MOC : [[SEXUALITÉ]] - [[PHILOSOPHIE]] - [[DÉVELOPPEMENT PERSONNEL]] Note de [[Bruno Marion]] (pour voir la vraie note, avec les images, aller des ressources => sexualité) Tag : #ToProcess #livre Auteur : [[Martin Ucik]] *** 12-2019 03-2023 Until then, my spirituality was largely informed by Eckhart Tolle’s Power Of Now, Buddhist practices, and Ken Wilber’s Integral Spirituality. These three approaches can roughly be encapsulated as follows: 1. Transcend your ego through being fully present in The Now and surrender to what is. 2. Don’t hate, desire, or be attached to anything—including outcomes. 3. Embrace the gross, subtle, causal, and pure witness realms while doing growth and shadow work at the level of the seven chakras in the “I,” “we,” “it” and “its” dimensions of your being to attain non-dual spiritual awareness. Andrew named three kinds of actions: those that are motivated by Ego as "minus one,” those who arise from a state of presence and surrender in the now as “zero,” and those that have us living our evolutionary purpose beyond Ego as “plus one.” “Love is unconditional but relationships are not” The biggest factors in our sexual selection process are the Primary sexual fantasies (women desiring success-objects and males desiring (younger) sex-objects), and the fear-shame dynamic (females selecting males who provide and protect, and males competing for females who appreciate and reward them with sex and love). It is still shocking how few people are consciously aware of these underlying dynamics of our sexual selection process and the negative effects of their excessive forms on our love relationships and the world at large. In addition to these two primary sexual selection criteria, most people desire Secondary fantasies such as a shared interior resonance or intimacy, cultural compatibility, and social desirability to be met. Lovers usually describe the ensuing feelings when their fantasies are fulfilled as chemistry between them. In our modern world, the expectations of most women, but also of some men, are increasingly unrealistic when it comes to sexual selection. Most singles desire partners who are above average in looks, status and money, even if they themselves are average or below average. The second big component of the ILR model relates to purpose. If you ask people what they are most concerned and passionate about, or what the meaning of life and their own purpose is, you often get a blank stare, or at best, basic or general answers such as being there for my kids, enjoying life, or living life to the fullest. Few people know that having a deeper sense of purpose that serves the needs of others leads to happier, healthier and longer lives, and that sharing a greater purpose with a partner is key for long-term relationship success. We have a Biological Purpose to survive, form groups, procreate, and seek the best quality-of-life possible, all of which unfolds naturally as we mature. We also have a Transcendental Purpose of creating more goodness, truth, beauty, or functioning that make the world a better place. Line two shows that, even though we all have a Transcendental Purpose, most people need to awaken to it first in order to consciously live it. Line three shows that our Transcendental Purpose is rooted in four genetically predispositioned natural talents for empathy, intelligence, creativity and kinesthetic abilities that vary in kind and degree between people. Line four shows that these four natural talents lead to skill development that allows us to create more goodness, truth, beauty, or functioning in the world. Line five shows that sharing our Transcendental Purpose with a partner is essential for its healthy expression and for having the greatest impact by creating synergy where the whole becomes larger than the sum of the parts. Line one shows traditional love that is experienced when different needs and desires of males and females are satisfied. Line two shows that the fulfillment of these desires leads to conditional, transactional, asymmetrical love relationships. Line three shows that these love relationships often turn into master-slave relationships. In modern or postmodern relationships, this usually leads to breakups and divorces. These separations are then often followed by prolonged singlehood or serial dating, or by multiple consecutive relationships and marriages. Some relationship experts now even call it the new normal. But this is destructive and does not have to be so! Line four shows the alternative; not only loving your partner, but even more so loving what is uniquely co-created by choice between couples with equal rights and responsibilities at the level of all seven chakras. Line five indicates that this leads to lasting Transcendental Love based on a shared Transcendental Purpose in lifelong healthy Integral love relationships. Line one shows that in order to make the world a better place, we need to become aware of the major global challenges that humanity is facing, and how these problems were created in the first place through our sexual selection process. Line two shows that Integral love relationships are essential or primal for becoming fully human, and for addressing the major global challenges that humanity is facing. Line three shows that finding a mutual understanding and agreement with a partner about what is right, true, beautiful, and functioning in a given situation are crucial for a thriving relationship and making a positive difference. Line four shows that this consensus needs to be reached through ethical discourse that gives good feminine and masculine reasons (called validity claims) for the feminine and masculine domains that are shown below line three as they pertain to the private and public spheres. Line five shows the importance of taking appropriate actions once consensus is reached between couples through communication that applies discourse ethics. This process is therefore called communicative action, as talk is cheap, but action taken before thinking and feeling things through on the level of the couple and reaching mutual understanding and agreement often leads to more misunderstandings, conflict, chaos, and problems. In 2017, the world population passed the 7.5 billion mark, which is, from an evolutionary standpoint, an incredible success story. At the same time, fewer people co-create and procreate in healthy, sustainable love relationships around the world, birthrates in most western societies have fallen way below sustainable rates, while the human created environmental destruction and rise in income inequality threaten our peaceful co-existence and future of humanity. The Lower Left quadrant which we may call the collective intersubjective interior “cultural” dimension. Similar to genes that are passed down from generation to generation through germ cells, we adopt language, belief systems, values and practices that are transferred to us from our parents and surrounding culture. These cultural analogues to genes are called memes (rhymes with genes) in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures, and so transmit cultural ideas, symbols and behaviors from one mind to another through speech, writing, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena. From this perspective, instead of us living in the world, the world lives in us. There are four different types of holons: 1. Individual holons (everything that has its own volition choice, will, agency, or experience, such as cells, flowers, dogs, or humans.) 2. Social holons (groups of individual holons, such as flocks of geese, male-female or same-sex partnerships, families, or communities.) 3. Artifacts (objects created by individual holons, such as bird’s nests, beaver dams, paintings, books, cars, or houses.) 4. Heaps (structures created by nature, such as sand dunes or piles of leaves.) To maintain their simultaneous wholeness and partialness, individual and social holons have four drives. - Self-transcendence or ascending, which drives them to be part of larger wholes. - Self-immanence or descending, which drives them to maintain their constituent parts. - Self-preservation or agency which drives them to maintain their own wholeness. - Self-adaptation or communion which drives them to maintain their own partialness. Adult development in consciousness is caused in three different ways: 1. almost unnoticed over long periods of time; (2) through a structured meditation or contemplative prayer practice combined with psychological healing; or (3) when particular beliefs, capacities, and views of a certain stage no longer provide adequate answers to life’s fundamental questions, challenges, and demands, and is often preceded by a deep existential crisis or dark night of the soul. The latter is often the case when we fall in love with a partner who challenges us to learn, heal, and grow, or through a painful breakup/ divorce. Each consecutive level provides better solutions to life’s challenges, deeper insights into one’s own experience, wider perspectives about one’s place in the world, and more capacity for love and compassion than the previous one. A key factor in creating a healthy love relationship is to be with a partner who is at a matching level of consciousness development and heals and grows with us. The cognitive understanding and self-assessment is often two levels higher than the stage that is actually embodied and enacted, for example, egocentric people may think they are at a rational level, whereas pluralistic people may think they are at a transpersonal level. Males and females grow through the stages of first-tier consciousness differently. Males tend to be single-focused (agentic) and growth-oriented (ascending), and then to advance through the stages by transcending and excluding the limited views of the previous levels through negation, dissociation, and repression. Females, who tend to be relational (communal) and fulfillment-oriented (descending), tend to transcend and include previous stages through attachment, fusion, and preservation. As a consequence, males act more consistently from the highest level of altitude that they have reached, and have a hard time tolerating the behavior, values, and worldviews of people in stages below or above them (i.e., let’s force our views onto others by getting them up to our standards or rein them in to our level).[ 134] Females, who are conditioned by evolution to rear children (who naturally all start out at the Infrared level) and to accommodate a male protector/ provider, unconsciously float between the first-tier stages they have transcended.[ 135] This makes their personality seemingly more complex than that of males. As we have seen above, our level of consciousness development or altitude defines how we view the world, ourselves and others. This obviously has a major impact on our love relationships, especially when conflicts arise. Who we fall in love with is primarily determined by unconscious processes in our limbic system and reptilian brain. The hormones that are released when we have our Primary Fantasy met and fall in love often cause us to temporarily ignore red flags that signal incompatibilities in our levels of consciousness. Once the honeymoon phase is over and the hormones wear off, potential differences become apparent. No matter how much we may be sexually attracted to our partner, or complement each other in our psychological makeup and unconscious, or share interests, lifestyle choices, dreams, values and passions, the quality and outcome of our love relationship will ultimately be determined by our own and our partner’s level of consciousness. Attachment Type/ Style Another model for considering personality types is attachment types/ styles. People vary greatly in their need for intimacy and closeness. There are four general attachment styles that are formed in early childhood through the relationship with the primary caregiver( s). Once established, the style stays with adults and shows up in how they relate in intimate relationships and in how they parent their children. Young children need to develop a dependable relationship with at least one primary caregiver in order for their social and emotional development to occur normally. Without this security, they will suffer serious psychological and social difficulties. How the parents or caregivers respond to their infants in the first two years, particularly during times of distress, establishes the attachment style their children develop. This childhood style will go on to guide their feelings, thoughts, and expectations in their adult relationships in profound and enduring ways. There are four styles: (1) secure (2) anxious, (3) avoidant and (4) anxious/ avoidant.[ 234] These early imprints show up in our adult relationship lives. We all carry a psychological blueprint that holds the details and lingering imprints of our heritage and life experiences. The unacknowledged/ unconscious parts of that blueprint contain the information that drives our irrational fears, anxieties, coping mechanisms, and defenses, as well as our creativity, dreams, and passions. And just as the conscious aspects of our interior and exterior dimensions have opposing feminine and masculine polarities that complement and attract each other, so do the unconscious parts. There are five major components of the unconscious that are of relevance for the mysterious magnetism or aversion that lovers experience at various times on the level of their bodies, minds, hearts and souls. (1) The ground unconscious represents our unrealized embedded potentials. All humans carry the potential after conception to grow in their physicality and in their consciousness (from body to mind, soul, and spirit). The unrealized stages of these future growth potentials are not actively suppressed or involuntarily repressed; they just have not developed yet. Examples are certain aspects of a child’s sexual impulses and preferences that have not emerged yet due to their young age. Even though each human or tree will develop its own unique qualities, the deep structures are embedded in the as-yet unrealized potential of their kind. In case of the child, we know it will become an adult, in the case of the acorn, it is already determined that it will not become a dandelion or a birch tree. The ground unconscious explains why people are unconsciously attracted to an opposite partner with whom they can grow in kind and degree to realize their full potentials and to become fully human at all levels of their being. (2) The archaic unconscious is linked to the unique predispositions and instincts that individuals have inherited from their ancestral past. These are embedded in their reptilian brain stem and DNA, and existed a-priori before language was learned, conceptual knowledge was developed, and personal events were remembered. This facet of the unconscious causes people to experience and respond to the world in a manner similar to the ways that their forefathers did. This innate set of tendencies explains why most people feel more comfortable and resonant with a partner who shares their own heritage. (3) The submerged unconscious is what Carl Jung called the shadow, or the subconscious. It represents all experiences and memories that were once conscious and are now screened out of awareness, either through simple forgetting, or a more forceful repression, negation, or dissociation. These are the elements of our existence that are considered to be incompatible with the ego (which is a mask, and is often referred to as our false sense of self.) If we are faced with these elements, we react defensively or aggressively, out of fear of re-experiencing the hurt that made us repress the memory of the event in the first place. As psychologists know, “anger masks fear, and fear masks hurt.” The anima and animus complex is a sub-component of the submerged unconscious that gets projected onto the opposite sex. A man who tends to repress his feelings may be attracted to a woman who is overly emotional. A woman who is unsure of herself and seeks constant approval from others may be attracted to a self-centered and arrogant man. A man who thinks of himself as unworthy may be attracted to a successful woman with a higher education. A woman who finds life to be meaningless may be attracted to a spirited man who is full of passion and purpose. Sooner or later, these lovers will become irritated by their partner’s qualities that they had repressed in themselves in the first place, and conflicts in the form of fighting (to change the other) and withdrawing emerge … unless the unconscious projections and behavioral patterns are made conscious through “owning,”[ 253] and used for healing and growth. This explains why people are attracted to partners with mutually compatible pathologies who challenge them to heal their psychological wounds. It also explains why the magnetic attraction that drew some partners together suddenly dissolves as those prior wounds are healed, and they end up parting ways. (4) The embedded unconscious was called the “superego” by Freud, referring to aspects of the self (ego) that can critically observe other parts of its existence, such as the body, behavior, thoughts, feelings, emotions, or even its essence—but never itself. It is the inner voice (judge, protector, skeptic, controller, seeker, etc.), that consciously represses, but is unconscious of its own existence. Others—especially a soulmate—may recognize this embedded unconscious “self” and mirror it back, until the subject of the previous level of awareness becomes the object of the subject of the next level, as we examined in the section about spiritual development in Chapter 5. This explains why we are attracted to an opposite and equal partner who sees beyond our false self, as it is our deepest soul desire to be seen for who we truly are and awaken to our deepest essence. (5) The emergent unconscious is similar to the ground and archaic unconscious above, as its potentials have not emerged yet. The difference is that the ground and archaic unconscious are based in the past (in our examples above, the evolution of oak trees throughout history, and the resulting givens for its growth as an oak tree—both unconsciously embedded in the acorn) and that the emergent unconscious is based in the future (the novel unfolding of this particular oak tree). For example, people who reject ideas of higher levels of consciousness development, such as Amber rejecting Orange, don’t do this by actively repressing views from a higher altitude. They have simply not evolved to higher levels of consciousness yet, and hence are unconscious of them. This explains why people—and especially women—who struggle at a particular level of consciousness are attracted to a partner at the next higher level. Humans appear to have an intuitive capacity to scan another person’s unconscious makeup.[ 256] Partners to whom we feel most drawn emotionally (rather than sexually or empathetically) mirror our unconscious most prominently in two ways: (1) they had experiences similar to ours during their upbringing, and, more significantly, (2) they developed coping mechanisms that are different from our own. This unconscious fit of “mutually compatible pathologies” causes us to gravitate towards and fall in love with people who complement our psychological makeup most aptly and who thereby provide us with an opportunity to learn, heal, grow, and awaken. There are two kinds of overarching purposes; our Biological Purpose or “biological imperative,” which we share with all living beings, and our Transcendental Purpose, which is unique to humans, as only humans can awaken to it. Science now shows us, that not only our Biological Purpose, but also the roots of our Transcendental Purpose are genetically predispositioned by nature. Both purposes are then shaped through gene expression and nurture, have a conscious and unconscious dimension, and, as we will see below, are driven by what we will call a co-creative impulse. Our Biological Purpose is to perpetuate our existence through self-sustaining processes such as metabolizing, procreation, territorialism, competition, cooperation, quality-of-life seeking, group forming, and agency.[ 301] Our Transcendental Purpose is to create (more) goodness,[ 302] truth, beauty, or functioning (as depicted by the four quadrants) in support of the well-being of others. We call it Transcendental,[ 303] in that it goes beyond our Biological Purpose. Because our Transcendental Purpose is genetically predisposition[ 304] in kind and degree, it is “a priori”[ 305] in the sense that the potentials to express it is present in us even before our sense observations and language emerge.[ 306] When we awaken to and live our Transcendental Purpose, its impact in the world is dependent on several factors: the kind and degree of our natural talents, our level of consciousness and spiritual development, our gender, and the opportunities, freedoms, and support that our social and cultural environment afford us. The ILR model argues that these four essential human qualities are not the result of some mysterious higher power or of some given evolutionary directionality towards ever more complexity and love (or goodness, truth, beauty, and functioning), but that they became genetically encoded through our unique sexual selection process, and that the seeming upward directionality was co-created through the female fear and male shame dynamic that emerged after humans became self-conscious. Seven steps to living our Transcendental Purpose In order to live our Transcendental Purpose, we need to: 1. Awaken to the fact that our lives have a purpose beyond the fulfillment of our Biological Purpose and the finding of happiness through hedonistic pursuits. 2. Remove psychological blocks that prevent us from awakening to our Transcendental Purpose and living it. 3. Identify our natural talents and resulting Transcendental Purpose in kind and degree. 4. Acquire the necessary skills through learning and practice to express our Transcendental Purpose in a competent way. 5. Serve needs in ways that are valued by others. 6. Continuously increase our impact by expanding our altitude, depth, and calling. 7. Become aware in which stage of maturity our Transcendental Purpose is. There are four general types of methods that have been developed by purpose guides to support us in discovering our natural talents and resulting Transcendental Purpose. We call these four discovery method types (1) Autobiographical, (2) Absent, (3) Ego-Transcending, and (4) Ego-Affirming. The expression of our Transcendental Purpose is not static, but likely to evolve through increasing levels of altitude, depth, and calling. Taken together, these three facets determine what impact the expression of our Transcendental Purpose will have as it is realized in visible form in our life. In short we can say: Impact = Altitude + Depth + Calling Altitude is a key contributing factor in the impact that enacting our Transcendental Purpose will have on the world. By “altitude” in this context we mean a combination of our level of consciousness with (1) how far-reaching into the world our considerations for others go, (2) how rich of an historical awareness we bring to our efforts, (3) how far into the future our concerns reach, and (4) how infused our work is with intentional caring for others. To define depth we will use the spiritual state-stages we covered in Part 1 under “Spiritual Development.” Depth determines how living our Transcendental Purpose either impacts the gross material or physical realms, the subtle mind and intentional levels, the causal meaning-making structures that are informed by feeling and intuition, the pure witness of direct or immediate experience, or the level of non-dual awareness which entails all the previous levels including the self or pure witness. When we enact our Transcendental Purpose at the gross level of depth, we create more goodness, truth, beauty or functioning at the concrete-operational physical, behavioral, or material level. We may for example create mythic/ religious rituals and practices that bring out the good in people; perform experiments to observe how material objects interact with each other; promote health through better nutrition, exercise, medicine, and medical procedures; create art such as paintings and sculptures; or impact lives through better infrastructure and technology. When we live out our Transcendental Purpose at the subtle level of depth, we create more goodness, truth, beauty or functioning from the formal-operational level of the mind. We may for example create or change ideologies, policies, and educational programs that better support people to get along with each other and become stewards of their environment; design mathematical formulas that help us to better understand the physical world or social dynamics; create moving and inspiring music and poetry, or support others to function better through psychological healing. When we enact our Transcendental Purpose at the causal level of depth, we create more goodness, truth, beauty or functioning by challenging and perhaps inspiring change in the feelings, intuitions and resulting meaning-making structures of people. We may for example foster idealistic dialectical approaches to discourse; further notions of unconditional love; present new views in order to liberate people from limiting dogma, ideology or other underlying unhealthy mental constructs; engage in noetic sciences[ 536] including research on topics such as spontaneous remission, meditation, consciousness, alternative healing practices, consciousness-based healthcare, spirituality, human potential, psychic abilities, and psychokinesis; or produce conceptual or improvised art (e.g. in jazz music or improv theatre). When we live out our Transcendental Purpose at the level of the pure witness of depth, we create more goodness, truth, beauty or functioning through being fully present and providing others with immediate or direct state experiences that they may then transform into permanently accessible stages. This may be achieved through certain forms of body work, spiritual practices, engaging conversations, poetic writing, sacred dance, tantric sexuality, eye gazing, transpersonal psychology, vision quests, nature experiences, concentration sports, or physical exercise. Providing these transcendental experiences can have a deep transformative effect on people that awakens them to showing more empathy, love, kindness, and responsibility towards others and all creation, and cause them to think more deeply about their own Transcendental Purpose. When we live out our Transcendental Purpose at the non-dual level of depth, we create more goodness, truth, beauty, or functioning by integrating all the previous levels. We not only abide in the eternal and infinite sense of oneness through direct or immediate experiences in the previous Pure Witness state/ stage, but engage fully in the ever-changing forms of matter, life-forms and consciousness which emerge in time and space, and of which our bodies and minds are an inseparable and integral part of. In other words, we move from the being-state of the pure witness to the inter-becoming stage of all creation at all levels (gross, subtle, causal) in all four quadrants. As previously mentioned, non-dual awareness is thus not a state-stage in itself, but an embrace and enactment of our Transcendental Purpose at the level of all previous levels of depth. Co-creating with a partner who shares our level of depth will increase the impact of enacting our Transcendental Purpose. The third element that affects the impact of enacting our Transcendental Purpose is determined by our calling to either maintain, improve, or create. We may feel called to maintain something which already exists and creates more goodness, truth, beauty or functioning, and we do so by stepping into someone else’s footsteps or religious lineage. Or we feel called to improve something that already exists. Or, we feel called to advance into novelty by creating something totally new. Humans have a Biological Purpose that unfolds similarly to other creatures from gestation to death, and a Transcendental Purpose of creating more goodness, truth, beauty and functioning that is unique to us. Both are genetically predispositioned. What meaning people give to their existence and what meaning they derive from their purpose largely depends on where they stand in relation to creationism, evolutionary theory, or intelligent design. As a unifying alternative, the ILR model proposes a co-creative impulse that drives everything that emerges into actuality through co-creation, which can then be observed, loved and honored, empirically analyzed, and studied. We humans experience the co-creative impulse as our will to live, our desire to love and be loved, and our sexual drive to co-create and procreate. To identify what our life’s purpose beyond survival, co-creation, procreation, and hedonistic quality-of-life seeking is, we first followed our biological and psychological trajectory from conception to death, with a focus on genetic predispositions, brain development, the nurturing we received in our early years, and skill development through practice, all of which laid the foundation and are the prerequisite for living our Transcendental Purpose—once we awaken to it. To identify their Transcendental Purpose most people first need to remove psychological blocks that impair their vision and prevent them from change. They can then proceed to apply one or more of four discovery methods that are designed to help them achieve clarity about their natural talents and resulting Transcendental Purpose, and how they can best serve the needs of others in ways that they will value and reward. This service to others is most effectively provided when shared in an Integral Love Relationship between equal and opposite partners who hold the same vision and share the same mission, and who create synergy by balancing and harmonizing their healthy feminine and masculine polarities between their four quadrants, and complementing each other’s strengths, and compensating for their weaknesses. It is important to note that people at all stages of spiritual and consciousness development can awaken to their Transcendental Purpose and create more goodness, truth, beauty, and functioning. As we will see throughout the rest of the book, the way forward for humanity is not only in people moving into higher stages of consciousness and to awaken to non-dual awareness to solve the problems that were created at the previous stages, but for more people awakening to and sharing their Transcendental Purpose in Transcendental Love relationships at whatever level they are at. Humans have genetically predispositioned natural talents to create more goodness, truth, beauty, and functioning in the world, which separates us from other species. These four capacities became encoded in our DNA (or Soul) through females selecting males as partners who were not only good protectors and providers, but also showed empathy towards their partners, proved their intelligence, wooded and entertained women with their creativity, and helped them with their practical kinesthetic skills. Excelling in one or more of these areas was often the only alternative for physically weaker Beta males to effectively compete for attractive mates. Unlike our Biological Purpose, which unfolds naturally in all healthy human beings, we awaken to our Transcendental Purpose spontaneously, or when we begin to ask deeper questions about the meaning of our lives beyond fulfilling our Biological Purpose. We fully live our Transcendental Purpose after we align ourselves with our genetically predispositioned natural talents and strengths, develop the necessary skills to express them in a professional way, and put them in service of the needs of others in life-affirming ways that are valued and rewarded by them. When we fall in love with an equal and opposite partner who shares our Transcendental Purpose in kind, degree, impact, and stage of maturity, a major shift takes place. We leave behind the generally unsustainable forms of love that are purely driven by physical and psychological urges, and social and cultural expectations, lead to asymmetric transactions between the three chakra pairs, and we move towards symmetric Transcendental Love relationships. The Primary Fantasy as major attractor between the first and second chakra, which is often unrealistic and in many cases in opposition to creating more goodness, truth, beauty, and functioning in the world, is moderated or even transcended as the primary sexual attractor, and replaced by the suprasexual attractor of the shared purpose. The same holds true for the other two asymmetric pairs of male/ female attractors, power in exchange for care, and creativity in exchange for intuition and wisdom. It is worth mentioning again that living our Transcendental Purpose that leads to Transcendental Love relationships is a potential that can emerge at any stage of vertical consciousness development. Couples in these relationships are no longer driven by the fear-shame dynamic and by the expectation of having their hedonistic needs and desires fulfilled by a partner. Instead, they take a eudaimonic approach to love and life by focusing on shared meaning, self-realization, flourishing, and contribution. They move from the asymmetric dialectic of love that is driven by lack, need, and desire, to a symmetric dialectic of love that is not only inspired by procreative impulses and the needs of the Biological Purpose, but by their Transcendental Purpose. While people who live their Transcendental Purpose are still attracted to mature partners who are financially, physically, sexually, mentally, emotionally and spiritually fit and healthy, the main attractor and sexual selection criteria, and what they ultimately fall in love with, is that which is co-created between them and offered in service to the world through combining their complementary natural talents and balancing and harmonizing their healthy feminine and masculine polarities between the four quadrants, at the level of all seven chakras in a way that they could not do as individuals. As long as men and women had divided gender roles, with males being protectors and providers with most rights and responsibilities in the public sphere, and females being caretakers in the domestic sphere, it was natural that the sexual selection process and the ensuing love relationships reflected these divisions. Because couples in traditional marriages depended on each other for their survival and well-being, their love often lasted a lifetime. When modern and postmodern women gained the same rights in the public sphere as men, and having children became optional, most of the social dependencies disappeared, while the biological Primary Fantasies and cultural romantic myths about love remained in the traditional way. This new reality of modern and postmodern social life caused many couples to end their relationships when the desires that had attracted them to each other and made them fall in love were no longer fulfilled. The answer from many love and relationship experts to this problem is that several consecutive relationships/ marriages and widespread singlehood are the new social norm, especially now that more people live longer. In fact, a multibillion dollar industry of expensive divorce lawyers, couples therapists, relationship coaches, dating websites and apps, and lately conscious uncoupling coaches has established itself that benefits from this new social reality, and none of them have a vested interest in ending the “pump and dump” cycles of modern love. Of course, going back to traditional gender roles and asymmetrical love relationships is not an option for modern and postmodern singles and couples. The only way out of the usually painful, destabilizing, expensive, toxic and sad divorces and breakups of transactional love relationships, the negative socioeconomic, environmental and personal impacts of singlehood, and the frustrating cycles of serial dating is to advance into symmetrical Transcendental Love relationships with a shared Transcendental Purpose. In a personal email to me on 1/ 23/ 2017 Ken Wilber pointed out that lower birthrates at higher levels of development have little to no effect on the downward shift of consciousness in western societies. He wrote: “So, I do think your general ideas on biological procreation tending to correlate with some bad news, is basically fine. But correlation is not causation, so I would just tweak and refine your view being more careful exactly how the social (and individual) holons are being defined and measured. (As I see it, when you try and correct integral theory views on holons, you basically just confuse all these different types explained here and then try to straighten that out, without being totally clear on just what is going on here, so I’d be careful with that part). Also, as for the downward shift in the overall center of gravity of the worldwide social holon—which is your major concern—the factor that I think is the MOST important in what you are talking about, is the fact that the actual realities of integral development itself are not part of any major sociocultural wisdom anywhere on the planet. Humans simply MUST have, as central feedback in their own evolution, the facts about development itself. If we don’t collectively know and acknowledge that this development, e.g., goes from egocentric to ethnocentric to world-centric, then we won’t know to actually aim for that in our own cultural unfolding. Especially disastrous is the “aperspectival madness” that treats all values and all outcomes as equally true and important—that mistake alone is a cultural disaster of the first magnitude (it denies and deconstructs all growth hierarchies—which deconstructs all growth, period—which is exactly why evolution has stalled and starting slipping downward). Unless and until that information is actually part of a cultural wisdom, then having birthrates change won’t fundamentally help the situation. So that’s my major concern here…. Every bad news item you point out is due, at least in major part, to the fact that there is no universally accepted overriding value of development itself: since that is not part of any feedback structure in any culture on this planet, then of course things will continue to go downhill until it is. We don’t do anything about it because we don’t know anything about development itself, and so the major cause of the disaster goes unnoticed and untreated, and spells no good news at all…. Haphazardly increasing birthrates at the very upper end won’t fundamentally change the problem here, I truly don’t believe. So what I see as the most central problem is exactly what I outlined in the Trump piece. We have seen a decline in the center of gravity of the worldwide cultural holon over the past few decades (measuring the social holon with the metric of highest expectable level of individual holons in the membership—the worldwide “humanity” holon has gotten very much bigger, while its center of gravity has gotten significantly less), and the single item most responsible for that is the aperspectival madness that has managed to drench the entire global culture with its stupidity. When Orange was in charge, there was at least the traction of a desirable vertical meritocracy—higher levels, however viewed, were genuinely thought to be better than lower levels. But with extreme Green, even that is gone; you can just see the magnet of higher-level growth hierarchies removed entirely from the upper end of evolution, so that evolution itself badly stalls—which is exactly what has happened, allowing it to dribble downwards. This includes a slow loss of Integral, as you say (although I’d definitely point out, in the same breath, that the influence of Integral among thought leaders has risen sharply during that period, and has exploded in the last five years. I have never had so many requests from so many mainstream thought leaders to be part of what they’re doing, and who embraced Integral itself very enthusiastically—it’s really been stunning, just stunning). But until that higher-level magnet of leading-edge intelligence is put back in operation, things will continue to stall and slowly slide downward, no matter what happens with birthrates.” This shift away from assigning the highest value to individuals and instead to co-creative couples arises from the realization that individual human and cultural evolution is not “automatically” progressing towards higher and higher stages of consciousness through an evolutionary purpose, telos, God, higher power, idealistic dialectical process, or even technical advances, but through co-creation and procreation, and by the insight that we can only realize our full human potentials at the level of all seven chakras (become fully human) in committed love relationships. As we have seen, the seeming progress that humanity has made in the past 250,000 years was not directed by metaphysical evolutionary forces, but by the neutral co-creative impulse, which we experience as our sex drive, and the sexual selection process in which females chose and procreated with males who were not only physically fit protectors and providers, but who also created more goodness, truth, beauty, and functioning to become attractive to women, increase the chances of survival of their offspring, and to improve their female partner’s quality of life.