An Open Letter from God

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The great mission of the Utopia is to make room for the possible as opposed to a passive acquiescence in the present actual state of affairs. It is symbolic thought which overcomes the natural inertia of man and endows him with a new ability, the ability constantly to reshape his human universe.

— Ernst Cassirer

We must have a provisional picture of the future to direct our aim and to act as a moral criterion of our means… That picture the evolution of consciousness alone seems now to supply… We are here to achieve a new spiritual level—a new range and quality of consciousness… We act only and wholly in order that by so acting, so striving, we ourselves may become a new, further being.

— Gerald Heard

Blessed are the poor in spirit:
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they that mourn:
for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek:
for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst
after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

Blessed are the merciful:
for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart:
for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers:
for they shall be called the children of God.

Blessed are they which are persecuted
for righteousness’ sake:
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

In the eight-phase ascent of the Biblical Beatitudes, the peacemakers appear in the seventh phase, preceded by (1) the poor in spirit (those who have emptied of the delusion of the egological self); (2) they that mourn (those who suffer the suffering of humanity as their own); (3) the meek (those who are initiated, trained, and ‘tamed’ in the way of self-transcendence); (4) they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness (those who are unswervingly committed to the continual pursuit of self-transformation); (5) the merciful (those who are incarnate compassion and tenderheartedness); and (6) the pure in heart (those who have attained integrity and coherence in singleheartedness). As the sixth Beatitude states, "Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God," the peacemakers in the seventh phase thrust into being as the seers of God, the attainers of Spirit, the awakeners of the Soul, who "shall be called the children of God" by the people of the earth, which they have inherited in the third phase of their spiritual ascent.

The Beatitudes brilliantly evince the all-too-often-ignored fact that authentic peacemakers are to be spiritually evolved and evolving human beings, that becoming a worthy peacemaker requires rigorous commitment to inner work and spiritual development. The Beatitudes remind us that engaging in the work of peacemaking without such inner work or spiritual development is insufficient.

The peacemaker thus understood is virtually identical with the concept of bodhisattva in Mahayana Buddhism. The bodhisattva is the spiritually evolved and evolving human being who is engaged in the act of giving form to a vision. The Sanskrit term bodhisattva in its Tibetan rendering as byang-chub sems-dpa’ reveals a spiritual signification which illumines the concept of peacemaker. The term byang-chub (bodhi) connotes "the ultimate abolishment of all impurities and the resultant transparent purity as well as a correct understanding and comprehension." [1]  The term sems-dpa’ (sattva) connotes "having a firm and unbending intention to realize pellucidity and consummation." [2]

The peacemakers and the bodhisattvas are spiritually awakened and awakening visionaries-in-action whose own further evolution has become inseparable from the evolution of humanity as a whole. As world-transformation is an evolutionary imperative for the bodhisattvas, so is world-peacemaking an evolutionary imperative for the peacemakers. Therefore, they peacemake as the expression of their own evolutionary thrust for self-realization. They peacemake to continually attain a new stage of coherent development for themselves and the world. They peacemake to break through the evolutionary stagnation of the self and all the non-self constituting their world of experience. Thus,

To peacemake means to create peace, not as a passive state but as an active force, a positive power directed against a definite force of evil to abolish war and violence. Evil in its seed-form is the drive toward devolution. Evil is the evolutionary stagnation mutated into a devolutionary force violently opposing the evolutionary thrust for change. Evil is the cognitive and existential reversal of the meaning of righteousness. Righteousness means right thinking and right-wise-ness; to be righteous means that one’s life is moving in the right (evolutionary) direction and is being lived in the right (evolutionary) way based on right (authentic, not opinion-based) knowledge and thinking. Evil people cognitively and existentially reverse righteousness or rightwiseness and force upon others devolutionary ways of life or death, while, in their delusion, enthroning their egotistic self as though it were the pinnacle of human evolution.

The seed of evil germinates in the soil of pathological self-righteousness. Pathological self-righteousness is the dishonest self-justification of one’s evolutionary stagnation combined with a willful imposition of evolutionary truncation and devolutionary suffering upon others. Envy is the distinctive core emotion of pathologically self-righteous people. Envy is the emotion of hatred of the good for being good, in contradiction to the emotion of jealousy, which retains the appreciation of the good for being good. Whereas jealousy affirms value, envy negates values. A jealous person desires to possess a value that is denied to him, but an envious person desires to destroy the value and its possessor, regardless of whether or not he himself wants it. Behind evil there lurks envy as the engine of destruction.

We have in our midst pathologically self-righteous people who turn to persecution of those others whom they perceive to be threatening. Persecution by the pathologically self-righteous is a severe test of one’s enlightenment, transformation, and love. Socrates with perfect fortitude and composure let his persecutors execute him; Jesus with consummate love and compassion let his persecutors crucify him. They passed their final test. Their lives were that of peacemaking; their deaths were that of transcendency. They were blessed in life and death, touched by immortality, imbued with the eternal. Socrates, Jesus, and many other illumined souls teach us through their examples that to peacemake is not merely to pacify the world but instead to spiritually and intellectually awaken humanity in the process of self-awakening.

2. An Evolutionary View

Reconceptualizing the Spiral Dynamics Model

The visionary psychologist Clare Graves has shown, based on his original research spanning over thirty years, that there exists a discernible emergent pattern in the existential development of the human being, which includes the development of psychology, behavior, and value systems. [3]  Graves’ original model was expanded and popularized by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan through their Spiral Dynamics model. [4]  The Gravesian-Spiral Dynamics model provides a new insight into the subject of peacemakers and peacemaking. Quoting Graves:

At each stage of human existence the adult man is off on his quest of his holy grail, the way of life by which he believes men should live. At his first level he is on a quest for automatic physiological satisfaction. At the second level he seeks a safe mode for living, and this is followed, in turn, by a search for heroic status, for the power and the glory [the third level], then by everlasting peace [the fourth level], a search for material fulfillment in the here and now [the fifth level], a search for personal fulfillment here and now [the sixth level], a search for integrated living [the seventh level], and a search for spiritual peace in a world he knows can never be known [the eighth level]. And, when he finds, at the eighth level, that he will never find that peace, he will be off on his ninth level quest.

Development from one level to the next is not a linear progression but is the process of what is called the nested hierarchy or holarchy, which is characterized by the process of "transcend and include," meaning that each new level transcends but includes all of the previous levels. Graves recognized a quantum jump-like transition from the sixth level to the seventh level in terms of cognitive flexibility and creativity, marked by the disappearance of fear, without any marked increase in quantitatively measured intelligence. Beck and Cowan call the first six levels the first tier and the seventh and eighth levels and beyond the second tier.

Here, let me reconceptualize the Spiral Dynamics model as follows:

Human consciousness is distinguished by its ability to develop self-consciousness in the symbolic space of images and languages. The development of human consciousness is therefore tantamount to the development of self-consciousness, while the development of human behavior is tantamount to the development in how the self relates to itself and the rest of the universe. The development of human consciousness can be seen as a process of phase transition or transformation in which each new phase transcends but includes the previous phases.

In Phase 1 the human being automatically subsumes the non-self (the physical surrounding) to the physical self (the bodily needs) in its pursuit of physical survival. In Phase 2, the human being semi-automatically subsumes itself to the tribal community upon whose existence the survival of the self depends. In Phase 3, the human being semi-consciously subsumes its tribal community to itself for its self-assertion.

In Phase 4, the human being consciously subsumes itself to the absolute non-self—the absolute external authority—existing above and beyond the self and the community. In Phase 5, the human being consciously subsumes the community and the "deity" to itself for its self-advancement. In Phase 6, the human being consciously subsumes itself to the valued human community upon whose evaluation and acceptance its own self-valuation – and validation – depend.

From Phase 1 to Phase 6, the human being operates under the existential logic of either the self or the non-self, though the logic of the first three phases is more an operative logic inherent in nature than a culturally cultivated existential logic consciously apprehended by the human being inside the symbolic space of language. In Phases 1, 3, and 5, the human being subsumes the non-self to itself with increasingly broader conceptions of the self and the non-self. In Phases 2, 4, and 6, the human being subsumes itself to the non-self with increasingly broader conceptions of the self and the non-self. From Phase 1 to Phase 6, albeit the conceptions of the self and the non-self as well as general cognitive complexity expand from one phase to the next, the human being continues to operate under the existential logic of either/or.

As the human being attains the seventh phase of development, it ceases to operate under the existential logic of either/or but adopts the logic of and/also. This fundamental shift in the operative existential logic marks the difference between the first tier (Phase 1 to Phase 6) and the second (Phase 7 and beyond). For the human being at Phases 7, 8, and beyond, there exists no existential necessity for subsumption either of the non-self to the self or the self to the non-self. The human being in the second tier transcends fear because fear is rooted in the existential logic of either/or. Thus, the disappearance of subsumptive relationship and the concomitant transcendence of fear are distinct marks of the breakthrough from the first tier to the second.

In Phase 7, the self and all the non-self exist in union with the non-self conceived as the extension of the self. In Phase 8, the self and the non-self exist in unity with all the non-self as a whole conceived as the source of the self. As Graves documented, when the individual attains Phase 8, the electrical resistance of the skin and other elements of physiology start to undergo measurable changes. In Phase 9, the logic of and/also exhausts its existential possibility, and the differentiation between the self and the non-self loses its existential meaning. What remains is the symbolic differentiation between the self and the non-self as a linguistic convenience and a communicative device. In Phase 9, what emerges to the fore is the coherent ground of being of the self and all the non-self, which ground will start unfolding its existential and cognitive possibilities in Phase 10 and beyond.

The peacemakers or the bodhisattvas as defined in this article are the human beings existing at the frontier of Phase 7 actively engaged in the evolutionary process of co-transformation of the self and the world. For them, peacemaking means the attainment of ever higher integration and peace means the dynamic movement of coherence and integrity.

We want to change, to increase the scope of our human relationships and our experiences, but we are confident we can remain the same. We demand to retain unaltered what has been called our ‘ipseity,’ our own character, and this actually means our own ego, our own private Establishment, our institutionalized difference from other persons. —Dane Rudhya

Operating under the logic of either/or, the people in the first tier tend to reject belief systems that differ from their own, particularly "fundamentalists" of all persuasions. For instance, religious fundamentalists, an extreme-case manifestation of the Phase 4 psychology and behavior, would be totally unwilling to accept the religious beliefs of other religions or denominations, which frequently results in "holy" war. Fundamentalist atheists, materialists, or communists would categorically reject any form of religion or spirituality, yet in reality they belong to the Phase 4 existence with its typical psychology. Those belonging to Phase 5 would not accept either communism or religious fundamentalism but may accept atheism, which is the philosophy that denies the validity of the various claims of theism. The egalitarians belonging to Phase 6, composing the great majority of the "cultural creatives," would reject the whole concept of the hierarchical levels of human existence.

World peace becomes possible when the logic of and/also becomes the dominant operative logic of humanity. The politics of versus, of opposition, based on the logic of either/or is not an appropriate vehicle for the task of engendering peace. However, it is the predominant operative modality of politics currently practiced all over the world. The task of the second-tier peacemakers operating with the logic of and/also is not primarily to try to pacify the warring regions of the planet, where the people involved all seem to be bent on endlessly recycling their karmic debts, but to facilitate the process of evolution, development, and transformation from one phase of existence to the next: from Phase 3 to Phase 4 (from despotism to autocracy), to Phase 5 (democracy accompanied by shareholder-value-based capitalism), to Phase 6 (democracy accompanied by stakeholder-value-based and sustainability-oriented capitalism), and to Phase 7 (democracy accompanied by planetary ethics-based and significance-oriented free market economy).

Democracy and free-market economy are essentially synonymous in that they both require that society allow freedom for and obtain responsibility from every individual constituting society. Democracy or free-market economy is possible exactly in the degree to which the logic of and/also is the dominant existential logic of the adult population. Democracy or free-market economy requires for its successful existence self-governing, responsible, sovereign individuals who respect the rights and freedom of themselves and others. Mature and authentic democracy and free market economy will only come into existence when the majority of the adult population enters the second-tier phases of coherent human development. When that happens, consequentially and quite naturally, world peace will also come into reality. For peace is a consequential value of the logic of and/also and of the social architecture based on the logic of and/also: mature and authentic democracy and free market economy.

The Principle of Polarity

War and peace are two diametrically opposite manifestations of the same cosmic principle: the principle of polarity. Polarization is the fundamental motive principle of the universe; there can be no movement of any kind in the universe without polarization. In nature, polarization tends to be complementary as symbolized by the Taoist principle of yin and yang. In human relations and in the affairs of the world, polarization is experienced as either complementary or oppositional, depending upon how individuals interpret and relate to the polarized situation or condition in which they are involved. Complementary polarity creates dynamic resonance and accord between polarized parties, while oppositional polarity creates subversive dissonance and discord.

Complementary polarity forms the basis for the Trilateral Winning Principle (Win-Win-Win Principle) whereby the two parties involved in a transaction of any kind and the rest of the world as the third party all benefit and win. Transactions that are based on oppositional polarity always involve parties that lose, which loss is a sign of breakdown in the integrity of the whole system. As an ideal scenario, if humanity as a whole always practices the Trilateral Winning Principle in all human transactions, peace and prosperity will of necessity prevail on the earth.

Authentic democracy makes complementary polarization and the Trilateral Winning Principle the standard practice and process of human relations and the affairs of the world. Authentic democracy is a sine qua non of world peace. To develop authentic democracy throughout this planet, we must become radical evolutionaries rather than being traditional revolutionaries. And being radical evolutionaries is an essential part of what it means to be effective peacemakers, which is to "act only and wholly in order that by so acting, so striving, we ourselves may become a new, further being."


Endnotes:

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