“The root illness is a massive spiritual, moral, and emotional retardation of development that has afflicted all Western culture and now all world culture, while in the meantime our technological cleverness in every realm has increased exponentially. This developmental differential is the very heart of the problem we’re looking at.”  Saniel Bonder

The Spirit/Money Split—Formula for Correlation part 4

Time for Boys with Toys to Become Men in Sacred Marriage

Over the spring and early summer I’ve presented a series of columns on “A Formula of Correlation That’s Destroyed Way More than Wall Street and Is Much More Threatening than Terrorism and Global Warming.” The series title refers to the “Gaussian copula function” and other abstruse mathematical “formulas of correlation” that financiers around the world relied on, as it turns out disastrously, in the lead-up to the financial/economic meltdowns of 2007-2009. This is the 4th post in the sequence.

Now that, in the last post, we’ve introduced our formula itself, let’s explore it from a number of angles:

“Conscious responsibility for sex and space precedes conscious responsibility for money and time.”

The symbols in this formula are words, of course, not numbers and exotic mathematical algorithms. And they stand not for mathematical factors of investment risk and supposed constancy of profitability, but for emotional, spiritual, whole-being dynamics, the immensely complex rhythms of living that make us humans tick, or not.

Any degree of taking this formula seriously reveals that the challenges we face as a species are far more grave than we’re already having a hard time accepting they are. If those who control the lion’s share of human money and temporal power across the globe are NEVER going to come to adequately sane, humane, collaborative, wise exercise of their practical, financial, temporal responsibilities until they go to some kind of school where they can learn to exercise conscious responsibility for what this formula means by “sex and space” … we’re in very serious trouble.

If you become convinced that this formula holds great truth for us, you can’t help but recognize, I believe, that in our particular day and age all humanity is dangerously akin to the Apollo spacecraft that almost just kept right on going instead of circling the moon to come home. “Planet earth, we’ve got a very serious problem.” We could say a “desperate” problem, except it’s so urgent that there’s no real time for despair.

So my job here is to try to convince anyone who’s reading (a) what the formula actually means and (b) just how unrelentingly true it will likely prove to be.

Up till now I’ve tried to provide lots of relevant examples of these phenomena and how pressing they are in our own time by relating true tales from the current economic/financial/political scenes around the world. I could go on and on in that vein. Over the summer, as just one plum of an example, we were all introduced to the strange fundamentalist Christian world of “The Family” in Washington, D.C. There leading American congressmen and governors have been regularly treated to a version of Christian gospel that looks up to the ruthless, dictatorial Hitlers, Maos, and Stalins of humankind. We’ve learned how their religio-political Family counsel has taught them to dismissively rationalize just about any power-mad treatment of other human beings, especially including such expendable moral trappings as wives and, oh yes, the vows they’ve taken to cherish, honor, and be faithful to them. This is “family values”?

Whew. And then there have been the people bringing guns to town meetings about health care reform, Ruth Madoff’s “TMI” complaints about her husband’s anatomical sexual inadequacy, a member of congress heckling a president at a major presidential address, an independent review board that has accused both the Israelis and the Palestinians of monstrous war crimes in their recent struggles in Gaza, and … well, it’s just not worth our time for me to review more random headlines here.

Let’s step back from news soundbites and current events. It should be obvious that the still-mostly-male and mostly macho world of political, financial, and economic power all around the globe suffers from severe incapacity to take conscious responsibility for the primary dynamics of sexual presence and participation. As I wrote in Part Three of this series, this involves “the whole range of energetic and emotional as well as physical interchanges of attraction and aversion, penetration and reception, embrace and withdrawal, and also violating and being violated, that we are engaging in relation to one another all the time. And ‘space’ must include profound appreciation for the psychic integrity and boundaries as well as the physical and virtual expanses in which we live, move, and have our being.”

As a result of this severe incapacity, since ancient times boys with toys — ranging from weapons of increasingly mass destruction to formulas for increasingly extreme acquisition of wealth — have ruled the human world. Overcoming that crippling incapacity, training these specialized, power-mongering idiot savants in the ever more crucial realms of “multidimensional currency exchange” where they are not only bankrupt but also thoroughly clueless, is not just going to require these fellas and their gals-in-macho-drag female cohorts to get some feeling-sensitivity and anger management training. That would not be a bad thing, to be sure. But it would only produce cosmetic changes. The root illness here requires medicine that goes vastly deeper than that.

The root illness is a massive spiritual, moral, and emotional retardation of development that has afflicted all Western culture and now all world culture, while in the meantime our technological cleverness in every realm has increased exponentially. This developmental differential is the very heart of the problem we’re looking at.

As a gateway into it, let me quote at some length from a brilliant bestselling retrospective on the emergence of the Western worldview, Richard Tarnas’s 1991 “The Passion of the Western Mind.” Tarnas’s book deftly explains the multiple cross-currents of impulse, thought, and understanding that have been at play in the emergence of the Western worldview for more than two millennia. In his conclusion he presents a startling series of observations:

“As Jung prophesied, an epochal shift is taking place in the contemporary psyche, a reconciliation between the two great polarities, a union of opposites: a hieros gamos (sacred marriage) between the long-dominant but now alienated masculine and the long-suppressed but now ascending feminine.”

Tarnas then goes on to outline just what this “sacred marriage” must entail, and now can, really for the first time in history. As you read, imagine trying to convince most of those today who hold the real reins of political, financial, and economic power in the world that they personally really must go through this kind of profound, simultaneously mystical and moral reintegration on every level of their own being and in all their relationships, especially their whole manner of participating in realms of worldly power and responsibility:

“And this dramatic development is not just a compensation, not just a return of the repressed, as I believe this has all along been the underlying goal of Western intellectual and spiritual evolution. For the deepest passion of the Western mind has been to reunite with the ground of its being. The driving impulse of the West’s masculine consciousness has been its dialectical quest not only to realize itself, to forge its own autonomy, but also, finally, to recover its connection with the whole, to come to terms with the great feminine principle in life: to differentiate itself from but then rediscover and reunite with the feminine, with the mystery of life, of nature, of soul. And that reunion can now occur on a new and profoundly different level from that of the primordial unconscious unity, for the long evolution of human consciousness has prepared it to be capable at last of embracing the ground and matrix of its own being freely and consciously. The telos, the inner direction and goal, of the Western mind has been to reconnect with the cosmos in a mature participation mystique, to surrender itself freely and consciously in the embrace of a larger unity that preserves human autonomy while also transcending human alienation.”

Again, think of the characters who dominate our headlines today, some of whom I’ve mentioned in these posts. What is it going to take for people like Bernie Madoff (the villain who got caught), Jimmy Cayne, Dick Fuld, or even the Alan Greenspans, Bernard Bernankes, Timothy Geitners, the Trumps and Welches and Gateses and Buffetts, the Sarkozys, Putins, Netanyahus, and Hus, to actually undergo the sacrificial “ego death” that Tarnas then implies is a prerequisite for the Western (and globally much-Westernized) mind, for the sake of human civilization? Is any such thing even possible?

“But to achieve this reintegration of the repressed feminine, the masculine must undergo a sacrifice, an ego death. The Western mind must be willing to open itself to a reality the nature of which could shatter its most established beliefs about itself and about the world. This is where the real act of heroism is going to be. A threshold must now be crossed, a threshold demanding a courageous act of faith, of imagination, of trust in a larger and more complex reality; a threshold, moreover, demanding an unflinching act of self-discernment. And this is the great challenge of our time, the evolutionary imperative for the masculine to see through and overcome its hubris and one-sidedness, to own its unconscious shadow, to choose to enter into a fundamentally new relationship of mutuality with the feminine in all its forms.”* (Author’s own italics throughout the quotations.)

The “Planet-Earth-we’ve-got-a-problem” direness of this challenge is that, as I’ve said again and again in this column on the Spirit/Money Split, it’s no longer just the academics and the mystics among us who must contemplate such a radical sacrifice of worldview and its accoutrements. Every human body now faces something of this kind of challenge. Certainly, all of our leaders in every field of society and culture do. Because at this stage, those who do not take conscious responsibility for such a thorough transformation of their worldview and their participation risk wreaking irreparable havoc on both human civilization and the whole biosphere.

That’s where our boys-with-toys, till-now irresponsible, relatively unconscious technological cleverness has gotten us. Those who have most of the power in the realms of money, earthly time, and geopolitics are among the most clueless in the multidimensional realms of sex and psycho-physical space.

So, as absurdly impossible and hopeless as it may seem, those of us who straddle that split as best we can have a profound obligation to our fellows on either side. We must champion this kind of reintegration, sacred marriage, reconciliation and reunion, which is now possible in a much more conscious form than ever before. 

The good news is that if you scratch the surface of the lives of many of the big power players in today’s world, they’re already searching. They know or sense that the gig is up. There was a time during the Clinton administration when both Bill Clinton and Al Gore were photographed with famed “Integral” philosopher Ken Wilber’s book “The Marriage of Sense and Soul” in hand. (“Sense and Soul” in his title, in different words, are “Spirit” and “Matter,” or masculine and feminine.) Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons’ book “Do YOU!,” a personal presentation of “laws to achieve happiness and success,” quotes from the “Yoga Sutras of Patanjali” and numerous other spiritual texts both Eastern and Western as well as from the wiser of his “gangsta” cohorts. Just this month in her magazine, Oprah, an unabashed seeker of mystic wisdom, interviews rapper-entrepreneur Jay-Z, whose two books he “lives by” turn out to be Gary Zukav’s “The Seat of the Soul” and James Redfield’s “The Celestine Prophecy.”

These are just a few. There’s a readiness and ripeness among many. Good-B’s Peter Ressler and Monika Mitchell found this out when they first published “Spiritual Capitalism.” To their great surprise, a lot of people in high finance, including major players, who were secretly spiritual and hardly dared use those two words “spiritual” and “capitalism” in the same sentence, started coming out of Wall Street’s own elegant woodwork. And they’ve been doing so ever since, including during the current crisis.

In further posts I’ll build from Tarnas’s diagnosis and challenge to undergo this “Sacred Marriage” in a number of ways. Long before I learned of his writings, this was the core and focus of my own life’s work, and so it has remained. What my wife Linda, our colleagues, and I have learned on the front lines of such work is in many ways extremely sobering, and yet in others hope-inspiring.

The challenge in front of us all, yes, is something like what it took for one country to put a man on the moon in a decade.

But, we humans did that. We can do this too.

And we must, if we agree that we don’t have a single viable option of any kind. Further posts will, I hope, help make that agreement impossible for us to avoid. When Tarnas says this sacred marriage is a “real act of heroism” and “the great challenge of our time,” he’s not exaggerating. If anyone has a back door to take rather than go meet this challenge, personally and directly, they will exercise that option. In a heartbeat. 

© Saniel Bonder 2009. All rights reserved.  

For previous articles please click archives.

About Saniel: Harvard educated “destiny-empowerment” expert, Saniel is author of Healing the Spirit/Matter Split, the provocative "White-Hot Yoga of the Heart," and many other books and programs. He hails from Sonoma, California where his unique blend of intellectual curiosity and spiritual wisdom is honed and nurtured. Saniel co-writes and co-teaches with his wife, Linda. Together they travel and teach “materiality and spirit” workshops throughout the US and internationally. His website is http://heartgazing.com/spiritmoney.