntled young adult who was deeply disillusioned with the world and withheld love from himself, to someone far more accepting of himself and the way things are, who more deeply understood his place in the grand web of creation, and who had discovered the purpose of his life: to love, to unite, to remember the truth of our interconnected nature, and to help others remember too. To align with the self-transcending drive of the cosmos, and to be a vessel through which Love flows into the world.
As this played out, I noticed my values changing, and intuition sharpening.
I started caring significantly less about external markers of success such as achievements, money, and status, and my inner compass shifted towards a resonance with what felt most real and authentic.
I naturally desired to be alone more, as the dynamic present within many of my relationships did not feel as aligned with my newfound sense of self.
I became more energetically open and empathic, more attuned to the subtle currents of energy present within myself and others, feeling like I could read people on a level I could never access previously.
Above all, I felt a profound sense of duty to the cosmos, to fulfill my role in the grand tapestry of creation, to inhabit my niche within the larger fabric of life by finding and fully giving my gifts to the world.
During the time of the initial experiences, I became more creatively inspired, as I began making videos about my experiences and learnings on my first YouTube channel “The Curious Minds”, amassing a significant following along the way.
My feelings of being called to uplift and inspire others in life, along with my desire to help others navigate the murky waters of spiritual growth and self-actualization, led me to obtaining a degree in psychology, and later an accreditation in life coaching, where I began to work with clients 1-to-1.
While this was a beautiful unfolding in my life, I do not intend to paint the process as all roses and daisies.
It has been far from that.
As I mentioned earlier, these transcendent experiences were just states of consciousness, and states are always in flux.
I mentioned that there was a lot of self-doubt and questioning about my experiences that would ensue when I found myself in a state of consciousness that was consumed by ego, and had me feeling disconnected, lonely, and depressed.
These frameworks helped to alleviate a lot of this self-doubt, providing clarity to the bigger picture of how consciousness evolves.
But, there is another significant aspect to the picture that has been an enormous source of energy drain and immense suffering for me along this journey: the shadow.
You Can’t Meditate Your Shadow Away
In Integral terms, Ken Wilber articulates the growth process as having 3 different primary aspects:
Growing up
Waking up
Cleaning up
Growing up refers to development through the increasingly complex stages of consciousness and meaning-making.
This is the journey of coming to inhabit increasingly expansive perspectives and meaning-making paradigms, from ego-centric to ethnocentric to world-centric, to kosmo-centric, and so on, with each stage transcending and including the prior.
My previous video titled “Integral Theory: The 10 Stages of Consciousness Evolution” is essentially a summary of the stages of the growing up process.
Waking up refers to the realms of spiritual awakening, which is the coming to recognize our transcendent nature beyond the separate self-sense.
This is the path of direct inquiry into the nature of existence itself, and can include methods such as meditation, contemplation, psychedelic inquiry, and more.
And what people tend to neglect the most along the path of growth is cleaning up, which refers to the psychological work of integrating our repressed material and healing our inner wounds.
This process of cleaning up is commonly referred to as “shadow work.”
When I was having my initial transpersonal experiences, I was undergoing a process of waking up, but these experiences alone did not cause me to grow up or clean up.
In making sense of my experiences afterwards, I was initiated onto a deeper path of growing up, but for a while there was not much work being done on my end when it came to cleaning up.
And so, throughout the process of living life, trying to make sense of and embody my spiritual awakenings, figuring out how I wanted to live my life, figuring out what my gifts were and how to give them, I continued to be governed by swathes of unconscious repressed material that served as an enormous source of energy drain and suffering, which resulted in less than loving mental schemas and behavior towards myself and others.
In my case, this shadow led to validation seeking behavior, perfectionistic tendencies, self-isolation, lack of healthy boundaries, emotional repression, and other mechanisms that played a significant role in shaping my self-image, flavoring my relationships with others, and governing how I ran my business and related to my spiritual/growth journey.
It was not until I entered into another romantic relationship in my early 20’s that I was able to more deeply see and understand my shadow, as it played out in the relationship, causing disharmony.
And interestingly enough, it was not until that relationship ended, ushering in another profound sense of grief, loss, and ego death, that I was able to accept that my shadow had been a significant cause of the end of that relationship, which initiated me onto a deeper path of cleaning up.
I don’t intend to dive too deeply into the shadow here, I will do that in future posts (You can see my video titled The Spiritual Ego: How Spirituality Can Produce a Massive Ego Shadow to learn specifically about spiritual shadows that can develop), but the key insight to take away here is that a proper path of self-actualization and transcendence requires all three of growing up, waking up, and cleaning up.
If any of the three aspects are neglected, one’s entire development will be stunted, leading to various forms of imbalance.
For example, someone who has grown up and cleaned up, but has not woken up, could be someone who is highly successful in their professional life, is cognitively sophisticated, who may go to therapy and appear to have excellent emotional intelligence.
On paper, it may look like they have it all: wealth, status, healthy relationships, and emotional maturity.
But without the dimension of waking up, their consciousness remains locked to their ego, causing a number of subtle occurrences that can lead to an underlying sense of separation, incompleteness, and dissatisfaction with life.
They may experience:
a persistent feeling that something essential is missing, despite having “everything”
existential anxiety and fear of death that no amount of achievement can resolve
difficulty surrendering control and flowing with life’s uncertainties
a pervasive loneliness that stems from experiencing oneself as separate from existence
a materialistic worldview that keeps them disconnected from life’s deeper mystery and meaning
being trapped in the “doing” mode of existence, rather than “being.”
On the other hand, when you have someone who has woken up and grown up, but has not cleaned up, the individual may be an intelligent spiritual teacher or thought leader, who has had genuine awakenings and a sophisticated understanding of consciousness and reality.
But without the dimension of cleaning up, this individual will continue to act out their unintegrated wounds and traumas that cause suffering.
They may:
use spiritual or intellectual teachings to subtly dominate or control others
seek validation through their status or following
act out repressed sexuality or power drives in harmful ways
be unable to maintain healthy boundaries despite having a conceptual understanding of how to do so.
use spiritual or intellectual terminology to excuse harmful behavior or to bypass uncomfortable emotions
preach compassion while unconsciously acting on anger or judgment
Are you now seeing how growing up, waking up, and cleaning up are all crucial components to the process of full-spectrum growth?
In order to live a life that touches into the farther reaches of human nature, you need to make a conscious devotion to your own development that incorporates each of the three domains of growth.
You Must Make a Conscious Devotion To Your Own Development
The truth is, if you want to self-actualize and self-transcend, if you want to discover Truth and embody the transcendent in your life, you need to make a serious, conscious commitment to it.
The reason you need to be so devoted to the process is because we live in a society that does not value this stuff, so it can become easy to backslide, or become unconsciously consumed by the consciousness of culture, especially at the beginning of one’s journey.
Think of society/culture as the mother, and the people within as the fetuses.
Just as a fetus will naturally develop to the stage of a baby inside the mother’s womb, a human will develop to the stage of consciousness development within the larger womb of culture, simply through socialization and conditioning.
If you grew up in a more developed country, you will naturally be taken to an individualistic, modern, capitalistic, scientific, achievement-oriented consciousness (SDi Orange).
If you grew up in one of the most developed places in the world, such as California, the Netherlands, or Germany, there is a good chance you will be naturally taken to a more pluralistic, postmodern, multicultural consciousness that values diversity, equity, equality, environmental sustainability, etc (SDi Green).
Just as the fetus does not need to consciously try to develop into a baby, for it happens naturally through the nurturing environment of the womb, humans also do not need to consciously try to reach their culture’s center of gravity.
Within the mother womb of society, human growth happens by itself through education, media, social interactions, and cultural conditioning.
However, for developing beyond the mother culture, into the farther reaches of human nature and into the realms of the transcendent, a conscious devotion has to be made.
You cannot learn how to self-actualize and self-transcend simply by going to university, nor can you do so through any mainstream institution or methodology.
Back in my university days, I was talking to the department head of psychology, and she asked me what my favorite branch of psychology was.
I responded “transpersonal psychology”, and she told me she had never heard of it.
The DEPARTMENT HEAD was not even aware that the branch of psychology related to the spiritual and transcendent realms of reality even existed at all!
How unfortunate!
I love to tell this story to illustrate that academic institutions are, in many ways, behind the times.
The point here is that if you want to develop yourself into the farther reaches of human nature, you are going to have to forge your own path.
You will have to lead yourself there by following that calling of your heart, through doing deep inner work, cleaning up your shadow, attending retreats, and finding the niche resources, teachers, and books that will help you get there.
This will not always be an easy, blissful process (sometimes it will be).
You’ll be living a life that looks different from your friends and family.
Many people may view you as weird, wacky, unconventional, or perhaps even delusional.
Many people simply won’t understand you, and what you’re about.
What you value, the topics you’re interested in, the conversations that bring you joy will be something that you can only fully share with a very small number of people.
The ego will have a very difficult time with this, for the ego’s sole purpose is to survive and thrive.
And when you take a serious leap beyond your culture, you shake up the ego’s foundation, threatening it, for it worries that its familiar needs and wants will no longer be met.
And so, you will likely experience significant resistance towards going full-steam ahead into your soul’s calling.
You may think:
Maybe I’m just deluding myself
Maybe this spiritual stuff is just nonsense
Maybe I’m just wasting my time
Maybe I’m not cut out for this path
Maybe I should be more realistic about what I am capable of
This resistance will arise because the ego so desperately wants to cling towards what is familiar and being accepted socially.
Yet, on this path you will have to learn to let your soul guide you, rather than just your ego.
You will have to learn to sit with discomfort and uncertainty, to be able to rest in not-knowing, and have the courage to follow your heart’s deepest bliss even if the ego is resisting it.
A serious, conscious commitment to your Highest Self has to be made.
This is the greatest act of self-love you could ever give.
Practical Benefits of Awakening and Maturation
It just so happens that life gets SO MUCH BETTER if you stay true to yourself, and adhere to the path of growing up, waking up, and cleaning up.
You’ll find yourself having greater emotional resilience and a heightened ability to deal with life’s challenges.
You’ll find yourself living with greater self-love and acceptance, and as a result your inner critic will loosen its grip over your mind, reducing anxiety and neurotic thought patterns.
You’ll live with a tranquil sense of groundedness, an anchoring in the truth of who you are, and you’ll find yourself caring far less about the opinions that others hold of you.
You’ll develop greater self-care, and live with a more stable sense of well-being that is far less dependent on external outcomes.
You will find yourself with the ability to perceive things more clearly, for you have gained consciousness of the ways in which your ego previously clouded your perception, allowing for a more genuine way of relating to yourself and with the world.
As a result, your relationships will take on a more real and authentic flavor, as your deep connection with yourself naturally allows for deep connection with others. You will also likely find yourself spending far less energy in social dynamics that don’t light up your soul.
In this, you will find yourself with a greater capacity to embody unconditional love. In your ability to truly see and connect with another in a non-demanding way, you naturally create a safe space for others to be exactly as they are. Your love is no longer about what you can get, but about what you can give.
You will also find yourself with heightened access to your intuition, for you have cultivated a deeper, whole-body awareness of what does and does not feel aligned with the calling of your heart, allowing you to make high-quality life decisions that moves both yourself and others towards greater bliss, joy, Love, Truth, wholeness, and freedom.
You’ll be living with a deep sense of aligned meaning and purpose, that connects you with something beyond yourself, that makes you feel “at home” within the larger fabric of life.
You’ll find yourself embodying ever deepening levels of trust that everything is taken care of, that the natural current of life is leading everything to where it needs to go, and as a result, you’ll stop worrying so much, you’ll stop trying to excessively control and manipulate reality so much, and you will find yourself with the capacity to simply be.
And perhaps most important of all, you will come to know yourself as Who You Truly Are, something far more vast and beautiful than the limited ego-self you once took yourself to be.
All of this growth work will make you far more effective at finding and giving your gifts to the world in a way that nourishes life, rather than taking from it.
We are a species of over 8 billion members, and according to Integral Theory, less than 2% of humans are living fully within the transpersonal stages of development.
This has left the vast majority of the world operating from less mature forms of consciousness, which has created the precise problems we face today, in which our level of technological advancement has far outpaced our level of wisdom, where our level of global interconnection has far outpaced our level of universal compassion.
If we ever hope to move past the issues of war, genocide, environmental destruction, poverty, racism, sexism, classism, and so on, the world needs more people developing into and embodying the farther reaches of human nature.
To do this, you must make a conscious commitment to your own development.
If you do not make a conscious commitment, the ego’s fear of change and desire for comfort will keep you confined to familiar, limiting patterns that keep you trapped within the same cycles of reactivity, the same unfulfilling relationships, the same unconscious thought patterns and behaviors that create suffering for yourself and for others.
In this, your deeper potentials will remain dormant, like seeds that never receive the water and sunlight necessary to actually grow.
Those glimpses of greater freedom and wholeness will remain just that – glimpses, rather than lived realities.
The person you are meant to become – more aware, more loving, more alive – will remain just a possibility, not an actuality.
And so, the year’s will pass, and you’ll find yourself being essentially the same person, dealing with the same patterns, the same limitations, while your soul’s yearning for freedom, liberation, growth, and transcendence go unanswered.
There is Nothing More Worthwhile Than Waking Up, Cleaning Up, and Growing Up
So, I repeat again, you must make a conscious commitment to your own development.
I write this from the depths of my soul: there is nothing more worthwhile than becoming the person you are meant to become.
To do anything other than grow up, wake up, and clean up would be to swim against the current of evolution itself.
It would be to resist the natural movement of consciousness towards greater freedom and wholeness.
It would be to deny your true nature and reject your role in the cosmic unfolding.
The reason I am so passionate about spiritual growth, self-actualization, cultivating a deep relationship with yourself and with life, and finding your unique gifts and bringing them into the world, is because WHAT ELSE IS THERE TO DO?
Take a pause and ask yourself that.
What else is there to do?
…
You are a creature of unfathomable complexity and immense intelligence.
You are a living, breathing, divine work of art.
It’s a fucking miracle that you exist!
A miracle!
And yet most people take it for granted, vastly unaware of their potential, painfully bound to the mechanisms of their ego and the unconsciousness of their culture.
Sitting on their phone, scrolling social media all day.
Numbing out to weed, alcohol, drugs, and porn.
Watching the news, getting riled up about the next political fad.
Working jobs they hate just to pay the bills.
Living for the weekend. Chasing the next dopamine hit.
Following preset life scripts without ever questioning them.
What a tragedy it is to be born with the immense capacity for love, creativity, and wisdom and to waste this precious time on Earth numbed out and checked out!
Every moment spent unconscious is a moment of this miracle of being human wasted.
Everyday lived on autopilot is a day of potential unrealized.
This is why the path of spiritual growth and self-actualization is not just another self-help fad or lifestyle choice, but rather it is a fundamental task of being human!
It is quite literally, a key purpose of being alive, it is the process through which divine love is brought forth in the world.
Ask yourself once more:
What else is there to do?
My #1 Piece of Advice: Find Your Gifts, And Give Them
In my eyes, a key component of self-actualization is finding your niche within the larger tapestry of life, and fully inhabiting it.
To do so, you will have to get in touch with your unique gifts, and offer them to the world.
Each one of us carries unique interests, curiosities, attributes, aptitudes, and qualities that make us who we are.
In addition, each one of us has gone through varying hardships, challenges, and transformative experiences that have shaped who we uniquely are.
Oftentimes, it is our deepest sufferings that shape the gifts we give, as our wounds tend to become a primary source of our wisdom.
The person who experienced profound loneliness develops an extraordinary capacity to make others feel seen and understood.
The one who battled anxiety ends up helping others cultivate inner peace.
The one who grew up in a cult goes on to teach others the nuances of cult psychology so they don’t fall into it.
In my perspective, the hardships we go through are not at all coincidences.
They’re actually Life’s way of shaping us into exactly who we need to be.
Through having our hearts cracked open through intense suffering, and feeling it to its completion, we come to inhabit a greater degree of wholeness, and from this newfound consciousness, we can go on to more fully fill our niche within the larger tapestry of life, mending an ache within the world, and uplifting the consciousness of the collective.
Your specific forms of suffering, hardships, traumas, karmas, as well as your talents, interests, and aptitudes form a perspective and capacity that no other person on Earth has.
When it comes to the domain of self-actualization and finding your life purpose, your niche will be filled where your heart’s deepest joy fills the world’s deep need.
It tends to be the case that sprinkles of one’s unique gifts tend to show up quite early in childhood.
In my case, I have absolutely LOVED writing since the moment I developed the ability to do so.
It is one of the few activities that can quickly induce a flow state, where 4 hours can pass by in what seems like 30 minutes, where my mind is pushed to new frontiers of thought, bringing a deep sense of joy throughout the process.
At age 5, I would create little pocket books that told a cute story that only a child could possibly think of.
In my pre-teen years, I was constantly writing stories in the various journals I owned.
When I was a teenager, I continued to write stories, in hopes that I could write a bestseller and never have to work a 9-5, could travel the world, and be quietly famous.
As I grew and matured, and went through spiritual awakening, this knack for writing stayed with me, as I started to use the skill to create scripts for YouTube videos, or write Newsletters with the intention of providing perspectives and insights that would help others along their unique journey.
The bottom line here is that the aptitude for writing and sharing perspective has always been there within me, but as I developed myself, this skill was able to be used in a more mature, self-actualized, world-centric way that allows one of my deepest joys to fill a need within the world.
When it comes to finding and bringing your unique gifts to life, ask yourself these questions:
What activities have consistently brought you into a state of flow since childhood?
What were you naturally drawn to before the world told you what you should or shouldn’t do?
What skills or interests have stayed with you even as you’ve grown or changed?
What do people consistently come to you for help with?
What difficulties have you faced that gives you unique insight or understanding?
What wounds have transformed into wisdom that others might need?
Pay attention to the patterns, and remember that finding your niche within the larger fabric of life is not about becoming someone different, it is about fully inhabiting and claiming who you uniquely already are.
As you adhere to the path of growing up, waking up, and cleaning up, your gifts will come through with greater clarity, impact, love, and wisdom.
Without the dimension of full-spectrum growth, your gifts will be present within you, but they will remain constrained by the ego’s limitations, distorted by your shadows, and expressed from less mature forms of consciousness.
This could look like someone having brilliant creative talent, but using it solely for personal gain.
Or someone having an aptitude for leadership qualities, but their leadership being corrupted by unexamined, unconscious power motives.
This is why personal development is nothing separate from discovering and sharing your gifts, the two paths are one and the same, for without waking up, growing up, and cleaning up, the raw potential will be there, but the gifts will never reach their purest, most powerful, most loving, most life-giving form.
Traps/Limitations of Integral Theory (Don’t Make It an Ego Game!)
There are a number of traps in adhering to what I have labeled as a path of “spiritual growth and self-actualization.”
These traps can be so powerful, and so sneaky, that they can have one genuinely convinced that they are actually growing and maturing as a human, when in actuality they are mostly just playing an ego game.
These traps include, but are not limited to:
Using developmental frameworks to feel superior or more “evolved” or “developed” than others
Excessively indulging in theory and concepts, rather than direct experience
Collecting spiritual knowledge like trophies, without integrating it
Saying “everything is one” or “everything is perfect” to bypass uncomfortable emotions and necessary growth work
Thinking you are at a high level of consciousness purely based on one or a few high consciousness states you experienced
Turning practices into routines, without putting genuine heart into them
The fundamental mechanism behind all of the traps is the ego co-opting the path of growth into a means of self-enhancement and self-preservation.
This is a highly sophisticated form of spiritual materialism in which the very perspectives, tools, experiences, and practices that are meant to liberate consciousness from the confines of ego, actually became methods through which the ego strengthens itself.
In my experience, the most dangerous thing about these Integral Developmental theories is that they subtly perpetuate this grand narrative of progress.
This is like candy to the ego.
In exquisitely describing development through a stage-like sequence, it can become incredibly easy to latch onto the idea of reaching higher and higher stages of human development, to continue “leveling up” so you can inhabit the “farther reaches” of human nature, creating an identity of being a “developed” or “evolved” person.
I have fallen into these traps many, many times, and in my experience this perpetuated a pushing/striving orientation towards life, where I sought to excessively plan and rigidly organize my life around my own development, so that I could “develop” and “grow” as fast as possible.
While this was partially rooted in the noble desire to become the most I could become for the world, the ego created its own game out of the idea of a “spiritual path”, causing the path to become heavily self-centric, counterintuitively moving me further away from the transcendence, freedom, and liberation that my soul yearned for.
It’s a paradox.
The more you try to “get somewhere” spiritually, the more you reinforce the very ego-structures that need to be relaxed and dissolved.
In reflecting on my experience, my making growth an ego game, perpetuating this pushing/striving orientation towards life, stemmed from a lack of self-worth and self-acceptance.
I always believed that I was never enough, that I could do more, and be more, so I pushed and strived towards this conceptual idea of “growth”.
In many ways I was growing, but in other ways I was reinforcing and strengthening the very ego structures that my soul yearned to transcend.
Here are some questions to contemplate that could illuminate ways in which you are making growth an ego-gratifying game:
Do you become defensive when your understanding or insights are challenged?
Do you feel a need to display your “level of development” through how you speak, dress, and act?
Do you feel special for your being more “conscious” or “developed” than others?
Do you feel threatened by others’ progress or insights?
Are you really embodying the teachings, insights, and techniques you’ve learned?
Do you hide parts of yourself to maintain a “spiritual” image?
Do you grasp for peak experiences? If so, why?
What’s driving your search for “higher consciousness?”
So many of you will contemplate these questions and hear what I am telling you on an intellectual level, but then you will still make growth an ego game anyway, creating this identity where you believe you are some amazing, wise person who is above other people.
Even if your ego game is not that extreme, I can guarantee that every single person reading this is having their path distorted by ego to some degree, which is why contemplating those above questions are extremely important.
If everything was perfect in your life and you experienced no distortion or hardship along your path, you simply would have no reason to have read this far into this post.
…
If you are like me, your ego game may perpetuate this pushing/striving mentality where you try to accelerate the process to reach some grand, enlightened stage as fast as possible.
It is only when making growth an ego game is making you feel drained, depleted, and ironically in a more ego-active state than before, will you finally let go and let the process unfold naturally.
You don’t have to save the world.
You don’t have to become some grand, great, high, noble, saintly person.
You just have to be you.
That’s it.
Just chill out bro! And let this shit unfold naturally.
…
I want to bring us back to the key insight of these Integral theories.
Human maturation unfolds towards ego-transcendence.
Read it again.
Human maturation unfolds towards ego-transcendence.
Transcendence, liberation, openness, and freedom is the direction that consciousness is naturally evolving towards!
This is where the flow of life is carrying you and all of humanity!
So really, all you have to do is let the process unfold.
When you add in these additional layers of egoic perception that distort the process, that make growth an ego-gratifying game, you create unnecessary resistance towards the natural unfolding.
This can be very tricky territory to navigate.
As I just alluded to, you may have to experience the suffering of making growth an ego game before you can stop making growth an ego game.
You Will Have To Surrender To Your Highest Self
But, inevitably, at some point, you will have to surrender to the natural current of Life.
You will learn to stop paddling so hard along this current, and allow yourself to be carried by something greater than your ego’s efforting.
In no way, shape, or form, does this mean you become passive and do nothing the rest of your life.
You have to remember: you are not just the leaf, you are the entire river.
In other words, you are not just your ego, you are all of creation.
You are the flow of Life itself!
And so, your most authentic desires, your highest excitements, your deepest yearnings, your heart’s deepest bliss is the very flow of life moving through your body!
SO FOLLOW THESE IMPULSES!
Of course, follow them with awareness, presence, and clarity of mind.
But when you act from this place, there’s a natural flow to it, coupled with an enthusiasm and joy, a result of natural unfolding rather than calculated effort.
This is the paradox of action in non-action: you’re intensely engaged but not from a place of ego-doing.
Rather than being in a pushing/striving orientation, you are in an authentic being/allowing orientation.
You’re passionate and committed to whatever it is you are doing, but it is done without the desperate need to achieve something or become someone.
In my eyes, it is a misleading myth that one ceases to desire things altogether at the transpersonal levels of development.
Desire continues, but it becomes increasingly purified – beginning to come less and less from the ego’s sense of lack, and more and more from wholeness, from the purity of Life’s natural current that runs both within you and beyond you.
If you look at some of the world’s great mystics and sages, both past and present, such as Jesus, Buddha, Rumi, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Aurobindo, Maharaj, Eckhart Tolle, and the Dalai Lama to name a few, each of them were quite active in the world, devoting their life to service, to a purpose beyond themselves.
For each of these individuals to do what they did in the world, they had to experience some level of desire, but as they grew up, woke up, and cleaned up, their desire became more pure, more crystallized, leading them each towards giving their gifts and living their authentic life purposes.
Likewise, on this journey, as your desire becomes more pure, your life purpose will take a more clear shape, allowing you to give your gifts and inhabit your niche with greater depth, potency, and clarity.
Life Is Waiting For You To Step Into Your Full Potential
I have written this post for those seekers of Truth who want to be the most they can be within this beautiful, divine, cosmic mystery of living as a human here on the planet that we call Earth.
I have written this post for those who truly care, who want to look back on their deathbed and say that they truly lived and truly loved, that they were fully themselves in this life, and that they gave their gifts fully to this world.
And I have written this post to remind you that Who You Truly Are is something far greater, more open, more free, more expansive, more true than what you may presently experience, or what you were told by your culture.
I write all of this as an imperfect human being with plenty more growing up, waking up, and cleaning up to do.
But what I have learned along this journey is that life can become something far more divine, blissful, and sacred than my previous selves could have ever imagined.
In fact, as my life goes on, my experience becomes more and more cosmically serene.
My friend: your potential, our potential, is far greater than what we’ve been led to believe.
Life can be so much more than simply following the standard script of school, career, marriage, mortgage, kids, retirement, and death.
More than working a job that does not light up your soul, more than waiting for the weekend, more than defining your worth through your external achievements, and more than spending your time passively consuming.
Of course, following a life path that looks similar to this is not necessarily wrong, what is wrong is following these scripts unconsciously.
When accepted without question, these cultural scripts and programming become unspoken, invisible boundaries that prevent us from exploring the vast possibilities of human potential.
In addition, the human species can be something far greater than what we’ve been led to believe.
Our current world of wealth inequality, severe political polarization, social division, and environmental degradation is not the end of our human evolution, but rather just a reflection of a current state of consciousness that we are collectively moving through.
We can live in a world where every single human beings’ basic needs are met, in which the struggle for self-survival has ceased, allowing every individual equal opportunity to self-actualize.
We can live in a world where cities breathe with the rhythm of nature, where energy flows abundantly, powering the lives of our dreams without leaving a carbon footprint.
We can live in a world where education nurtures every individual’s unique curiosities, interests, and aptitudes, preparing people not just for jobs or careers, but for serving Life.
We can live in a world where business exploiting people and the planet for profit does not happen, in which success comes to be defined by its contribution to the well-being of all.
These realities are possible, but it all starts with you tending to your own garden and staying committed to growing up, waking, and cleaning up.
Life is imploring you to step into your deepest, most mature version.
Will you answer the call?
Offers
I hope you all come away from reading this feeling invigorated and inspired to continue to step into your greatest version, along with a clarity of what all this growth is leading towards.
The world is in dire need of more people stepping into their highest selves, of people who are competent enough to hold the complexity of our present global challenges, of people who can bridge different worldviews with groundedness and compassion, guiding themselves and humanity towards greater wholeness.
If you find yourself resonating with what’s been said here, and are looking for some guidance on consciously crafting the course of your inner journey, consider hiring me as your coach.
As an Integrally-informed coach, we will work together to:
Align your life with your highest values and aspirations
Develop practices that support the growth and expansion of your consciousness
Uncover and integrate blockages or shadow aspects that may be holding you back
Explore potential ways to meaningfully contribute to collective growth
Help you fall deeper in love with life
If this interests you, please click this link to book the free discovery call, which is a 45 minute call to discuss you, your unique life situations, goals, aspirations, etc. in order to determine if we are a good fit to work in the long-term together.
Hope to see you soon!
With love and intention,
Wyeth