#2 There's no potential. We limit ourselves!
We are spiritual creatures. We are embedded in something greater than ourselves: an intelligence of its own quality; you might call it God or the One, the Universal or cosmic intelligence.
We are part––and only part––of this intelligence. We are neither able to understand it fully nor control it. But we can be in an intense exchange with this intelligence; we are invited to shape it and simultaneously perceive guidance. This isn’t just spiritual; it’s part of our biological setting, as everything concerning our consciousness is always routed in our biological fundament, our body. Our consciousness is meant to exceed our material existence and our ego. This ability doesn’t come by itself; it is something we must develop throughout our lifetime. But most of us do not even get a glimpse of it. And that’s not accidental; it’s by design, by society, and not by natural design.
Let us return to our two children from part one and how their consciousness unfolds.
From the work of Piaget and others, we know that a child passes through a series of stages until it fully realizes its biological and mental potential. Skills and bodily abilities define each stage; the child learns and develops a certain quality of worldview, and the child achieves and strives toward a specific aspect of autonomy. Each stage is based upon the prior one and is the foundation for the next phase. [1]
Although bodily development is finished at the end of puberty, developing one’s consciousness isn’t. And just as with a child, the adult goes through certain stages. To be more precise, he can go through certain stages. What distinguishes childhood from adulthood is that in the first phase of our life, we have an intrinsic impulse to complete our biological development. Once that’s finished, we still have a long mental or internal development before us, but no biological need behind it. It’s optional.
The American developmental psychologist Robert Kegan created a framework and differentiated various phases in adulthood. [2]
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From our perspective, there are two important thresholds that we, as adults, can cross. One is from the socialized to the self-authorized mind, and the second is from the self-authorized mind to the self-transforming mind. We’ll take the first step when we free ourselves from the expectations of our milieu and turn inwardly to what is important for us. The socialized mind is outward-oriented, while the self-authorized mind is inward-oriented. This first threshold marks the beginning of a true individuation. The second we’ll take when we exceed our self in the service of something greater. That’s when we enter the spiritual domain.
These shifts happen in a dynamic exchange between the biological foundation, the social context surrounding the child, and the child’s response to everything inside and around him.
Let it be the child in rural Wales or urban China, an atheistic family of wealth, or a spiritually committed single-mom family: the context in which the baby grows not only defines how it will speak, understand, and act in the world. This context defines, to a great extent, how far this child must go in order to realize its self. Does he live in a society, culture, or family deeply rooted in the understanding that we are part of something bigger? Then, this context will support and guide the child to reach his full potential. Or does he grow up in a culture that sees humans as the culmination of the Creation, as someone whose responsibility is to control and govern nature to accumulate material wealth? Then, chances are high that the spiritual path is closed, and the child will not tap into its potential. Why?
At each stage he brings with him, as I mentioned above, a certain worldview and, with this, a certain way of interacting with the world and nature. Our most common developmental stage is dominated by selfish behavior and materialistic hunger. It is based on the dominant paradigm of fragmentation: humans are separated from nature and each other and are meant to control and explore nature. Only in later developmental stages can we overcome this worldview and thrive in a worldview of oneness into the experience where everything is interconnected. Out of this, we realize that if we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves. If we as humankind would live out of an understanding that we are part of nature and not its ruler, and that we as nature are inseparable and dynamically connected with everything around us, we would behave differently. Instead of exploiting nature as much as possible, we would seek to nourish and thrive in nature simply because this is the only way to succeed and realize our natural human being.
So, the world we are living in, the world we created over the last centuries, is an expression of a certain state of our consciousness: We have not fully realized ourselves as human beings.
It’s not that we can’t reach our full potential. It’s more that we are holding us back.
We are our context. We are our own environment. By this, we define how far we humans can reach in our inner development. We have built societies and communities that hold us in a certain state of our consciousness. And we maintain them in our daily actions. So it’s not that we can’t reach our full potential. It’s more that we are holding us back
For more on this, e.g.: Neufeld, G.P. (2012) Keys to Well-Being in Children and Youth. Brussels Adress. https://neufeldinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Neufeld_Brussels_address.pdf (2023-10-14)
Kegan, R. & Lahey, L.L. (2009) Immunity to Change.