Cultivating our Wholeness in a Transforming World: From Algorithms to Allegories

The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold, and it has overturned the order of the soul…                                                                                     

~Leonard Cohen

All human activity emerges from our inwardness, for better or worse. As we work and live, we project the condition of our interior onto the people and world around us. Congruence, the alignment between our inner lives and outer actions, brings integrity and strength. Whenever we ignore this inner voice, our life becomes divided, and our spirit suffers under the burden of duplicity.

Eckhart Tolle explains duplicity this way: reliance on our psychological form - the shell of our ego and our roles, creates a strong sense of separateness. The world around us, and people in particular, come to be perceived as threatening. The unconscious compulsion to destroy others through judgement arises as does the need to compete and dominate. Even nature becomes our enemy and our perceptions and interpretations are governed by fear. The mental disease that we call paranoia is only a slightly more acute form of this normal but dysfunctional state of consciousness.

What our soul yearns for is wholeness, a genuine embracing of our being and our becoming, our softness as well as our strength, our shadow as well as our light. Being, that timeless, formless ground of all-that-is, is the felt experience of peace. Becoming is the felt experience of evolutionary urgency, the impulse to move, to learn, to have impact, and to transcend. Being and Becoming together represent the metaphysical totality of everything, both manifest and unmanifest.

When we chose to soften our psychological form – we crack open our vulnerability and realize the limitless sense of our soul’s connection possibility. The world around us appears abundant and people are perceived as kind. The conscious intent to nurture others through truth consciousness and forgiveness arises as does the need to respect ourselves and others. Nature becomes our ally and our meaning system becomes dominated by love. The mental health that we call self-transcendence is only a slightly less refined form of this uncommon but illumined state of consciousness.

Sustaining good relationships among those with whom we live, work and play requires us to know and understand our inner terrain, and to reconnect role and soul whenever the blizzard of the world crosses our threshold and leaves us feeling fearful, rigid, and separate. Turning inward to build the ground for trustworthy relationships with others may sound counter-intuitive, counter-cultural even, in a world with instant communication, constant ‘feedback’, and individualized user experience. And yet, Rumi, the 13th century Sufi mystic, spoke of the importance of honoring two kinds of intelligence…

There are two kinds of intelligence:

one acquired, as a child in school memorizes facts

and concepts from books and from what the teacher says,

collecting information from the traditional sciences

as well as from the new sciences.

With such intelligence you rise in the world.

you get ranked ahead or behind others in regard

to your competence in retaining information.

you stroll with this intelligence in and out of fields of knowledge,

getting always more marks on your preserving tablets.

There is another kind of tablet, one already completed

and preserved inside you. A spring overflowing its springbox.

a freshness in the center of the chest. This other intelligence

does not turn yellow or stagnate. It's fluid,

and it doesn't move from outside to inside

through the conduits of plumbing-learning.

This second knowing is a fountainhead from within you, moving out.

As translated by Coleman Barks

Authentic power is what happens when our ego personality comes to serve the energy of our soul: when who we are and what we do on the outside, honours our deepest humanity.

The gift of high-quality behavioural analytics is that we now have ways to see ourselves outside-in without the intense subjectivity-bias of feedback from the people closest to us whose needs and expectations can’t help but colour their perceptions. We can also learn where our ego personality easily fits in the world of work, helping us reduce the stress and fatigue inherent in working out of sync with our preferred behaviours. When we complement this ‘objective knowing’ with wisdom from our own inner voice, we can bring our Being and Becoming into alignment. We can hold tight against the blizzard and Become the whole person we have the passion and potential to Be.