A few months ago, I saw this image on X from a post written by Peter Limberger.
I drew the red line on it to demonstrate the path I’ve seen most people traverse who seek to hold both high agency and high consciousness.
The journey goes something like this…
You start out in victimhood (bottom left), learn how to take responsibility for your life and make shit happen, then realize behind all the achieving and killing it, is a bunch of unconscious insecurity and low-self esteem.
Realizing that you’ve spent most of your life robotically experiencing life from your unconscious wounds and conditioning redirects you on a consciousness path. In spiritual bypass land, you might start to look down on all the achievement activities that once fueled you.
Eventually, you realize that orienting your entire life around healing all day isn’t really the answer either. So you reorient again to begin learning how to pursue expanding consciousness and contributing to the world at the same time.
The road described is a windy and painful road. I know, because I’ve lived it!
I recently had a conversation with Brian Whetten to investigate whether it’s possible to minimize the windiness?
He’s spent the better part of 25 years reverse engineering this question by studying people who are operating from a place of both high consciousness and high agency.
I found his ideas from our conversation so intriguing that I wanted to write this post on them in order to understand them better. This is my best attempt at summarizing my understanding from our conversation and props to Brian for creating these epic visual aids which are integrated into our discussion on Youtube.
The Success vs. Spirituality Duality
Let’s start out by acknowledging the seeming duality that exists in our culture. People seem to think you need to choose between pursuing consciousness or pursuing success.
Both consciousness and material agency are forms of power. Brian defines power as the capacity to influence or change reality. Power in itself is morally neutral. You can use it to improve the world or destroy it.
On the road to success, maybe you make a lot of money and use those resources to make shit happen. This is an expression of power. People at a certain level of awareness may have the ability “to know things” which guide their choices or perform extraordinary feats like others through intention. This is a different expression of power. Both axes render an increased ability to change reality just in different ways.
Many people, like myself, are interested in transcending this false duality and pursuing both at the same time. My journey of how to do this is the subject of my book Conscious Accomplishment: How to use Personal Achievement For Spiritual Growth which comes out in early October.
As any traveler who has attempted this path before will tell you, it ain’t easy! In my experience, there isn’t a ton of good maps or long standing traditions in western culture that guide you how to do both at once.
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So why is doing both so hard?
What both Brian and I have seen is that at some point in your life, a wall shows up. All of a sudden shit gets hard. If you were in high agency, achiever land, no matter how hard you push and fight, all your clever strategies don’t work anymore.
It’s like an invisible wall has been placed in front of you through the people and events unfolding around you preventing you from getting what you want.
This wall often redirects people on to a spiritual path, moving them from the bottom right quadrant to the top left.
Reflection - is there a “wall” in your life right now. Where does it feel like no amount of pushing is working?
What is this wall and why does it show up?
Brian believes the wall shows up when we have a greater ability to change reality, than our ability to use it for good. Or in his language, it appears when our power is greater than our leadership. In this framework, Leadership is our ability to turn our power into value for ourselves and the larger system you find yourself in.
This wall isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a natural law of the universe like gravity or physics. It’s benevolent in that it slows us down when our capacity hasn't caught up to our power. This prevents you from destroying yourself or the system you find yourself in when there is more power than you can steward.
But what about all the powerful assholes in our world? Where’s their wall?
Remember the wall exists on the dimensions of consciousness and material power (agency). So there are a lot of people with tons of material power, but low consciousness like self-serving business magnates. And there’s a lot of people with high consciousness and low material power like broke spiritual teachers and coaches.
But if you want both, which seems to create 10-100x results, you need to evolve yourself in ways that the wall moves.
I want to reflect more on this natural law existing that Brian talks about through some evidence I have seen.