How would you rate humanity’s performance at fulfilling our potential, so far, on a pass/fail grading system? Has the pass/fail ratio for various parts of the world changed over the centuries? Are there some places on earth today where people are doing well-enough as a group to receive a “pass” grade? Are there other groups of people who are clearly “failing” at living up to their potential as human beings? How does your opinion of “human nature” affect your grading system? After all, if human nature is inherently vile, then villains would receive a passing grade, wouldn’t they? Well, here is my personal grading system based on my understanding of the quadrune mind model’s perspective on human nature.
What Does a Successful Human Life Look Like?
It is in the successful human life that the meanings of “wholeness” and “holiness” become most synonymous. Wholeness can be understood as healthy and uninjured. Holiness refers to Godliness. The person living up to their potential as a human being is able to see the wholeness of the universe and all that is. But that requires a healthy human brain, either uninjured or healed from injury. It is the integrated “wholeness” of the healthy brain that enables a human being to see the universe through God’s eyes: that it is Good, including us. There is no division between the secular and the sacred. Humans understand that we and our little planet are an integral and natural part of this whole universe. The successful human being, then, lives respectfully, skillfully, and appreciatively in just such a holistic world.
What Does a Human Being Who Is Failing their True Nature Look Like?
The person who is failing to live up to their potential as a human being lives in a world of ubiquitous borders, boundaries, identities, and walls. They believe that the categories we make up to divide everything in the world into little bits are true, real, and important. Consequently, national borders were drawn by God; the boundary dividing good and evil is static and everlasting; to be Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Democrat, Republican, Capitalist, Communist, White, Black, American, Canadian, Male, Female, ad infinitum, is more important, and better than, being human; and walls, gated communities, private islands, and prisons are go-to solutions for relationship problems among people. In fact, it is the artificially created identities we perceive dividing “us” and “them” that condone all our failed human behaviors toward others, from rudely taunting referees by sports fans, to cheating and lying to people to get their money and property, to genocide. It’s all a demonstration of our spiritual immaturity. Everything in the physically fragmented outer world, which we believe exists “out there,” is a manifestation of an unintegrated, unhealed, afflicted inner brain and the resulting dominant immature mind.
What Is the Probability That You and I Are Failing to Live Up to Our Human Nature?
Most people in the world, perhaps 75-80%, consider themselves to be religious or spiritual to some degree. However, I think that far fewer people would be considered to be successfully living a spiritual life most of the time, as described above.
Abraham Maslow estimated that from less than 1% to 2% of the population achieve self-actualization. Even so, at his death, he was extending his model toward a human need for self-transcendence. I must believe he would have an even lower estimate of success at that level of living.
Ken Wilber estimates that 5% to 0.1% of the population achieve increasingly difficult levels of spiritual development in his model. He believes that it would take 10% of the population to be living a high level of spirituality to make a difference in the world.
Buddhists make up about 4% of the world population. I believe that Gautama Buddha was the best spiritual teacher in history. However, I don’t believe that all Buddhists fully actualize his teachings. Similarly, about 30% of the world identify as Christians, including multitudes of people who do not replicate, or even understand, the essential life of Jesus as a mystic.
Carl Rogers was wise enough not to hazard a guess as to what percentage of the population expressed “unconditional positive regard” toward others. Instead, he focused on what is needed to achieve such a high spiritually related approach to life.
I’m not as wise as Rogers: An estimate that about 2% of people in the world successfully fulfill our spiritual human nature most of the time seems reasonable to me. Of course, this means that 98% of us living fail to do so most of the time. It’s interesting to ponder what that means for the many thinkers who have made declarations about human nature based on what they see most people doing, most of the time.
What Would a 98% Human Nature Failure Rate Look Like?
First of all, it normalizes people failing to live up to their true, spiritual human nature. Failure could mean such dramatic examples as I’ve given above, or much more subtle ever-present examples in everyday life. To get a 98% failure rate, I use a very high standard for human nature. I determine “failing to live up to our human nature” to include all of us who use any discrete categories in our perception of the world the majority of the time.
It is a pernicious and pervasive failure to accept the belief that reality is fundamentally segmented at all. When we are first starting to heal our afflicted brains and integrate our immature minds, seeing the world in all of its “wholeness” takes a great deal of awareness and intentional effort. However, when our Grownup mind is dominant, it actually becomes easy to see and interact with the world in this way. That’s the point of spirituality being our true human nature—once we have Grown Up, our “holy” human nature becomes completely natural. For the small portion of human beings who are successfully living their human nature, they naturally take the right actions to reduce suffering and increase healing for all in any given situation, without having to struggle against dichotomous ways of seeing the world.
What Can We Do About It?
We can begin by holding ourselves to a higher standard—today! We can become aware of, and push back on, our impulses to divide up reality into categorical dichotomies, such as good/bad, beautiful/ugly, and especially, us/them.
And we can have higher expectations of the people around us, remembering that expectations are not obligations. That is, if people do not meet our expectations, we would not punish them. We can express appreciation when we are treated with integrity, honor, and maturity by people as we go through the day—and not be surprised.
We identify ourselves as a human being, in common with all humanity, above all dichotomous identities (we could go a step further and identify as “living beings” in common with all other living creatures, or even participants in existence, in common with all else that “is”). We take the responsibility to be stewards of the world seriously because of our great power to harm nature. We continually seek opportunities to increase our skills to make life better for our family, friends, and strangers that we will never meet in the present world or in the world of the future.
Whether you agree with my numbers or not, perhaps we can agree that humanity could do better than we are doing now. “Good” isn’t good enough. Spiritual wholeness is not something we’re awarded after we die. Spiritual wholeness is something we earn, and help each other earn, during this lifetime. Humanity, and the planet, will look very different when we start finally living up to the promise of our unique, spiritual human nature.
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