This paper describes the theory behind a new program of psychospiritual growth which is oriented toward fundamental social change, where transformation of consciousness is applied to community and planetary problems and opportunities. Transformation work includes elements of psychotherapy, spiritual work, and social action. 

Healthy Capacities

My understanding of Transformation is organized around healthy capacities, such as purpose, love, interconnectedness, hope, power, and passion. These can be seen as healthy psychological and social capacities or as aspects of spiritual reality. In Transformation work, we develop these capacities in ourselves and our groups and organizations.

Healthy Capacities in Various Arenas. Each capacity can be applied in various arenas of a person’s life. It can be understood and explored with respect to one’s personal life, interpersonal relationships, membership in collectives of various kinds, spiritual development, and social transformation. For example, let’s look at the healthy capacity of purpose, which is related to one’s life purpose, or the meaning of one’s life:

1. In the personal arena, it has to do with finding fulfillment in life.
2. In the interpersonal arena, it has to do with love and service to others.
3. In the collective arena, purpose has to with your role or contribution to the functioning or well-being of a collective such as a family, community, organization, social movement, cultural group, nation, etc.
4. In the spiritual arena, it refers to a spiritual calling, the experience of being an agent of God or Spirit.
5. In social transformation, purpose involves being called to contribute to fundamental change in society.

Capacities in Social Transformation. The following table shows how a variety of healthy capacities are related to social transformation. 

Collective Capacities. Not only do people have capacities, but groups or collectives also have capacities. Most individual capacities also apply to collectives; for example, we can look at the power of an individual or the power of a cultural group. In addition, there are capacities that apply primarily to collectives, for example, cohesiveness, democracy, inclusiveness, and diversity. These collective capacities depend on both the sum of the capacities of the people in the collective and also the processes and structures used by the collective. These understandings are inspired by Tom Atlee’s co-intelligence philosophy. In Transformation work, we not only develop our personal capacities but also our ability to foster various collective capacities in the groups we are part of. For example, you might develop your ability to help organizations become more inclusive rather than closed and narrow.

Presence

Each healthy capacity involves not only a certain ability to act in the world but also an experiential core or state of consciousness. When a healthy capacity is activated, the person experiences a specific quality of presence which can be brought to consciousness if he or she pays attention. For example, purpose often feels like a deep sense of grounding and maturity in the lower part of the body. Compassion is a quality of lovingkindness felt in the heart. These are similar to "aspects of essence" in the Diamond Approach of A. H. Almaas.

When a healthy capacity is blocked, certain psychological issues prevent the person from experiencing the particular quality of presence associated with that capacity, at least in certain arenas of life. Therefore, part of the work of Transformation involves regaining experiential access to these states. This includes accessing emotions, body sensations and movement, connection with nature, and spiritual states.

Levels of Consciousness

Each healthy capacity develops through various levels of increasing consciousness. Let’s look at compassion:

1. At one personal level, it means feeling love for people you are close to (or similar to) who are in pain.
2. The next level includes compassion for your own pain and difficulties. For example, sensing the pain behind your difficulty in being as powerful as you would like.
3. Another level involves feeling compassion for people who are different from you in race, religion, or culture, including people whom you have never met personally because they live in other parts of the world. 
4. A higher level includes feeling compassion for people who disagree with you about society or whose actions seem destructive or evil. This might help you to understand their situation and therefore work with them more effectively.
5. At another level, there is compassion for all human beings, for our struggles to deal with suffering and live happy lives in a difficult world. This involves compassion for all beings, including animals and the natural world, and a desire that all be free from suffering and open to love. This could naturally lead you to live your life in such a way as to foster this.
6. At still another level we recognize that we are love, that we are all love and all connected, that the suffering of others is our suffering and their freedom is our freedom. These higher levels do not supersede the direct personal expression of compassion.

The movement to a higher level of consciousness means that you become able to recognize and understand limiting beliefs that at the previous level unconsciously influenced your experience and behavior. This notion is similar to the theories of Maslow, Wilber, Robert Kegan, and Lawrence Kohlberg, among others. For example, at level (1) above, there is a (perhaps) unconscious belief the only people worth caring about are those you are close to or who are part of your cultural group. There is also a belief that compassion can only be directed toward another person, not toward yourself. In levels (2) and (3), these limiting beliefs are recognized and transcended. For instance, you realize that people of other races and cultures are just as human and worthy of compassion as your own people.

Consciousness and Social Transformation. Advancement of consciousness is not only valuable for individual spiritual growth, it is necessary for our society to move to the next step of social evolution. Just as we recognize that a democracy cannot be successful with uneducated, disempowered people, so solutions to our current problems can only be created by people with a sufficient level of consciousness. Many people in our society are still at a level of consciousness where they are defined by their relationships and their culture’s values. They are unable to step back and see our modern world view from a distance, to wake up from the cultural trance. By developing their consciousness, they can become capable of creating their own sense of values and guiding their own lives from within, with autonomy and self-direction. This helps people to change their lives in ways that will naturally contribute to changing society in positive directions. This level of consciousness is also necessary for creating the kind of social structures we need.

In addition, other steps are necessary. A person might be able to create her own values and choices in life but not recognize others’ right to do the same. Therefore there is a need for further development of a consciousness that respects other people as whole, autonomous beings. This is necessary for a healthy culture in today’s pluralistic world. At an even higher level of consciousness, people recognize that the autonomous self and personal values we each create are not the whole story. We see that our selves are really part of something much greater and our world views are only partial truths. We recognize the intrinsic wholeness and interconnectedness of everything while retaining our individuality. This level of consciousness, though difficult to attain, is important for social transformation because it enables the kind of cooperative social processes we need today. It is especially useful for social change agents because it allows us to understand and work with a wide variety of people.

Blocks

Each healthy capacity can be blocked by particular problematic psychological structures and patterns of behavior. For example, compassion can be blocked by being judgmental, and interconnectedness can be blocked by a strictly Newtonian world view. In Transformation work, we will be developing an understanding of which structures and behavior patterns are likely to block which capacities. This gives us specific information about how to work on the blocks in order to unlock and awaken the capacities.

Origins of Blocks. Blocks to capacities can have four origins—family, culture, society, and biology.

1. Psychotherapy recognizes that some blocks derive from a person’s family of origin. For example, a person may have little sense of personal power because of growing up with a domineering parent. Such blocks may be somewhat unique to each person.
2. In addition, many blocks derive from a person’s culture or subculture (even though this may be partially transmitted through the family). This allows us to identify those blocks that are widespread in our society. For example, almost all of us struggle with a tendency to evaluate ourselves and others in a competitive or judgmental way, whether we place ourselves above or below others. This blocks compassion, appreciation, and value. By working through our blocks that have cultural origins, we are playing a part in changing our culture.

As is well known, some cultural blocks operate differently for men and women or for different racial or ethnic groups. For example, men tend (on the average) to have blocks to vulnerability and relatedness and women tend to have blocks to assertiveness.

3. Many blocks derive not only from the way we are affected psychologically by our culture but the way our lives and opportunities are shaped by our technological and social structures. For example, our economy tends to erode community because it forces us to rely on impersonal economic transactions. And the architecture of our buildings and the structure of our cities make community and connection with nature more difficult. By studying these influences, we can come to see how our society effects us and come to a clearer understanding of what needs to be changed.
4. Some blocks result from our biological survival imperative. For example, our instincts for aggression and sexuality are the underpinnings for blocks to our capacities for cooperation and appreciation of diversity. Despite the biological basis for these blocks, they can be worked through because we also have biological tendencies that go in the opposite direction and actually support healthy capacities. For example, we have a biological tendency toward cooperation.

Systematic Understanding of Blocks. I have already developed a detailed delineation of various blocks to interpersonal capacities. This is called the Pattern System and has been used in understanding diagnosis and treatment in psychotherapy. A. H. Almaas has mapped out the relationship between psychodynamic issues and various spiritual capacities, which is used in the Diamond approach to spiritual realization. The current theory is being developed as an extension of the Pattern System which includes insights from the Diamond approach and collective and social transformation capacities.

Cultural Blocks. Since some of the blocks to healthy capacities derive from our culture, it is useful to identify blocks that are common in our society. The following chart shows a few of these:

Blocks to Collective Capacities. These blocks can take the form of (a) structures in a group such as rules and procedures, or (b) group norms and values. For example, a hierarchical power structure will tend to block interconnectedness in an organization. A norm of back-biting or a valuing of ego aggrandizement will tend to block cooperation. In Transformation work, we work on creating collective structures and values that promote healthy group capacities.

Overview

The Transformation program is based on an understanding of humanity’s current evolutionary and historical position. It includes our place in

• Cosmic evolution (see The Universe Story by Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme)
• Human social evolution (see my book Transforming Human Culture: Social Evolution and the Planetary Crisis)
• American history (see The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe)

The work of Transformation involves three components: (1) Regaining the blocked state or quality of presence corresponding to each capacity, (2) horizontal development of each capacity as it applies to a variety of arenas of living, and (3) vertical development of each capacity through increasing levels of consciousness.

There is a close relationships between this kind of individual development and the social evolution of humanity, as I have delineated in my book Transforming Human Culture. Regaining presence is equivalent to reclaiming those qualities that were present in our early history, such as community, natural living, and participatory consciousness. In my study of social evolution, I call these "ground qualities." Developing higher levels of consciousness is related to humanity’s development of emergent qualities such as reflexive consciousness and complex social structure. This theoretical correspondence promotes the integration of personal and social transformation.

Horizontal and Vertical Development. Some spiritual paths seem to assume that vertical development of consciousness is all that is needed; when there is a high enough level of consciousness, it automatically applies horizontally to all arenas of one’s life. However, experience has shown that this is often not true. Certainly, any increase in consciousness has a tendency to affect a person’s overall way of being, but because of our human tendency toward compartmentalization, it is common to be advanced in one aspect and blocked in another. For example, a person could have a high level of development of his experience of spiritual interconnectedness but not understand ecological interconnectedness.

Many Western spiritual teachers have recognized the need for psychotherapeutic work to deal with arenas of life that aren’t traditionally touched by spiritual work, especially sexuality, relationships, and the body. For a fully rounded development, we also need to enhance our capacities for working in groups and contributing to social transformation, both of which are customarily left out of both therapy and spiritual work. This is one of the main contributions of the Transformation program.

Integration is important in this work—not only integration of psychology, spirituality, and social transformation, but also integration within each of those areas. For example, in psychotherapy this means integrating psychodynamic insights with experiential process work. In social transformation work, it means integrating ecopsychology, social justice work, feminism, sustainability, and many other threads, as represented in the pages of Yes! magazine, for example.

In conclusion, this expanded version of the Pattern System delineates patterns of personal/spiritual growth and blocks to that growth and how they relate to healthy capacities in all arenas of life, especially those related to collective functioning and social transformation. It will be used in four ways in Transformation groups: