The most precise language for talking about where Integrative Meta-perspective takes us draws on the concept of systems. Systems thinking emphasizes the need to consider all the pieces; that connections are as important as differences; and how, when what we are considering is in fact a system, the whole ends up being greater than the sum of its parts.

We can use systems language to frame most any culturally mature challenge—from the most personal to the most encompassing.

Moral decision-making in a world without cultural guideposts requires a new ability to take all systemic factors into account. Identity beyond Cultural Maturity’s threshold requires that we include all the diverse aspects of our makeup (a recognition reflected in the need to more consciously acknowledge intelligence’s multiplicity). Leadership requires increasingly that we move beyond the mythologizing of authority and engage leaders simply as people with tough jobs (as whole beings). Culturally mature love requires that we move beyond making the other our brave knight or fair maiden and, in a fundamentally new sense, love as whole people. And relationships between nations require that we surrender past notions of “chosen people” and simply appreciate our systemic differences and similarities. On all these fronts, making effective choices in the future will require what Creative Systems Theory calls Whole Person/Whole System formulations of identity, relationship, and truth.

But systems thinking as conventionally conceived cannot help us as much as we might hope. Most systemic thinking confronts a critical obstacle when it comes to the kind of understanding the future will increasingly require. Until very recently, our systemic models, even for ourselves, were, mechanical models. Conventional systems ideas appreciate intricacies and interconnections, but the assumptions are most often those of a machine world. Even when the system of interest is a human body or an ecosystem teeming with organisms, the language remains that of a good engineer—hydraulics and forces, gears and pulleys.

A closer look at this “life” conundrum brings important detail to the challenge that confronts systemic thinking and any effort at culturally mature conception. It also highlights the multiple ways systemic thinking can go astray and the particular significance of a creative frame.

The “life” conundrum holds within it a more specific quandary:  How do we think about difference if our ideas are to that honor the fact that we are alive. Creative Systems Theory calls it the Dilemma of Differentiation. The simple fact that culturally mature truth requires that we make distinctions puts us immediately in a pickle. Differentiation, the ability to say “this as opposed to that” is ultimately what makes thinking work. But usual ways of addressing difference leave us short of the required dynamism. We can fall off the road in two opposite ways when it comes to the Dilemma of Differentiation. We encounter both kinds of traps with advocates of systemic thought. Systemic understanding is unusual for the diverse—even opposite—worldviews it can be used to justify.

The most obvious kind of trap is that previously noted. Thinkers depict difference in traditional parts terms—that is, in an atomistic, mechanistic manner. Such systemic formulations can be highly detailed, but no matter how subtle and sensitive our delineations, when we put the parts together, we end up back in a machine world.

Less often we encounter an opposite, yet just a deadly kind of trap. More popular writers who use systems language—particularly those of a more humanist or spiritual bent—may largely ignore parts and focus only on relationship. The result is ideas that reduce, in the end, to elaborate ways of saying “all is one.” Recognizing connectedness can be comforting—and it identifies a truth just as important and accurate as the “all is many” claims of atomistic or mechanistic belief. But begging the question of parts makes for impoverished conception at best. Worse, it makes for misleading conception. Real relationships (unity in the systemic sense we have interest in)—whether personal or conceptual—require difference. Certainly life does.

A defining characteristic of culturally mature thought is that it effectively addresses the Dilemma of Differentiation. Success at this task follows directly from where Integrative Meta-perspective naturally takes us. We see hints in my earlier observation that culturally mature understanding “bridges” conceptual polarities. The most fundamental of polarities doesn’t appose one conclusions and another; rather is juxtaposes separateness and connectedness.

Because in some way this most fundamental of polarities is reflected in every more specific juxtaposition, any concept that effectively bridges conceptual polarities at least begins to address the Dilemma of Differentiation.

We see more explicitly how success at addressing the Dilemma of Differentiation follows naturally from an Integrative Meta-perspective by looking to the diverse ingredients that Integrative Meta-perspective’s encompassing vantage helps us engage. For example, we catch a glimpse of this result in the way each our various intelligences approach questions of distinction in wholly different ways. I find a simple—but, in fact, ultimately quite sophisticated—image particularly helpful for representing this more complex creative result. Take a box of crayons. We can think of the needed more dynamic systemic understanding as what we get when we consciously and effectively use the whole box. The box represents the needed more expansive awareness; the crayon’s diverse colors signify the new and deeper engagement with life’s multiplicities.

Fig 4-1. Whole-Box-of-Crayons Perspective

Whole-box-of-crayons perspective offers that we might see beyond black and white—and even shades of gray—and draw consciously, in timely and appropriate ways, on the whole rich complexity of hues we manifest by virtue of being human. In so doing, it directly reconciles our Dilemma of Differentiation. Difference—represented by the separate crayons with their distinct hues—and connectedness—represented by the colors’ generative interrelatedness—each have equal significance. Cultural Maturity’s cognitive changes make such whole-box-of-crayons perspective newly possible. With time they make it common sense.

We can apply this picture to the previous chapter’s assertions about the importance of stepping beyond the protections that have before been supplied by ideology. A simple—but not simplistic—way to think about ideology is to describe it is what we get when we take one crayon in our systemic box and make it last-word truth. That can be any sort of crayon—political, religious, gender- or temperament-related, philosophical. Giving one crayon elevated status distorts reality. But it also protects us by keeping complexity’s larger picture at arm’s length.. Placed in this frame, Cultural Maturity’s task becomes learning to think, act, and relate from a place that draws on the entirely of our whole-box-of-crayons inner makeup, and engages in and understands the world with a similar kind of “living,” systemic completeness.

That our box-of-crayons image has specifically creative implications should not surprise us given my claims for how Integrative Meta-perspective alters experience and what the use of the word “living” ultimately points toward. A creative frame offers a less pictorial, more conceptually rigorous—and also potentially more highly differentiated—way to address the Dilemma of Differentiation. Creative Systems Theory’s developmental/evolutionary approach illustrates the success of this approach when applied to difference over time. Later we will look at how we can use a creative frame to make analogous more here-and-now “living” distinctions. A creative frame lets us make highly detailed distinctions and have our identification of difference increase, rather than diminish, our appreciation for our dynamic “living” natures. As far as difference and connectedness, notice how creative stages are, without contradiction, at once discrete, and aspects of larger generative entireties. We find a related “third option” beyond mechanistic difference and connectedness as unity in all creatively framed formulations.

A creative frame provides not just one example of an approach able to reconcile the Dilemma of Differentiation, but, arguably, a particularly significant example. With regard to ourselves, at least, it may provide something quite precise. The foundation of creative perspective lies with what makes us not just alive, but the particular kind of life we are by virtue of being human. Integrative Meta-perspective, just by how it works, produces an explicitly creative picture of our human functioning.

Can we extend this observation further? Do we appropriately think of biological life and existence as a whole as ultimately creative? In a sense, perhaps (a future topic). But such conclusions leave us very close to common conceptual traps. Certainly we must take care that we don’t simply project our time’s new cognitive mechanisms as Enlightenment perspective did with rationality and its presumed mechanical universe. Better we say simply that whatever strategy we apply, it has to accomplish similar ends.

The changes that come with Transition in any formative process involves more than just letting go of one stage and moving to another—they bring into question the whole developmental orientation that has defined growth and truth. Transition presents a critical quandary that might seem a show-stopper. Creative Systems Theory calls it the Dilemma of Trajectory. A simple way to recognize this quandary is the way each stage in formative process’s first half is defined by greater distinction between poles and a greater emphasis on difference more generally.

At transition, this defining impetus reaches an extreme. Going further in this direction stops giving us anything of value. Indeed there is an important sense in which it really stops being possible at all. Contrasting our two definition of maturity both highlights this quandary and clarify how further options—indeed rich and important options—might lie beyond it.

The first half of personal development is marked by processes that produce ever-greater individuality, independence, and authority over the world around us. Our first definition of personal maturity—“growing up” in our first-half sense—continues this familiar trajectory. But while this general direction of change works well in the first half of our lives—it is what defines growth—in the second half of life it stops serving us in the same way. If we continue on as we have, the second half of life becomes increasingly absurd, at best a thin caricature of youth.

Successfully engaging second-half-of-life developmental challenges produces changes of a specifically integrative sort. This is not to say that individuality becomes less, in fact it continues to grow, often manifesting in particularly delightful and idiosyncratic ways. But when we successfully take on second-half-of-life developmental tasks, the tendency toward difference becomes counterbalanced by equally important integrative mechanisms.

With culture’s story to this point, we see changes analogous those we encounter with personal development’s first half. In a similar way, we witness growing impetus toward individuality, independence, and authority. The invention of fire freed human migration. The Magna Carta affirmed basic human privilege. And our Modern Age has continued such appropriately proud advancement. The truths of our Modern Age have their foundation in increasing delineation of the individual will and growing independence from the constraints of nature and the irrational. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed the right of the individual to the pursuit of happiness. And the Industrial Age brought dramatic new expressions of human dominion and control. In their timeliness, such achievements could not have been more profound.

But this developmental trajectory, has today, in a similar way to what we see with personal development, stopped serving us as it has in the past. The tasks of our time demand accomplishments of a different sort.

While much of what we have reaped, and will continue to reap, from our ability to stand separate in the sense of individuality and autonomy of choice is profound, the future cries out as much for a new appreciation of how we are related, a fresh understanding of caring, community, and the common good. In a similar way, while culture’s evolution has also brought with it increasing human control—over nature, over our own bodies, over life’s deep mysteries—today almost the opposite seems equally a part of what is needed, a new humility to what we cannot control, a new sensitivity to when we should be listening as opposed to directing (whether the voice needing attention is the natural world, our tissues, or the unfathomable).

We confront profound questions, indeed questions with God-like implications, but the authority needed to address them is not some ascension to a chair of final dominion (ourselves somehow becoming God). It is also different from some further iteration of the Enlightenment’s grand goal of bringing all of understanding into the pure light of awareness and realizing final control over the untamed. Indeed, many of the problems we face in today’s world derive from just such hubristic notions of what right action is about. We are left in a pickle that cannot be resolved within the assumptions of our first kind of maturity. Any familiar notion of going forward threatens to take us in very wrong directions.

The Dilemma of Trajectory is significant not just because ignoring it will result in misguided actions. There is a way in which it stops us in our tracks. In the next chapter, we will look at how the past’s story of growing distinction, taken far enough, threatens to severe us from much that is most important in being human. But we can use the Creative Function to get at this result more abstractly. If it is accurate to think of cultural evolution as creative, proceeding further in this direction of distinction and separation leaves us at a dead end. Distinction and separation can only go so far. Cultural Maturity—or at least something that can produce changes similar to the more integrative mechanisms the concept describes—becomes the only real option.

Fig. 3-2. The Dilemma of Trajectory

Capacitance is the second of Creative Systems Theory primary Whole System patterning concepts (the first being the Questions of Referent). It refers to a person’s overall capacity to take in, tolerate, and engage life. Think of a balloon. Capacitance describes the size of the balloon, the “volume” of life a system can handle before things become too much. The concept could not be more important, both for its practical usefulness and for its theoretical implications.

We can usefully understand this second Whole System patterning concept in relationship to the first. The Question of Referent, or simply “aliveness” if our interest lies less with the question than where we look to find the question’s answer, concerns the basic question of where truth is to be found once over Cultural Maturity’s threshold. Capacitance is more specifically quantitative. It concerns how much truth—how much “aliveness”—we can handle.

Attention to Capacitance helps greatly in living our personal lives in healthy and sustainable ways. It is rare in my work as a therapist that I don’t at sometime talk about Capacitance with clients. For some people I work with, learning to live consciously within their Capacitance becomes therapy’s most defining theme.

The ability to make subtle Capacitance discernments is also increasingly essential to culturally mature decision-making at a societal level. Particularly with decisions at a global scale, effective policy hinges on our ability to understand what is possible and what is not and the crafting of approaches that are thus most likely to be helpful.

The concept of Capacitance also helps us fill out other important theoretical recognitions For example, Cultural Maturity’s cognitive reorganization requires not just stage-specific changes, but, also, as with any new cultural chapter, a more general increase in capacity. Capacity as here I have used the word, refers not to particular abilities, but to Capacitance, to overall systemic capacity. We can think of development proceeding like a snake that must periodically shed its skin. The snake’s skin represents stage-specific beliefs and developmental tasks. The snake’s expanding girth represents growing Capacitance. Capacitance is the one thing that increases in a consistent way over the entire course of formative process (irrespective of leaps and changes in trajectory). In the Creative Function, Capacitance is represented by the volume within the circles.

The concept of Capacitance if personality style distinctions are to prove ultimately helpful. Temperament distinctions can be highly misleading unless they are accompanies by Capacitance-related observations. A person may have the requisite sensibility for a certain kind of contribution, but totally lack what is needed to effectively carry that contribution’s tasks out or to function effectively in the relationships it requires.

Including Capacitance in our personality style distinctions stretches us in ways that may not at first be celebrated. Capacitance brings the topic of limits directly into the temperament equation. Temperament is in one sense a very “non-judgmental” way to think about difference. (The liberal/humanist in us will like that.) Certainly it helps us see beyond our bigotries. But human diversity also involves Capacitance differences, and Capacitance is arguably as “judgmental” a kind of discernment as there could be. It is not just about people having different strengths, but about being “better and worse” and the inescapable consequences that follow. This is “better and worse” in a different more quantitative, “what is possible” sense, rather than the morally condemning sense in which we might have used the words in times past. But such “better and worse” discrimination become essential if we are to make good people choices in a culturally mature world and most effectively apply an appreciation for temperament differences. The concept of Capacitance offers that we might rethink what we mean by judgment, engage judgment’s task in a more systemic and creative way. But including Capacitance in the temperament equation requires that we acknowledge limits and judge accordingly.

Cultural Maturity itself is a Capacitance-specific notion. This is no more the case with Cultural Maturity than with any other developmentally-related cultural change point. But being conscious of how this is so becomes newly pertinent if we are to successfully support culturally mature change.

It is important that we recognize that without sufficient Capacitance, culturally mature perspective is not really possible. Otherwise we will make errors in our support of such perspective. Cultural Maturity’s changes require that we are able to engage a certain magnitude, or “volume,” of experience. If there is not adequate Capacitance, Cultural Maturity’s challenge can only overwhelm. And when systems get overwhelmed, they polarize—that is a natural way they protect themselves.

It is just as important that we recognize how the opposite is also the case: At a certain Capacitance, Cultural Maturity’s conclusions become almost self-evident. Culturally mature perspective is impossible without sufficient Capacitance. But it is also true that we don’t have to advocate culturally mature conclusions one by one. Rich dialogue helps. But in the end, we need only support the need growth in Capacitance.

We can apply the concept of Capacitance to the most recent past American presidential administration. Many people described George W. Bush as not very intelligent. That was not the problem. The issue was limited Capacitance. Dick Cheney was more functionally intelligent—indeed extremely intelligent—but just as limited with regard to Capacitance. The combination made him even more of a concern. It produced not only dangerously simple-minded policy, but also an absolutely boggling capacity for denial.

That may seem like harsh judgment, but it represents a simple observation—one I and colleagues made well prior to the election of the Bush/Cheney team. And it is an observation with predictable consequences—consequences that came to pass. Those who know me recognize that this is not a judgment based on ideology. I can name many political conservatives whom I deeply respect for their high Capacitance. There are high and low Capacitance conservatives and there are high and low Capacitance liberals.

Capacitance adds useful conceptual refinement to Question of Referent observations. The bare-boned truth task of addressing moral questions without traditional guideposts requires that we more directly discern choices that are most “life-affirming.” The concept of Capacitance offers a more embodied way to think about it. Acts that support the Capacitance of a system become moral; acts that undermine the Capacitance of a system become immoral. Of course things aren’t quite that simple—systems are always multiple and overlapping—but the general principle holds.

Capacitance similarly sheds additional light on the more collective bare-boned truth task of redefining progress (and the collective bare-boned truth task more generally). Increasing overall Capacitance is what ultimately defines growth. The problem with our old definition of progress is not that it is wrong, but that it has lost its connection with Capacitance. We need ways of thinking about growth that successfully reflect what, in our time, makes us personally and collectively “more”—what, in fact, produces actual and necessary growth in Capacitance.

The concept of Capacitance also brings attention to a unique danger we face in times ahead. Systems challenged to more than their available Capacitance polarize. It is right that they do—polarization provides protection by keeping challenges to the system’s Capacitance at a safe arm’s length. In times past, when this happened at a major social system level it really didn’t change things that much. It only increased polarization that was already part of consensus reality. The result might be a war. But it was likely a familiar kind of war.

Today, as polarization directly undermines the needed maturity of perspective, this sort of response becomes newly problematical. One of the great dangers we face today is that newly God-like challenges—along with the more encompassing task of Cultural Maturity—will stretch Capacitance beyond what we can tolerate. The resulting polarization and projection could distance us from the needed maturity of perspective just as such maturity has become imperative.

“Pull out, pull out, you’ve hit an artery” —caption on a Gary Larson cartoon (depicting a mosquito, eyes wide and desperate, approaching the shape of a balloon).

Some Creative Symptom questions:

How at your best do you respond when facing situations that stretch you beyond that which with you can comfortably deal. At your worst? How at their best do other systems of which you are a part (a friendship, a business or other organization, your country) respond when facing situations that require more than they can effectively manage?  At their worst?

What systems do when pushed beyond their available Capacitance? Without protective mechanisms, the consequences of exceeding creative limits can be severe. The concept of Creative Symptoms addresses this question of protection. It also helps us make sense of easily confusing behaviors and better understand how to assist systems when needed Capacitance is more than they have available.

Creative Systems Theory observes that human systems perceive challenging experiences as meaningful—alive, true in a creative sense—up to the limits of their Capacitance. At that point we experience perturbation. We have common language for how we respond if we aren’t up to how much Capacitance a moment requires. We “lose it,” get “bent out of shape.”  More precisely, at that limit, one of three things takes place:  the system expands itself and grows, it acts consciously to protect itself (so the creative vessel will not be expanded too far), or in some way the system protects itself covertly (hopefully with enough effectiveness that major damage is avoided). The term Creative Symptom refers to the last of these options.

Creative Symptoms can offer more effective safety than overt boundaries.  Because conscious boundaries tend to make a system more visible, they can put a system at further risk (make it a more obvious target). But we pay a price when we use this last line of defense.  Symptoms diminish flexibility—they are “habitual.” And they block “good” experience along with “bad,” not just experience that threatens to harm but also that needed to learn and adapt. When chronic, Creative Symptoms can slow or even arrest development. But the price paid is preferable to the harm that can ensue if protection is breached.

Symptom is not an ideal word to describe such unconscious protective mechanisms. The presence of creative symptoms does not necessarily imply pathology—making boundaries is a critical component of health. But the link between symptom in this specifically systemic sense and other dynamics for which we might apply the term is strong enough to justify its use. Indeed helping us better understand mechanisms that may underlie symptoms in the word’s more conventional usage is one the most important applications of the concept of Creative Symptoms.

While Creative Symptoms take a great multiplicity of forms, Creative Systems Theory proposes that the underlying strategy with all of them is the same. Put most simple, Creative Symptoms amplify polarity. This mechanism protects the system by getting it out of the line of fire or by neutralizing the challenge to Capacitance (or sometimes both).

We could look to any scale or type of system for examples. Drawing on parallels with how a psychotherapist might use the word symptom offers the most ready illustration. Unconscious psychological protective mechanisms can be thought of as exaggerated manifestations of common vertical and horizontal psychological polarities.  Some polar diversions shield us by lifting us above the perceived threat (e.g., intellectualization or grandiosity). Others drop us below the potential insult (e.g., depression or the victim posture of passive aggression). Some shift our attention internal to the threat (e.g., withdrawal or denial). Others direct our focus external to the threat (e.g., combativeness or obsessively busying ourselves). Some of these responses shield us from contact (e.g. obsessiveness or withdrawal). Others function by engaging the perceived threat in ways designed to diminish its effect (e.g. combative or undermining behavior). Often we use two or more of these strategies simultaneously. Such mechanisms can be ongoing ways of relating to the bigness of life or time-specific responses to particular kinds or intensities of challenge.

Note that while we may label these responses as discrete categories of pathology, they are really just exaggerated expressions of polar tendencies. From the extreme right, rigor becomes rigor mortis. From the extreme left, flexibility becomes a lifeless puddle.  Whether they are best thought of as pathology or simply protection cannot be determined from the Symptom alone.

We tend to use different language when addressing different kinds and scales of Systems, but families and organizations too can become depressed, grandiose, or oblivious. And countries and whole cultures are similarly vulnerable—and just as creatively clever. The concept of Creative Symptoms offers a common framework for understanding protective responses at all systemic scales, and more, an integrated language for addressing responses that may involve multiple, interplaying systems.

There need be nothing wrong with a system for Creative Symptoms to manifest.  Stretched sufficiently, any Creative Whole will evidence such protective mechanisms—there would be something wrong with it if it didn’t. Often when we see Symptoms something is indeed the matter, specifically broken. But just as frequently, differences we see in vulnerability to Symptoms are a product of natural variations in Capacitance or the Capacitance differences inherent to stages of creative development. Two individuals may constitutionally differ in their resiliency. And challenges that an adult, a mature organization, or a modern country might take in stride could easily overwhelm a child, an organization in its start-up phase, or a less economically and technologically developed state.

How do we best think of the significance of Symptoms? We can frame them just as appropriately as good, bad, or merely information. Symptoms represent important ways systems protect themselves (good). They are evidence of a discrepancy between available Capacitance and that required (bad). And they are indicators of where growth in a system may be possible and timely (simply information).

This more systemic picture has major implications when it comes to intervention.  For example, it predicts that making better boundaries—which helps protect systems from overwhelm—should provide a good general antidote. And this is what we see.  Sometimes the needed boundaries are more external—to another person, to unnecessary life demands.  Sometimes they are more internal—to a critical inner parent, to a melodramatic part that makes mountains out of molehills. Note that such skills have specific pertinence for our time.  In the past, the major portion of external and internal boundaries (both for individuals and social systems) were culturally determined.  Learning to make boundaries more consciously represents one of the most important of new skills required by Cultural Maturity.

A more systemic understanding of Symptom, combined with the earlier concept of Capacitance, also helps alert us to the care and humility needed to successfully effect change. For example, it reminds the psychotherapist that efforts to promote growth and alleviate Symptoms, if not carefully crafted and timely in execution, may push the person even further beyond available Capacitance. One of the most important skills we can bring to international relations is a sensitivity to the necessary stages of economic and political development. Helping nations progress is important.  But just as important is avoiding developmentally inappropriate changes or attempts to change too much too fast. One of the great dangers of globalization is how dramatically it can stretch the Capacitance of social groups who may not be ready for the demands of a globalized world—with resulting symptomatic responses.

Given the diversity of forms Creative Symptoms can take, we could think of them equally well as a Whole-System Patterning Concept or Concepts of Creative Differentiation. To a degree this is so with any Whole-System Pattern Concept. (By referring to Aliveness and Capacitance as having diverse colors and flavors, I’ve already implied creative multiplicity.) But the concept of Creative Symptom makes such multiplicity even more explicit. It makes no sense without an appreciation for the fact of polarity. And the specific forms Creative Symptoms take follow directly from the way Patterning in Time and Patterning in Space mechanisms shape polar dynamics. People at different periods in their lives are most prone to certain kinds of Symptomatic responses (for example, the same individual who as a child may tend to become withdrawn, as an adult may become combative). And while an academic may rise above a perceived threat by intellectualizing, a corporate executive is more likely to do so by becoming excessively controlling, “lording over,” or an artist by keeping her “head in the clouds.”  Symptoms amplify and caricature underlying time- and space-relative creative mechanisms.

While the concept of Creative Symptom applies to systems at any stage of development, like Aliveness or Capacitance, it requires culturally mature thought to be understood deeply. Before now, such a notion would demand greater systemic awareness—greater comfort with uncertainty and complexity—than our available Capacitance would allow. The concept would itself only have created Symptoms.

We should find related, more systemic, notions of health and disease increasingly common at all creative scales. A notable example is the growing acceptance by physicians that “stress” can contribute not just to psychological discomfort but also to physical illness. What is stress? It is what we feel when our system is challenged to more than it can comfortably manage. It is Gary Larson’s overtaxed mosquito.

Symptom exercises:

What kinds of situations are most apt to stretch you beyond your Capacitance?  With each, what kinds of protective responses are you most likely to utilize. What might be the most creative, healthful response if symptoms are noted.

Ask the same questions with regard to a larger system you are a part of—your family, your community, a business or other organization, an ethnic group, your profession.  Do this also for the country you live in and for the planet as a whole.

The new picture we see with culturally mature perspective reflects not just changes in what we think, or even just how we think, but in the very mechanisms of cognition. We can recognize these same changes, but in a highly circumscribed form, with second-half-of-life changes in personal development. With Cultural Maturity they manifest in a way that includes every aspect of our personal and collective experience.

We can think of Cultural Maturity’s cognitive reorganization as a two-step process. Each step reflects not just change we might wish to occur, but change predicted by our developmental natures, and change we already witness.

The first step in Cultural Maturity’s cognitive reordering involves a new kind of stepping back. It is this stepping back that brings culture’s past parental function into question. We become newly able to grasp the larger, more complete reality that an individual human and human culture together comprise. But the greater perspective this stepping back produces alters much more than just how we understand culture. It changes how we think about understanding itself. Indeed, in the end, it alters how understanding works.

Stepping back to gain greater awareness is not new, but this is new—and fundamentally. Were this not so, we would not see reordering of the sort we do. Particularly important to recognize is how this stepping back is different fundamentally from what gave us as-viewed-from-a-balcony objectivity—the great gift of Age of Enlightenment understanding. What we see represents a more complete sort of stepping back. Cultural Maturity’s new vantage lets us step back from parts of who we are that always before have defied perspective.

That we better step back from our projections and mythologizings is one piece of it. But there is also an aspect of this stepping back that provides particular insight for distinguishing it from Modern Age perspective. Cultural Maturity’s changes involve more fully stepping back from intelligence’s multiple aspects, including the more rational aspects that since the Age of Reason have reigned supreme. It reveals Enlightenment objectivity to be at best a specific and limited sort of objectivity. With Cultural Maturity, for the first time, we step back from the full complexity of our cognitive natures.

The second step in Cultural Maturity’s cognitive reordering—one just as important and essential to grasp—produces an almost opposite result. Culturally mature perspective, along with this greater distancing, involves a new and deeper engagement with all that we step back from. Cultural Maturity’s cognitive reordering is simultaneously about a more expansive vantage for appreciating our complexity and a more full embodiment of who we are as complex beings.

This second step is just as critical as the first. Without it, the more complete stepping back I’ve described would, in fact, not provide great practical benefit. We would still be without useful guidance. Greater awareness without this complementary greater depth of engagement leaves us wandering in a landscape in which truth is “an inch deep and a mile wide,” or worse, effectively random. We will need later reflections to fully see how this is the case. But this result represents a not unfamiliar circumstance in our contemporary world.

The answer to the question of just what we connect with in this deeper engagement has multiple parts. One part: Cultural Maturity’s changes require that we reincorporate past projections and abandon the mythologized perceptions that have accompanied them. With such reincorporation we engage aspects of our complexity that we’ve not considered parts of ourselves at all (or that we have interpreted in distorted ways that protected us from their full implications if we did encounter them).

A couple additional aspects of what we newly engage are ultimately just as important. At the same time we better step back from intelligence’s multiple aspects (not just rationality, but also cognition’s more emotional, imaginal, and bodily dimensions) we also engage the whole of understanding with a depth of embrace that before has not been possible. Intelligence’s new significance lies not just with greater awareness, but with the degree intelligence’s multiplicity becomes something we make real in our daily lives. This added piece is critical. We will see how our needed, more complete picture of complexity makes little sense without it. Cultural Maturity’s cognitive changes help us not just get our arm’s around, but embody the fullness of intelligence’s workings.

There is also a further important piece essential to Cultural Maturity’s cognitive changes: We reengage aspects of experience that we knew intimately at earlier cultural times, but that we have since, for developmentally appropriate reasons, put at arm’s length. This additional piece is readily misunderstood and we must take care in teasing apart its implications, but it is needed for any of the others to make ultimate sense.

We catch a glimpse of this last piece in how it manifests with our most recent cultural stage. At first what takes place as we move beyond Modern Age cultural realities might seem less fundamentally new, rather something we necessarily do with each new “chapter” in culture’s story: we leave behind the defining beliefs of our most recent cultural stage. Today this means the Modern Age’s rationalist, materialist, objectivist, and individualist assumptions. But as we shall see, we in fact witness something fundamentally new, today, in this shedding process as well. Just how this is the case plays a key role in complexity’s new picture. Always before such passing from one age to the next relegated the previous worldview to ignorance (or worse). This time the task is different—more specifically integrative—a distinction with direct implications for more deeply engaging complexity. Beyond cultural maturity’s threshold, Modern Age sensibilities, rather than being forgotten, become part of a larger multiplicity of perspective. We recognize them as aspects of the needed, more whole-ball-of-wax understanding. We will see how something similar applies to truths of times past more generally.

It is important to appreciate that this various pieces are not in the end separate. They come together to produce the more conscious, integrated, and complete relationship with our complex inner makeup that makes possible Cultural Maturity’s increasingly nuanced and complete understandings.

We could also talk about how talk about how these various pieces come together in quite dramatic terms if we wish. While today’s new challenges demand intelligence, as much or more they require wisdom. If we want to be provocative in our claims, we can quite accurately think of what we get with our two part cognitive reorganization as a “mechanism” for producing wisdom. And just as accurately, we can speak in ways that are not dramatic at all. Again, the result is ultimately nothing esoteric or even ultimately complicated. Arguably it is more ordinary than what we have known. No longer mythologized, our beliefs become to more accurately reflect just what is. Our pieces come together as the mechanism of our new, more mature and reality-embracing kind of common sense. They come together as the mechanism of our unique (or nearly so) systemic natures

The specific way polar dynamics evolve invites sophisticated understanding of formative process more generally and also Cultural Maturity’s particular changes. Answering the question of why we think in polar terms in the first place proves pivotal in developing new ways of understanding. Creative Systems Theory’s answer: The generation of polarity is necessary to formative process. The fact that historically we have thought in the language of polarity follows from our creative, tool-making, meaning-making natures.

Formative processes of all sorts reflect a related architecture. The first half of any formative process brings the newly created object or idea into being and in the process generates polarity. The second half reintegrates that which has now been made manifest with the context from which it originated, and in so doing establishes a new, now expanded whole.

To think with greater detail about the role of polarity in formative process, we can take this simple image and extend it like the bellows of an accordion. The first half of formative process becomes an evolving play of polarities, with polarity in each stage following a predictable progression. The juxtapositions of each succeeding stage reflect greater identification with the newly created form and diminishing identification with the context from which it originates.

When we then include the second half of formative process, we get a template for understanding formative process wherever we might find it. Creative Systems Theory calls this generic map, applicable to formative dynamics from the most personal of insights to the most encompassing of collective processes, the Creative Function.

We readily recognize this two part extended picture with personal psychological development. The developmental tasks that define the first half of an individual life’s are similar in that the underlying impetus with each is toward distinction and the establishing of identity. With childhood we begin discovering who we are, with adolescence we make our first forays into the social world, and during adulthood we establish our unique place in that world. Second half of life maturing involves more specifically integrative tasks. It is about learning how to live in the world with the greatest perspective, integrity, and proportion.

The Creative Function presents a simplified picture. Stages can vary in length and emphasis depending on the kind of system and surrounding circumstances. And formative processes can be aborted at any stage. But the general sequence holds with remarkable consistency. For our purposes, the important recognition is that it holds as predictably at a cultural scale as it does for more circumscribed formative processes such as creating a work of art or the evolving play of interactions that produce a relationship. It also strongly supports Cultural Maturity’s conclusions.

This progression’s conceptual power makes it worth an extended look—for our purposes, with particular emphasis given to cultural dynamics. The descriptions that follow bring together observations about the workings of polarity, the role of multiple intelligences in formative process, and conclusions about the systemic nature of contemporary challenges. I’ve chosen working on a piece of sculpture to make the simple creative act more vivid.  (I was a sculptor before entering medical school.)

Creative Systems Theory has more formal language for what I’ve described as the incubation, inspiration, perspiration, and finishing and polishing stages. It calls them Pre-Axis, Early-Axis, Middle-Axis, and Late-Axis respectively. I include that language here with the accompanying diagrams. This more formal language helps avoid confusion when making complex pattern language distinctions.

Creation’s Differentiation Phase:

Creative “Incubation” (Pre-Axis)—

Formative processes begin “in the beginning,” before the appearance of creation as form. Here truth speaks the language of darkness—and of the unbroken whole. The process is germination. The new impulse to form lies within, waiting for the right moment to break through into the world of the known.

In a simple creative act, like my working on a piece of sculpture, this is the incubation stage. I may have a vague sense that something is preparing to happen, but nothing is yet visible.  If I’m sensitive, I can feel some of the primordial beginnings in my tissues—perhaps in an attraction to a certain kind of movement, a feeling of contained shape, a gentle expanding.

In a lifetime, this is the prenatal period and the first few months of life.  The unbroken whole speaks in the infant’s relationship both to the mother and to itself. Even following birth, the bond to the mother is what is primary. The light of conscious volition, that evidence of first distinction of both self from self and self from other, is only preparing to awaken. The reality of the infant is an unselfconscious creature world. To feel is to act; there is no separation.

In a new relationship, this is the time before there is anything really visible as relationship. I may have a sense of being open to the possibility for a new connecting. I may have even met the person and felt a certain “chemistry” in her presence. But the spark of conscious recognition has yet to ignit

In the story of civilization, this incubation stage corresponds to Stone Age times. For the most part, this is a reality of our distant past, though there are still a few places on our planet—in the New Guinea highlands, the upper Amazon basin, some places in the Australian outback—where this primordial reality can prevail.

The unbroken whole at a cultural scale is multilayered, at once the tribe, nature, and time. In early tribal realities, the “body” of the tribe is more accurately the primary organism than the individuals who compose it.

At once, truth and nature exist as, in essence, a single thing. Tribal deities are simply the faces of nature set animate:  the wind, the mountain, bear, eagle, coyote. Health is one’s degree of harmony with this living nature. Knowing is one’s bodily connection in and as this whole. And time similarly affirms this unbroken entirety. Existence takes place in an eternally cycling present. Each generation and each turning of the seasons reenacts a timeless story.

Creative “Inspiration” (Early-Axis)—

The next big slice makes the magic and numinosity of the creative most explicit. Newly created possibility now steps forth from mystery into the light. This dramatic movement fundamentally alters how we perceive the order of things. Truth becomes explicitly polar. And its primary mode of expression shifts from the kinesthetic to the symbolic, to the language of myth and metaphor.

In working with chisel and stone, this is the stage of first inspiration. What was before only a faint quickening is now visibly born. My task is to play with images and possibilities, to feel where in them the deepest power lies, and to risk to give that power first form.

In a lifetime, this is the magical world of childhood. In this stage, we see the first critical distinction in initial separation from mother and, in first manifestations of individual consciousness, separation from the infant’s more creature-like reality. Truth moves a bit more “into the light,” organized now according to the laws of imagination. The critical work of the child is its play, trying out images of possibility on the stage of make believe and let’s pretend.

With intimacy, this part of the story has its beginning with the first blush of real attraction. It’s a magical time, filled with tentative first touchings and fantasies of the possible.  Still largely strangers, our connecting is often more as numinous symbols than as simple mortals . . . a fair princess, a handsome prince.

With the story of civilization, this stage takes us to the time of early civilizations. It first manifests in the coming together of tribes into broader allegiances. It reaches its full splendor with the classical high cultures—in the mystical monumentality of ancient Egypt, the vibrant artistry of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, or the great mythic tales of Olympian Greece and the rich philosophies that followed. But we can also find current examples of this inspiration stage in culture—in places like Tibet (though Chinese occupation has tempered the inspiration) or Bali (though more so prior to the tourist invasion). This is the time of culture’s initial flowerings.

Something more than just nature (spirit, essence, magic, beauty—no single word quite does it) emerges as the new cultural referent in these times. It manifests with particular directness in myth, speaking through epic tales and complex pantheons of major and minor gods. This is also a time of rich artistic potency. Art during this stage becomes not just expression, but in and of itself, a form of truth. We see also philosophy’s inspired beginnings.

Creative “Perspiration”(Middle-Axis)—

Creation’s perspiration stage takes the possible into solid form. It galvanizes the conviction, focus, and endurance concrete manifestation requires. With the beginnings of this stage, we may easily feel that something is being lost. The preceding stage was magical and numinous. Now the predominant feelings are often hard work and struggle. But this stage is in no way less significant—and no less creative. The moment of first inspiration is indeed wondrous, but it is only a first step on the road to fully realized creation.

With creative perspiration the language of truth shifts from the mythic to the moral and the emotional. The work progresses by virtue of heart and guts. We can understand why this experience of struggle might be common by looking at the underlying polar dynamics. By the middle of this stage, the power of the newly created and the power of the context of creation have become equivalent. Reality exists as a polar isometric between at once opposite and conspiring forces.

As a sculptor, it is here that I most directly grapple with the hard demands of my calling. I must confront both the brute fact of the stone and my own limitations. Sometimes work proceeds with the patient rhythms and quiet satisfactions of the craftsman. Other times I rage. Over the course of this stage my relationship to the work changes, becoming both more vigorous and more expressive of the work as a human act.

In a lifetime, this stage bids entry into adolescence. Adolescence is a heroic time, but also often an awkward and troubled time. The innocence of childhood must be left behind. It’s a time for us to heroically challenge external limits and establishing inner ones. Emotions can be strong and contradictory. The reward for perseverance is an increasingly established identity and successful preparation for entry into the adult world.

This stage in love takes on the tasks of relationship building. This can be immensely satisfying—coming to better know the other person’s gifts and peculiarities, beginning to build a life together. And again we commonly find contradictory feelings. The glow of the honeymoon period—with the other as dream image—necessarily fades. This is the stage at which we most directly deal with questions of control and territory. It’s here we decide who takes out the garbage.

This stage in cultural dynamics ruled in the West from the time of the Roman Empire through the Middle Ages and predominates today in much of the Middle East, as well as in parts of Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and Central and South America. We find great wonders, from the Roman aqueducts to Europe’s great Gothic cathedrals. And equally we find struggle (and not infrequently pain and inhumanity)—the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, the European Dark Ages, and, in more modern times, often intractable conflict and the tyranny of brutal dictatorships. The emotional and moral assume new prominence. With the Middle Ages, Europe saw values like honor and chivalry newly revered, along with the first intimations of romantic love (though at this point it was unrequited love that was idealized— love held at a safe moral distance).

Cultural beliefs at this stage commonly have a fundamentalist ardency. A newly equal, and frequently ambivalent, balance between polar forces orders cultural experience. With the European Middle Ages we saw social structure increasingly feudal, landed lords above, serfs and the otherwise impoverished below; church and state (here in the form of kingly rule) became newly separate, newly equal, and ever-more-frequently at odds; and the ancients’ many gods with their differing proclivities began to surrender their power to the notion of a single deity—or more accurately a dual deity—a monotheistic godhead in eternal battle with the forces of evil.  In the modern world, one of the easiest ways to find perspiration stage cultural sensibilities is to note where conflict is common and particularly intractable.

Again, we might regret that a certain magic has been lost. But this is not regression. The reward for this loss is increasingly established social structure. The Middle Ages gave us, with kingly rule, a new solidification of social organization, establishment of an institutional church, radical validation of rights with the Magna Carta, and increasingly formal structures of communication and commerce. We find related advances—and related contradictions—wherever perspiration stage developmental realities dominate in contemporary times.

Creative “finishing and polishing”(Late-Axis)—

Our progression has thus far taken us from the mystery of the formless into magical possibility and first form, and then through a time of solidification of form. Now we give new form its finishing touches. Attention shifts increasingly to refinement and detail. Poles become even more separate, giving reality two nearly distinct faces. Truth becomes increasingly rational and material, defined in terms of logic and phenomena that can be seen and measured. And, at the same time, it becomes newly personal and subjective— the truth of aesthetics and even whim.

At this stage, as I face that piece of stone, I become newly able to objectively step back. The work now sits before me as a “piece,” ready for completion. My focus shifts increasingly to issues of detail, to making sure all the elements are there and fit correctly together, to questions of aesthetic refinement, final nuance. Audience becomes increasingly important. I need to give the newly created piece the delineation of voice required to communicate clearly.

In personal development, it is here that we face the tasks of adulthood. Adulthood challenges us to refine identity, to make essential decisions regarding career and family and to give nuance and detail—and one’s personal stamp—to the way we live our lives. More than at any other time, identity can be described in terms of things we can objectively see and measure—the structures we have given our live and the forms of our actions. Adulthood is the most explicitly “in the world” stage of life.

Love at this stage becomes established and defined. We’ve sorted out the major issues of being together and reached general agreement on the roles and boundaries of relationship—who does what, how, and when. We’ve largely stopped asking what our relationship will be, because it now is. Our attention shifts to details and fine-tuning. If we’ve chosen to continue together, love’s connection at this point frequently has a feeling of calm and acceptance not present in earlier stages.

In the story of civilization, this is the Modern Age, the last four hundred years in Western Europe and at least an ingredient in the sensibilities of most all cultural systems today. If classical times marked Europe’s childhood, and the medieval period its adolescence, modernity marked its coming of age. As culture engages finishing and polishing dynamics, oral and kingly truths gives way to more materially ordered realities—a personal reality of individuality, intellect, and achievement; a social reality of law, industry, and economics; and a physical reality of actions and their concomitant reactions. Institutions come to reflect a new appreciation for individual freedom and individual initiative. Governmental forms become representative; religion entertains newly personal and direct relationships with the divine; and economic competition becomes its own ethic, freeing business from moral constraint. With the Modern Age in Europe we witnessed the Age of Reason and the growing prominence of science with its new emphasis on the empirical. We also witnessed reason’s counterbalance in the Romantic Age, with its emphasis on nature and the artistic (and romantic love increasingly requited).

At this stage a sense of impending completion permeates culture. People speak of it being only a matter of time until all of life’s great mysteries find elucidation and individual freedom is fully realized.

To fully grasp this developmental progression, we need to appreciate how the architecture of polarity has evolved through cultural time. The Creative Function maps this evolution. Thought in tribal times included polarity, but it resided in understanding’s background—the major influences in human understanding were the unbroken whole of nature and tribe. With the move into classical times in both the East and the West, polarity assumed a more central role in understanding, but poles remained conceptually close, and were not yet at odds.  (The yin and yang of Chinese Taoist philosophy or the entwined snakes of the Greek caduceus provide particularly graphic illustration of this complementary sort of relationship, but we could turn as readily to underlying assumptions in the dialectics of Plato or Aristotle.) In cultural times that parallel the European Middle Ages, polarity becomes more explicitly about opposites. (Truth becomes an isometric—though still ultimately co-generative—play between clearly contrasting forces: feudal lords and peasants, church and crown, good and evil.) With our Modern Age, poles become even more separate, and also, by virtue of that separateness, less obviously in opposition. (In a Cartesian reality, subjective and objective or mind and body are not so much in conflict as simply inhabitants of separate worlds.) While each kind of polar relationship can appear in a wide array of culturally specific manifestations, each brings with it predictable assumptions about how the world works.

Creation’s Integration Phase:

Part of the “finishing and polishing” stage story is that we have reached completion. The piece of sculpture is done. Identity is established. The hard work of relationship is over. We have brought understanding into the full light of reason. But, in a similar way to what we saw with intelligence’s creative progression, polarity has told but half if its story. Much that is most important in the “respiration” of creative life has yet to take place. And, again, thankfully this is so. It is these additional creative stages, and the additional kind of polar relationships they involve that make Cultural Maturity possible. I’ve described how formative processes have two halves. Polarity has very different significance depending on which half we inhabit.

To appreciate how this is so, and before that, what just getting to such second half realities requires, we need first to add an additional stage—or more accurately a time between stages. It has particular importance for understanding these formative times in culture.

Creative “Transition”—

Transition marks the line separating the creative journey’s two halves. I’ve hinted at how Transitional changes are different from earlier developmental leaps in that they involve more than letting go of one stage and moving to another. It is a difference we will look at in detail in Chapter Eight—they bring into question the entire developmental orientation (toward ever greater ascendancy, separation, and solidification of form) that has defined growth and truth. Transition is creation’s continental divide.

Transition can be a profound time—in its confrontations lie the seeds of wisdom. But it is also a time of disorientation and inescapable uncertainty. We stand at a precipice. Do we leap and trust that solid ground is to be found? Do we go back? Proceeding depends on the gradual discovery of a new completeness in how we relate to both ourselves and our world.

The piece of sculpture is done. It stands before me as a crowning achievement. But what now? During the process of its creation I have come to be almost more the sculpture than myself. And now, suddenly, I must let it go. I could be tempted out of fear to cling to the piece, refuse its surrender. But if I do that, the piece becomes increasingly tired and purposeless, and I myself become increasingly absurd. I could just blindly walk away. But where do I go—indeed, is there any place to go?

With individual development we confront the unique and unexpected challenges of mid-life. Just as we thought we were done, the most fundamental of questions reappear and block our way. In time, this necessary questioning touches every part of our lives—our work, our love, ultimately our most basic ideas about who we are and how the world works. The sense of purpose we once took for granted can feel suddenly elusive. We ask, So who am I, really? And what really matters to me? At this point we have no way of knowing whether anything lies ahead—at least anything that can excite. Perhaps the future promises only being over-the-hill. Some people respond to this uncertainty by abandoning what they have been—by getting a divorce, leaving their jobs. Others cling to old beliefs or try to return to their youth. But we have no real choice but to live with the uncertainty. When we attempt to hide from it, perversely, we only feel more empty and confused.

We see something similar with the midpoint in love as a creative process. Suddenly, just as we thought our work done, the passions that have driven love risk eluding us. The same sense of completion that before gave us pride easily begins to feel like habit, and the comfort of familiarity easily feels like taking each other for granted. We have become for each other all too familiar objects. Where to go from here? Stepping forward requires that we surrender that familiarity, and with it our dreams of perfection and completion. But is there anything beyond these things? We have no way to know. In fear, we often cling to what we know. But when we do, our relationship becomes empty and stale.

Cultural Maturity proposes that much of what we see today has its origins in transitional dynamics. As a species, we stand at a precipice. Old answers are ceasing to work and, by all evidence, they will not be replaced by new ones, at least not of the same sort. What lies ahead?  Anything? From the apex of Transition we cannot know. We can try to cling to familiar truths—from the onward and upward story of material progress to religious predictions of final salvation or damnation. But when we do, we only become more absurd.

This Transitional predicament is well described by postmodern social formulations such as those of existentialism and social constructivism. Such views emphasize the diminishing usefulness of final truths of every sort—truths based on cultural belief. Our developmental picture offers explanation for why, as I’ve proposed, even the best of such notions can only get us part of the way. Such views eloquently address the Transitional quandary, but by themselves give us no way to understand whether anything of real substance lies beyond it.

With Transition we reside at a threshold, at a doorway joining two related but also fundamentally different words.

Creative “Integration”—

Stepping over maturity’s threshold—whatever the creative scale—offers that we might leave Transition’s precarious reality behind us. We are necessarily surprised by what we encounter—surprised that so much of creation’s journey remains ahead, at the magnitude of what it will ask of us, and by the depth and richness of its potential rewards. Transition in one sense marks a completion, in another a beginning—of a systemically mature creative life. While we may have thought creation finished, or nearly so, in fact we have barely approached its midpoint. Yes, the new object of creation (the piece of sculpture, personal identity, relationship as an entity, or culture as structure) stands shining before us. But it has yet to be significantly tested. Integration is about that testing—and the creative changes that result, not just in that object, but also in everything that surrounds it.

The second half of the creative cycle reconnects the new creation with the personal and social contexts from which it was born. It is about bringing maturity to the creative process. We become newly able to step back from the whole of the creative mechanism, and, with this, to better appreciate where it has taken us and what ultimately it has been about. A word like integration comes close to describing what takes place, but this is not integration in any simple additive or averaging sense. The changes that take place in these integrative stages are as fully creative as any seen before. They change everything—fundamentally.

Key to what we see is a fundamental change in the role and functioning of awareness. Integration provides perspective of a newly encompassing sort. Our interest becomes increasingly not just the newly created object, but that object in living relationship with all that surrounds it. This changes how we see the world dramatically. Indeed it changes truth itself. We better appreciate the degree in which how we perceive affects what we perceive. And we better recognize how truths that before seemed separate or even adversarial—many of which are essential to our sense of identity—may work as colluding partners. Before this developmental point, all this would have been too much—disorienting, overwhelming. As Integration Phase dynamics become timely, we experience these changes as positive. They make possible a sophistication of understanding—and of life—that we could not have known before. Within the limits of any formative process’s particular creative scale, we engage a more conscious and explicitly complex, whole-box-of-crayons world of experience.

As I step back from that piece of stone and examine the finished sculpture it has now become, I confront how the journey of its creation is in fact far from over. The piece may need further seasoning, and, even if not, it has yet to be placed in the world. What will happen to it? Will it make the world a better place, be ignored, be destroyed? And in an important sense, it has also yet to be placed in me.  Much remains to happen. On “completing” a piece of real significance, it is often years before I can say with any clarity what it is really about, what it has to teach. The conscious object of creation before was the stone. Creative maturity reveals that my engagement with it has always been as much about creating myself, and, if it truly functions as art, about new possibilities in the creation of culture.

The primary achievements of the first half of development in our individual lives—self-definition, the acquisition of skills and knowledge, perhaps creating a family—all in some way concern establishing ourselves as form. The developmental challenges of life’s second half make real in ever-more-subtle ways the fact that creative Transition first made inescapable—that the role of such forms in the tasks of truth and identity is but a beginning. Truth as answer increasingly gives way to  truth as perspective and interrelationship. Questions present themselves that can’t be answered in the old ways, questions of a newly contextual sort. We reexamine our professions, looking to see if they still provide challenge and fulfillment in our lives—and as important, if they contribute in satisfying ways. We do the same with our relationships and our beliefs. In the process, who we are in each of these spheres deepens. Frequently our choices remain largely as before—it is primarily our relationship to our choices that changes. But sometimes too we make new choices, venture off in wholly new directions. Questions of perspective and meaning increasingly move forefront. When we say someone is mature, seasoned, or wise, we appreciate that they have engaged and weathered at least the most important of life’s Integrative challenges.

Love’s second-half dynamics give new emphasis to the uniqueness of each person and to the unique needs of the relationship. Bonds become at once richer and more humble. Being more fully ourselves, our connection can deepen. But this can happen only with the acceptance of limits to what one person can be for another. Being together with fullness and honesty—however that might look—increasingly defines affection and commitment. We more deeply appreciate self and other as particular and complex beings.

In this book, I’ve proposed that today we see related changes on the cultural stage. Each is a predicted outcome of the more fully encompassing cognitive reordering we would expect second-half dynamics at a cultural scale to produce. I’ve described how the specific values and truths—objectivist, materialist, individualist—that have defined our most recent stage in culture can’t continue to serve us by themselves. I’ve also shown how new questions in every sphere require that we abandon polar ideologies and assumptions and think in more complete and embracing ways. In addition, I’ve discussed how tasks of every sort present us with fundamental questions of context and meaning, and how, more and more, we must make conscious choices in a newly complex, often uncertain, deeply interconnected, and ever-evolving world. Furthermore, I’ve argued that we are being challenged in our time to become, in ways not before conceivable, consciously responsible—mature choice-makers in the larger human story.

Do our times mark the end of civilization? In the sense of confronting Transition’s threshold they do. Our times mark the end of a way of organizing experience and making sense of ourselves that in its general contours has been with us since our species beginnings. From the near side of that threshold there is no way of knowing whether anything lies beyond what we see, and every reason to assume we will find only problems ahead. A step over maturity’s threshold reveals that a great deal potentially lies ahead. We can’t know all the specifics or whether we can pull off what the future will require. But this developmental picture makes strong argument for the conclusion that the rewards for venturing forth could very will be not just exciting, but profound.

Identity and relationship in times past have been systemically partial, based on projection and mythologized perception. Cultural Maturity offers the possibility of more systemic complete, Whole Person/Whole System identity and relationship.

This change takes its most encompassing form in the new, more mature relationship between the individual and culture that becomes possible when we leave behind perceiving culture as a symbolic parent. Individuality comes to have a new, more explicitly systemic meaning.

But Whole Person/Whole System identity and relationship manifests at all systemic levels.  For example, at a large systemis level, Whole Person/Whole System dynamics offer the possibility of relationships between nations that step beyond the chosen-people/evil-empire dynamics of times past. They also make possible a newly mature relationship to leadership—the ability to see leaders not as symbols, but as simply people doing difficult jobs. In addition they offer the possibility of more mature conceptions of community, friendship, and love.

Identity and relationship in times past have been of a specifically two-halves-makes-a whole sort. By giving parts of ourselves away for safekeeping, we’ve protected ourselves from the full complexity of natures and the bigness of life more generally. Psychology provides good language for this “giving parts of ourselves away” dynamic, at least for how it manifests personally. When we “project,” we act as if elements in our inner workings were in fact characteristics of people or groups outside of ourselves.

Projection is something we see with immature behavior of a personal sort all the time. When we say a person is being adolescent, reactive, or blowing something out of proportion, projection almost always plays a role. The person attributes to the world threats and possibilities that have more to do with him or herself.  The re-owning of projection plays a key role in the more limited changes the produce maturity in our personal psychological development. Given how inextricably tied cultural projections often are to consensus realities, we are not used to recognizing that projection manifests in our collective behavior, much less catching it when it occurs. But projection very much plays out at a cultural level and hugely affects our beliefs and behaviors.

The most pointed example, at least as far as consequences, concerns “chosen people/evil other” dynamics in relationships between nations, religions, and ethnicities: We retain the light and project our darkness onto others. Always before in human history, such dynamics have been necessary to a felt sense of social identity and safety. Today we are recognizing that we must leave the tendencies that create such projections behind us—and in relatively short order—or Pogo’s quip that “We have met the enemy and he is us” will become not just the truth, but quite possibly the end of us.

A related handing of parts of ourselves to others for safekeeping has, in times past, ordered every part of our collective lives. We find a good additional example in how we have always before symbolically elevated our leaders. This is obvious with pharaohs and kings, who were seen if not as gods, certainly as god-like. But Kennedy in Camelot, or Reagan as the kindly father figure, both enjoyed glorified parental status.

In a way similar to what we see with the more demonic imagery of “evil other” nationalistic projections, the more idealized projections of traditional leadership once served a useful purpose. They provided a needed sense of order. But they are also similarly ceasing to benefit us. Needed changes almost certainly play may a major role in today crisis of confidence in leadership. Not only have old forms of leadership in most all fields stopped working, they feel less and less like leadership to us at all. We find less trust in leadership today than at the height of 1960s anti-government rhetoric.

Good future decision-making will require a  “growing up” in our relationship to leadership. Absent past projections, the leadership role becomes more humble—that of a good and smart person doing a difficult job. But it also becomes ultimately more powerful. A big part of the reason is that mature leadership is better able to tolerate and manage complexity. As a result, it produces more nuanced decisions and is thus capable of ultimately more potent effect.

We can also look for examples of where projective dynamics some into play to societal dynamics that manifest more personally. The topic of love might strike some people as out of place in this discussion, but it presents a particularly useful illustration. It helps us appreciate how broadly Cultural Maturity’s changes manifest—no part of our lives is left untouched. And, in contrast to war and leadership (at least of the formal sort), love represents a concern with which we all have personal experience.

We are not used to thinking of love as something that changes—love is love. But in my therapeutic work with couples, few things strike me more deeply than how fundamentally love, today, too is changing. Greater ability to recognize projection when it is happening and greater interest in finding ways to love without projection’s past defining influence lies as the heart of these changes.

Love’s changes help illustration how projection relates to culture’s larger developmental picture. The Modern Age gave us the romantic ideal. If we at all acknowledge that love’s definition can change, we tend to think of romantic love, like we do democratic government or the Reformation’s more personal relationship with one’s God, as a culminating expression. Romantic love is love based on individual choice.

But while romantic love represents an important step toward individual choice beyond the more traditional practice of having mates chosen by families or matchmakers, it isn’t the final destination we imagine.

The romantic ideal stops yet short of love between two whole people. As with national allegiances and traditional leadership, its glue has derived from projection. I ascribe feminine aspects of myself to you; you ascribe masculine aspects of yourself to me. Love remains symbol as much as substance—my white knight to your fair maiden—Romeo and Juliet.

While romantic love has produced profound new possibility in its time, today we witness something ultimately even more profound in it implications. We recognize the beginnings of an important “growing up” in our relationship to love. The most ready place to see this is our modern questioning of traditional gender roles. What we encounter is more significant than just new behavioral options. We glimpse the possibility of loving another person more fully for simply who they are. As with mature relations between nations or between leaders and citizens, this is a pursuit that is at once more humble and more rich (and profound) in its possibilities. Love increasingly requires that we better recognize, as Lily Tomlin put it, that we are “all in this alone.” And, simultaneously mature love requires that we recognize the possibility of deeper and more complete ways of being together.

With each of these examples equally, with war and peace, with  leadership, and with love, we see the ready projections of times past fading in their influence. It could seem surprising that we might see related changes in such disparate corners of our experience. But that is what Cultural Maturity predicts—its changes should manifest in every part of our lives. And that is what we see. Ways of thinking about identity—collective or personal—based on projection are not only ceasing to satisfy, they are ceasing to work. Similarly, safe and effective relationships of all sorts—between nations, between leaders and follows, and between ourselves and those whom we care most about—today each require that we reclaim the ready projections of times past and think and act in more complete—and with this more complex and nuanced—ways.

Notions of identity and relationship that work must increasingly be Whole Person/Whole System notions. What results is neither mysterious or in fact terribly complicated.  Whole Person/Whole System identity and relationship is just about better seeing ourselves for who we really are — separate from the protective dynamics of times past.

Identity and relationship in times past have been of a specifically two-halves-makes-a whole sort. By giving parts of ourselves away for safekeeping, we’ve protected ourselves from the full complexity of natures and the bigness of life more generally. Psychology provides good language for this “giving parts of ourselves away” dynamic, at least for how it manifests personally. When we “project,” we act as if elements in our inner workings were in fact characteristics of people or groups outside of ourselves.

Projection is something we see with immature behavior of a personal sort all the time. When we say a person is being adolescent, reactive, or blowing something out of proportion, projection almost always plays a role. The person attributes to the world threats and possibilities that have more to do with him or herself.  The re-owning of projection plays a key role in the more limited changes the produce maturity in our personal psychological development. Given how inextricably tied cultural projections often are to consensus realities, we are not used to recognizing that projection manifests in our collective behavior, much less catching it when it occurs. But projection very much plays out at a cultural level and hugely affects our beliefs and behaviors.

The most pointed example, at least as far as consequences, concerns “chosen people/evil other” dynamics in relationships between nations, religions, and ethnicities: We retain the light and project our darkness onto others. Always before in human history, such dynamics have been necessary to a felt sense of social identity and safety. Today we are recognizing that we must leave the tendencies that create such projections behind us—and in relatively short order—or Pogo’s quip that “We have met the enemy and he is us” will become not just the truth, but quite possibly the end of us.

A related handing of parts of ourselves to others for safekeeping has, in times past, ordered every part of our collective lives. We find a good additional example in how we have always before symbolically elevated our leaders. This is obvious with pharaohs and kings, who were seen if not as gods, certainly as god-like. But Kennedy in Camelot, or Reagan as the kindly father figure, both enjoyed glorified parental status.

In a way similar to what we see with the more demonic imagery of “evil other” nationalistic projections, the more idealized projections of traditional leadership once served a useful purpose. They provided a needed sense of order. But they are also similarly ceasing to benefit us. Needed changes almost certainly play may a major role in today crisis of confidence in leadership. Not only have old forms of leadership in most all fields stopped working, they feel less and less like leadership to us at all. We find less trust in leadership today than at the height of 1960s anti-government rhetoric.

Good future decision-making will require a  “growing up” in our relationship to leadership. Absent past projections, the leadership role becomes more humble—that of a good and smart person doing a difficult job. But it also becomes ultimately more powerful. A big part of the reason is that mature leadership is better able to tolerate and manage complexity. As a result, it produces more nuanced decisions and is thus capable of ultimately more potent effect.

We can also look for examples of where projective dynamics some into play to societal dynamics that manifest more personally. The topic of love might strike some people as out of place in this discussion, but it presents a particularly useful illustration. It helps us appreciate how broadly Cultural Maturity’s changes manifest—no part of our lives is left untouched. And, in contrast to war and leadership (at least of the formal sort), love represents a concern with which we all have personal experience.

We are not used to thinking of love as something that changes—love is love. But in my therapeutic work with couples, few things strike me more deeply than how fundamentally love, today, too is changing. Greater ability to recognize projection when it is happening and greater interest in finding ways to love without projection’s past defining influence lies as the heart of these changes.

Love’s changes help illustration how projection relates to culture’s larger developmental picture. The Modern Age gave us the romantic ideal. If we at all acknowledge that love’s definition can change, we tend to think of romantic love, like we do democratic government or the Reformation’s more personal relationship with one’s God, as a culminating expression. Romantic love is love based on individual choice.

But while romantic love represents an important step toward individual choice beyond the more traditional practice of having mates chosen by families or matchmakers, it isn’t the final destination we imagine.

The romantic ideal stops yet short of love between two whole people. As with national allegiances and traditional leadership, its glue has derived from projection. I ascribe feminine aspects of myself to you; you ascribe masculine aspects of yourself to me. Love remains symbol as much as substance—my white knight to your fair maiden—Romeo and Juliet.

While romantic love has produced profound new possibility in its time, today we witness something ultimately even more profound in it implications. We recognize the beginnings of an important “growing up” in our relationship to love. The most ready place to see this is our modern questioning of traditional gender roles. What we encounter is more significant than just new behavioral options. We glimpse the possibility of loving another person more fully for simply who they are. As with mature relations between nations or between leaders and citizens, this is a pursuit that is at once more humble and more rich (and profound) in its possibilities. Love increasingly requires that we better recognize, as Lily Tomlin put it, that we are “all in this alone.” And, simultaneously mature love requires that we recognize the possibility of deeper and more complete ways of being together.

With each of these examples equally, with war and peace, with  leadership, and with love, we see the ready projections of times past fading in their influence. It could seem surprising that we might see related changes in such disparate corners of our experience. But that is what Cultural Maturity predicts—its changes should manifest in every part of our lives. And that is what we see. Ways of thinking about identity—collective or personal—based on projection are not only ceasing to satisfy, they are ceasing to work. Similarly, safe and effective relationships of all sorts—between nations, between leaders and follows, and between ourselves and those whom we care most about—today each require that we reclaim the ready projections of times past and think and act in more complete—and with this more complex and nuanced—ways.

Notions of identity and relationship that work must increasingly be Whole Person/Whole System notions. What results is neither mysterious or in fact terribly complicated.  Whole Person/Whole System identity and relationship is just about better seeing ourselves for who we really are — separate from the protective dynamics of times past.

The notion of a needed new human maturity—especially when filled out with more theoretical distinctions—is unusual as much for the specifically developmental/evolutionary kind of idea it reflects as for its particular conclusions. Culturally mature decision-making requires not just new ideas, but new kinds of ideas. Here we see one way this applies to the concept of Cultural Maturity itself. Just how it does has critical implications.

The new capacities that a healthy, and perhaps even survivable, human future will require can seem really not humanly possible. When I speak, people who make this assertion often justify it with an evolutionary argument. They might say, for example, “We’ve evolved to be warlike and that will never change.” In making this argument people miss that evolution has two meanings. There is biological evolution, and on that front we are unlikely to see much that will help us, certainly anytime soon. But there is also cultural evolution: the ways social systems grow and evolve over time. If the concept of Cultural Maturity accurate, cultural evolution should produce significant change in times ahead, much with real and important promise.

The whole notion that culture might evolve, and in understandable ways, is suspect in some circles. But the fact of such change—and change of a deep sort—becomes pretty self-evident with close examination.

The concept of Cultural Maturity draws on a particular sort of evolutionary perspective. Just how it is different is key to the concept of Cultural Maturity making sense and providing useful guidance. It is particular, first, in where it gives its attention. Conventionally, if people have thought of culture evolving at all, they’ve mapped human progress in ways that related specifically to invention—a time of hunter-gatherers, an age of agriculture, a modern industrial age. With the concept of Cultural Maturity, our interest lies more specifically with changes in how we humans think and behave. This includes changes throughout our history, and in particular, further changes we see today.

And even within views that give primary attention to changes at the level of understanding, the perspective we will apply is particular. As we will see, it is unique with regard to how it frames the mechanisms of change over time. It is also new in how it frames current changes, the particular way it sees them not just as a next chapter in culture’s story but one of specific and pivotal significance. This newness is one of the reasons I’ve made this introductory chapter as detailed as I have. It is important that we avoid confusion.

We glimpse some of how the developmental/evolutionary perspective we will draw on is different from usual ways of thinking—and critically important for our project—in the simplified but useful recognition that most of our stories about what the future will be like fall into one of two broad categories. On one side we find views that basically affirm where we have come to, and which, for the future, assume the continued viability of the trajectory that got us here. These views acknowledge that there will be bumps in the road ahead, at times big ones, but hold that our institutions and our ways of understanding are basically sound. Given time, according to these views, we can count on our amazing capacities for insight and invention to pull us through whatever difficulties we might face.

Contrasting this we find an array of views that see our present condition to be in some way broken. Extreme examples regard it as irretrievably so, perceiving, if not a looming Armageddon, at least a world  “going to hell in a hand-basket.” Most present milder critical interpretations, but all such notions share the idea that in some basic way we have gone astray. Either explicitly or by implication, most call for major kinds of human transformation.

Both positions, certainly in their extremes, but also in more tempered manifestations, have problems. With regard to the first set of views, there is no reason to conclude that new cultural forms—educational, economic, governmental, scientific, and more—do not lie ahead, and every reason to assume that they do. In addition, we confront how few if any of the major challenges ahead can be solved by technological, economic, or policy means alone. We will see how going forward will require not just striving onward, but changes in how we think, and more deeply, in who we are.

With regard to the second set of views, we need to appreciate that most of the conundrums we face today are the result not of going astray, but of our great success as a species. This is the case equally with more in the world challenges, such as climate change, and with concerns that are more obviously about ourselves, such as the need to address moral questions without past one-size-fits-all cultural guideposts. In addition, a close look reveals how views that argue for radical transformation most always miss critical pieces of the puzzle. We will look at how most such notions advocate for idealized outcomes that we could not achieve, and more important, would, with greater understanding, not want to achieve.

Cultural Maturity’s notion of a needed and newly possible collective “growing up” presents a third sort of interpretation, different not just in its conclusions, but also in the kind of idea it represents. It argues that change—fundamental change—is indeed required; needed changes involve not just a significant stretch, but a leap, beyond familiar assumptions. But, at the same time, the idea of a new human maturity makes clear that the needed going forward is not about the correcting of past error (which is not to say the human enterprise has not involved error). And certainly the answers it proposes look very different from idealized or magical solutions. Cultural Maturity’s new narrative presents at once a more “ordinary” picture, and a picture that is more audacious. It is about engaging a now critical—developmentally predicted, but only now within our capabilities—next step in the human endeavor.

This developmental/evolutionary picture has important implications for the question of hope. The simple fact that the idea of a collective “growing up” articulates a practical story of possibility is by itself of no small significance. But that these needed new capacities are together part of needed and now possible developmental changes suggests something more. It implies that the capacities we need if we are to have a stable, healthy, and creative future, may, as potential, be built into us.

If we needed to invent the changes the concept of Cultural Maturity describes from whole cloth—make them happen simply because they obviously need to happen—the argument that optimism is warranted would be hard to make. But if the seeds of the needed new capacities lie in our makeup, the implications become very different. What our time asks of us comes to have less to do with radical invention than with garnering the insight and courage needed to make our inherent potential manifest. If, too, we are not just potentially capable of what the needed new human maturity asks, but already beginning to make it manifest, as we will see is the case, there is more reason to hope. While this developmental explanation does not guarantee our safety or even our survival, it does paint a very different sort of picture, both more ultimately hopeful and more realistic.

Developmental/evolutionary perspective is needed not just to effectively understand our times and conceive of the future, but also if we are to usefully understand our world more generally. For example, effectively addressing terrorism becomes almost impossible without it, as does any at all useful understanding of conflict that involves countries and ethnic groups that reside in different cultural stages. Functioning effectively in a global economy similarly demands it. The important recognition is that if something like what this particular sort of developmental/evolutionary perspective proposes is not correct, it is hard to imagine a sane and vital—or perhaps even survivable—future.