Healing and The Mind
Introduction from Katherine Fulton
Over the past three years, a small band of Commonweal folks have worked with Michael on his own archive—and inevitably therefore also on the archives for Commonweal as a whole, in anticipation of our 50th anniversary in 2026. We have uncovered many treasures that we hope to use for various publications and exhibits.
The found documents—and the conversations they have stimulated–have begun to create a fascinating intellectual history of Commonweal. Looking back raises many observations and questions about what has—and has not—changed over these 50 years, as well as what the world calls for now, in a very new time.
Given Commonweal’s founding vision as a center for healing ourselves and healing the earth, I asked Michael if he would be willing to share his current thoughts on healing with the board.
Michael being Michael, he created this quite extraordinary document reflecting a lifetime of exploration and learning.
As you begin to read, following the evolution of the ideas that have formed Commonweal, know that Michael offers a few prefaces: He focuses here primarily on personal healing, as he did not feel he could do justice to both the personal and the planetary in one short report. There are dozens of ways he could have traced how personal healing has changed dramatically over the past half century in some ways, and not at all in others. He can only speak from his own experience.
Thank you Michael. This piece is truly a gift.
***
My Mind Map of Healing in 1972
I taught psychology and politics at Yale—and contemporary political theory as well. When I moved to Bolinas from teaching at Yale in 1972, my mind-map was essentially a developmental psychology map influenced by Erik Erikson, Jean Piaget, and Lawrence Kohlberg with their parallel stages of psychosocial, cognitive, and moral development.
Overlaid on this developmental model of mind was a pastiche of neo-Freudian concepts, national character studies ike Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality, Gregory Bateson and RD Laing’s double bind theory of schizophrenia, Erikson’s work in psychobiography, and Marcuse’s Repressive Tolerance. I had no coherent theory of mind but what concepts I had were intrapsychic and in no way transpersonal.
Psychology and politics had been my principal interest at both Harvard and Yale. I wrote psychobiographical theses both as an undergraduate and for my doctorate. I did daily psychoanalysis with a Freudian analyst for four years at Yale since I was considering becoming a lay psychoanalyst.
I was the recording secretary for the Wellfleet Psychohistorical Conference on Cape Cod with Erik Erikson, Robert Lifton, Philip Rieff, Kenneth Keniston and others. I had worked at the Yale Psychiatric Institute. I also taught the course on counterculture. I dabbled in psychedelics. I was at the juncture point of the establishment and the counterculture mind maps.
I was reading Erikson’s psychobiography, Young Man Luther and Childhood and Society, David Shapiro’s Neurotic Styles, Philip Rieff’s Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, Kenneth Keniston’s Young Radicals and The Uncommitted. All these influences contributed to the mind map I brought to California. There was no hint of transpersonal psychologies, environmental factors in health, or lifestyle factors in health.
Nutrition and the Mind
When I moved to Bolinas, my first major mind map shift came from meeting a young girl who had been diagnosed “retarded” until she was taken off gluten and dairy products. This launched me into a long-term interest in the effects of nutrition on child development and later adult evolution. Bolinas in 1972 was an epicenter of the counterculture with a remarkable confluence of interests in cannabis, psychedelics, meditation, yoga, holistic medicine, and many other contributors to my evolving mind map.
I co-founded Full Circle, a residential center for children with learning and behavior disorders in 1974. I wrote a report for Ford Foundation called Tomorrow’s Children—The role of nutrition in the learning and behavior disorders of children, exploring what was then—and largely remains—the work of pioneering clinicians studying food allergies and chemical sensitivities, dietary shifts, hypoglycemia, nutritional supplements, and more. Our work at Full Circle led me to understand that some children responded dramatically to nutritional interventions, some less dramatically, and some not at all.
Commonweal—Healing Ourselves and Healing the Earth
I co-founded Commonweal in 1976 with a vision of contributing to healing ourselves and healing the earth. This was a direct continuation of my interest in psychology and politics which in turn reflected my lineage: my mother the psychologist, my father the political theorist.
By this time a spiritual perspective on consciousness had entered. The question of whether the vision of Commonweal had come from within me or come through me was a real question. Carolyn Brown and Arthur Okamura had taken psilocybin and seen Commonweal as an acupuncture point on the surface of the earth. Carolyn had a vision of sitting in a circle of spirit entities. I took psilocybin and saw myself as a young rabbi in rural Russia on a dirt road filled with joy (which I now understand as an ancestral vision).
An Era of Cultural Convulsions
The 1970s-1990s was an era of cultural convulsions. There was both awareness of the destructive social and environmental trends but also hope that we might achieve a better future. “Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s,” the song went. Earth Day was established in 1970. The hope that we might “save the earth” reached its apotheosis around the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, when there was still some hope of a North-South contract for sustainable development. We sent a delegation of eight people to the Earth Summit. It never happened. Those hopes, while still extant, have increasingly been subsumed by the growing cadence of social, environmental, technological, economic, and political-military crises.
It is difficult to be healthy people on a sick planet. It is challenging to have hopes for a better future when natural and social systems are collapsing all around us.
Three Key Essays on Biosocial Decline, Biopsychosocial Transformation, and Environmental Health
After I co-founded Commonweal in 1976, I wrote several key articles in Steve Lerner’s Commonweal journal Working Papers including The Biosocial Decline Hypothesis, Biopsychosocial Transformation, and The Age of Extinctions and the Emerging Environmental Health Movement. This interest in environmental health—in healing the earth—ran alongside my interest in healing ourselves. I saw the two as inextricable.
We also held several conferences on global governance, created the Commonweal Sustainable Futures Group with futurist Don Michaels and others, and, as I said above, actively participated in the Earth Summit. All these activities reflected our focus on healing the earth.
Joining the Effort to Mainstream the Mind-Body Health Movement
On the personal healing side, I joined Rachel Naomi Remen and others at the Institute for the Advancement of Health (IAH) which Eileen Rockefeller founded in 1982. I became part of the effort to mainstream the emerging mind-body health movement. This had a profound effect on my mind map of healing. Our partners were serious academics, clinicians, and researchers in seeking to understand mind-body health. IAH published Advances, which was an excellent journal of some of the best thinking of the time.
Integral Yoga and the Transformation of Commonweal
My world fell apart in 1983. My dog died, my father developed cancer, my marriage ended, and Commonweal’s funding collapsed. I had to lay off virtually the entire Commonweal staff including myself.
I discovered Integral Yoga. It fundamentally changed my mind map of healing and the mind. The transpersonal became real for me. The non-dual view that truth is one, paths are many, became real. The reality that a life of dedication is the path to inner peace became real. The Integral Yoga Community introduced me to Dean Ornish, MD. His work showing that yoga-based retreats could reverse coronary artery disease was a revelation. Dean and I and others began to imagine what other diseases we could test this approach with. We decided to try retreats at Commonweal for systemic lupus disease because it has good markers for regression. We did two lupus retreats with good results. We then did two retreats for the elderly with good results.
Then after my father developed cancer I decided I wanted to try working with cancer. This so frightened the Commonweal board of directors that they demoted me, turned power over to the business manager as executive director, and told me I could keep a powerless title as president. It was an interesting experience. I note it here only as a significant developmental stage. But then in 1984 I was awarded a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, grants began to flow in, the board forgave me, and I rebuilt Commonweal with the yoga-inspired vision of Commonweal being a flexible instrument for human service.
Founding the Cancer Help Program
When I co-founded the Commonweal Cancer Help Program in 1986 with Rachel Naomi Remen, Virginia Veach, Swami Nischalananda, and others, I was exposed to a whole different set of mind maps, especially the psychosynthesis theories of Roberto Assagioli, which Rachel Remen had trained extensively in.
Wounded Healers—Bill Moyers’ Healing and the Mind
In 1993, Bill Moyers launched his four-part series for PBS television series “Healing and the Mind.” He simultaneously published a book with the same title. He chose the Commonweal Cancer Help Program as the concluding episode. He called that segment “Wounded Healers.” Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, and I co-led that retreat and were interviewed for the book. (David Grubin was the consummate skilled filmmaker who filmed the series.)
The Moyers series was played hundreds of times on PBS stations across the country. It still lives today on the Internet. It played a critical role in the mainstreaming of mind-body health at a time when mind-body health was deeply suspect in mainstream medicine.
Eileen Rockefeller went on to co-found the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning in 1994. Daniel Goleman’s seminal book, Emotional Intelligence, published in 1995, spent a year and a half on the New York Times best-seller list and was translated into 40 languages. The concepts of social and emotional intelligence went mainstream with immense power. At the same time, Howard Gardner at Harvard was disseminating his theories of multiple intelligences and Carol Gilligan was teaching her important work In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development.
The Cultural Revolutions and Their Impact on Mind Maps
This impulse—to recontextualize the mind—with mind-body health, psychoneuroimmunology, and social and emotional intelligence—has far deeper roots than these cultural markers of the 1970s to 1990s. In the current cycle, they date back at least to the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s. The notable social movements included the peace movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the anti-war movement, the environmental movement, human rights, anti-colonialism, LGBTQ+ rights, the cannabis and psychedelic revolutions, and much more.
The staid post-war suburban image of the Organization Man and Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd gave way to social, environmental, and political movements so profound and so radical that I remember literally not knowing how these multiple revolutions would end. And, indeed, as has historically been the case, these leftist movements gave birth to a backlash of right-wing forces symbolized by Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, the Powell Memorandum, and the remarkable effort by conservative philanthropy that institutionalized the right-wing movement in this country that we now see in full flower with Donald Trump. Likewise, right-wing movements increasingly dominate European politics. The polycrisis has engendered increasingly authoritarian impulses around the world. So our dive into progressive inclusive democratic movements cannot blind us to the generally more potent right-wing movements they engender.
Mind Maps I Knew Less Well
I was not deeply engaged with many other parallel developments in mind maps, especially the psychedelic renaissance, the work of Stan Grof and others, the whole set of mind maps emerging at Esalen, the deep evolution of Buddhist mind maps, and much more. I was aware of these developments but not deeply engaged with them. In retrospect, I was missing some of the deepest sources of transformation of our understanding of healing and the mind. Ken Wilber, for example, has stayed largely on the periphery of my mind maps despite his remarkable contributions.
How Did these Cultural Movements Affect Commonweal?
How did all these movements affect Commonweal? The answer can only be: quite deeply. On the one hand, I tried very hard to keep Commonweal “transpolitical”—above the fray of politics. This impulse came from several places. First and foremost, I wanted everyone to feel comfortable in the Cancer Help Program, whatever their politics. Second, we were on a lease in the Point Reyes National Seashore and therefore on federal land. Third, we had projects that were very mainstream as well as some that bent toward the progressive. Finally, since healing is fundamental to our work, my image was that Commonweal was like the Red Cross, sending ambulances out into the fields of battle to care for the wounded on all sides. I still feel strongly that this is our best approach. We have strong values, yes, but only engage in political issues with the greatest of caution. That said, Commonweal was inevitably deeply influenced by many of these movements, and our programs reflect those influences.
Names for Mind-Body Medicine
These new and also ancient understandings of healing and the mind have been called holistic health, mind-body health, mind-body-spirit health, patient-centered medicine, relationship-centered medicine, and whole-person health. It had its parallel in psychoneuroimmunology. It became a core dimension of complementary medicine, integrative medicine, functional medicine, and more.
Enlightenment and Romantic Impulses
At a cultural level, the American counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s was a renaissance of Romantic thinking which, in turn, was a reaction to the dominant Enlightenment paradigm. Put differently, it is the ancient dialogue between Plato and Aristotle, the idealist and the scientist. As William Blake put it, “May God keep us from Single Vision and Newton’s sleep.”
These two impulses—the ideal and the material—have danced with each other for millenia. Is there meaning in the universe or not? Is there a transcendent world or not? Sometimes this debate has been captured by the conflict of church and state—the religious and secular orders—but neither religion nor the secular order do justice to the deeper questions. Nor is the debate in any way settled to this day.
In the post-World War II era, the identification of Romanticism as one of the root sources of fascism, the strong materialist tendency of socialism and marxism, and triumphant developments in science, technology, and corporate and military power—all contributed to a decisive victory of materialism over idealism. So while the counterculture impulse was Romantic and holistic, the dominant paradigm was fiercely materialistic.
The dance of the idealist and the materialist interact with the evolution of the scientific, technological, social, and political forces also propelled us over the past 60 years from a collective sense of some hope for humanity and the earth to a growing preponderance of pessimism about the future and the inexorable interaction of events we now call the global polycrisis. We live in fraught times.
Know Thyself, Heal Thyself—Ancient Roots
The question we address here is where we are now—what we have learned about healing and the mind over these six decades—and what lies ahead. I will focus primarily on healing ourselves and leave the questions of healing the earth for another time.
These questions about healing and the mind are ancient—as ancient as humanity. “Know thyself” was inscribed at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. When Socrates was told the oracle at Delphi had said he was the wisest man in Athens, he responded that could only be because he knew that he did not know.
“Physician, heal thyself” is an ancient aphorism from Jesus referenced in Luke 4:23—but goes back at least as far as the 6th century BCE. The chorus in Aeschulus’s Prometheus Bound comments on Prometheus’s suffering: “Like an unskilled doctor, fallen ill, you lose heart and cannot discover by which remedies to cure your own disease.”
To heal ourselves, we must know ourselves. This intuition is ancient and fundamental. What changes over time is how we understand it. What does it mean to heal ourselves? What does it mean to know ourselves? And how does this rapidly changing world affect both?
Buddha Speaks
In The Dhammapada, the great Theravada Buddha teaching of the Pali canon from the third century BCE, in Juan Mascaro’s exquisite translation, the Buddha says something like this (from memory):
What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday
And our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow
Our lives are the creation of our minds.
If a man speaks or acts with an impure mind, suffering follows him
As the the cart follows the beast that draws the cart.
If man speaks or acts with a pure mind,
Joy follows him as his own shadow.
He insulted me, he hurt me, he defeated me, he robbed me,
Those who think not such thoughts will be free from hate.
For hate is not conquered by hate. Hate is conquered by love.
This is a law eternal.
This is an especially clear formulation of the role of pure mind and a fundamental doctrine of harmlessness, the Golden Rule, reciprocity and love in the construction of our lives.
Four Great Questions
Who am I?
Where do I come from?
Why am I here?
Where am I going?
These are four ancient questions susceptible to very different answers. Some would say we are a perfectly random blind assemblage of molecules without meaning. Consciousness is a random epiphenomenon of the human brain. Stephen Hawkings called us chemical scum on the surface of an ordinary planet. This is the standard physicalist narrative of our time.
Others would affirm this—but add that we as humans have the opportunity to assign meaning to an otherwise absurd and meaningless world. This is the existentialist position.
Still others would marvel at the beauty and coherence of the universe and our ability to understand it but still give a deeply humanist response. This view, like the existentialist view, is congruent with the physicalist standard dominant narrative.
And then there are others who see patterns of meaning and purpose and who believe in some sense we come from beyond. This view is held by a substantial portion of humanity who believe in some mystical, divine, or transcendent function.
Wordsworth’s Ode to Immortality
Wordsworth speaks to this intuition in Ode to Immortality.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
An Early and Sustained Definition of Healing
I have pondered these questions for sixty years. When I had the vision for Commonweal in 1975, I imagined a center for “healing ourselves and healing the earth.” What did that mean to me at the time? The meaning has endlessly deepened.
An early and sustained meaning of personal healing was this.
Healing is different from curing. Curing means a treatment that removes a disease and it never recurs. Healing is a movement toward wholeness. Healing can take place both in living and in dying. It can take place physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Healing tends to work best in community. Healing is the solo journey that we cannot make alone.
It is true that there are great common pathways to physical, emotional, mental and spiritual healing. We describe seven healing practices at CancerChoices.org: eat well, move more, manage stress, sleep well, create a healing environment, share love and support, and explore what matters now.
There are many other iterations of these practices. A fourfold version offered by Dean Ornish, MD, is diet, exercise, stress reduction, and finding love and support. A religious version, the Daniel Program, is faith, food, fitness, focus, and friends. There are many different versions of the same counsel for secular, spiritual, religious, scientific, philosophical, or simply pragmatic orientations. The basic counsel: if you get as healthy as you can you will do better.
The Power of Story—Great Healing Pathways + Minute Particulars
But there is far more to personal healing than these great pathways. William Blake said if we would help another “we must do so in minute particulars.” This is my experience from more than 220 week-long retreats in the Commonweal Cancer Help Program.
I find the unique particulars of healing to be even more powerful than the great common pathways. This is why authentic deep healing cannot be mass-produced. It can be evoked for some people at some times under some conditions. But it is never guaranteed.
The surest path to understanding the minute particulars of healing is our stories. I’ve worked with more than 1,700 people and come to know them well during these retreats. I ask each of them to write me a biographical letter in advance with prompts that include:
Where were you born?
What kind of family?
What was childhood like?
What were you like in 8th grade? As a senior in high school? As a senior in college (if you went)?
What happened after that?
What have the turning points in your life been?
Do you have any religious, philosophical, spiritual or other frame of meaning?
What matters most now?
These questions usually elicit long personal letters—often a first telling of a life story—which I go over in detail with them during our individual sessions. I do this for three reasons.
The first reason is that what usually needs healing most is our stories. Many people come with broken stories—but some come with coherent trustworthy stories that protect them and give meaning to whatever life brings. When I encounter someone with an intact story, I know they are in good hands. On a recent retreat, a man with an amputated leg and metastatic cancer who was in great pain sat with me. He had lived a very difficult life. But when I asked him how he felt about what lay ahead, he looked me in the eye and said, “bring it on.” At that moment I knew he would be OK regardless of what happened. Many people of faith have a deep serenity in the face of whatever happens. Their stories are meta-stories beyond what fate brings. We often miss the significance of serenity—whether religious, spiritual, or secular. Our stories are an essential guide to the minute particulars of deep intentional healing.
The second reason is these life reviews often help us focus on the most fundamental of all healing questions which is rarely about six of the seven healing practices—the fundamental question for all of us, I would suggest, is what matters now in our lives? And what matters now is almost always unique.
The third and final reason is to explore whether there is a place that goes beyond personal story and beyond current understandings of what matters now—what Carl Jung called the transcendent function.
“The transcendent function is the core of Carl Jung’s theory of psychological growth and the heart of what he called individuation, the process by which one is guided in a teleological way toward the person one is meant to be.” Jung approached the transcendent function as a dialogue with the unconscious.
Here we have to be exceedingly careful. Not everyone wants or can bear a dialogue with the unconscious. The transcendent function does not have meaning for everyone—and even when it does have meaning, it may not be what matters now. We are dealing with Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It is very difficult to focus on the transcendent function if basic needs for food, shelter, medical care, pain relief, finances, and the like have not been attended to.
There are people who are able to take refuge in the transcendent even when basic needs are not met. But this is where William Blake comes back in. Like a good community organizer, those in healing work need to meet people where they are now and address what matters now—and that is minute particulars more often than not.
Three Common Themes in Relational Healing—Lessons in Healing from More Than 1,200 Women
In what follows here I draw on 38 years and more than 220 week-long Commonweal Cancer Help Program retreats—but also on many hundreds of conversations on healing with hundreds of others. I am absolutely convinced that the lessons from our work in healing with cancer are essentially applicable to all of us.
Most of the 1,700 people who have come through the Cancer Help Program are women. For most of these women what matters most now is not their cancer treatment. What matters most for them are three things.
The first is struggles in relationships. The second is the challenge of finding space and time for self-care and creative living. And the third is how they can continue to contribute and find meaning in their lives.
The relational issue is fundamental. These women struggle either with their partners or their ex-partners or with finding a partner. They struggle with children, siblings, and parents who are having difficulties. They struggle with the challenges of friends they care about or relationships to work or at work. Finally, they so often struggle with childhood or life wounds of abuse or neglect or abandonment of every possible kind. Close to half the women who come report deep experiences of abuse, abandonment, or isolation in childhood. This is often where the deep healing work starts.
Finding time and space for self-care—and feeling it is OK to take care of themselves as opposed to giving to others—is the second great struggle. And since deep healing is all about self-care at every level, it is a critical struggle indeed. This is relationship with ourselves. It is astonishing how deep the training to see self-care as selfish for women often goes. The need to believe you are finally worthy of self-care can be an awesome struggle.
The hope to find ways to continue to serve in the world—and to realize our potential to be of the greatest service we can be—is the third great struggle. It speaks directly to what matters now—as do the struggles with relationships and self-care. It is also about giving. Two of these three struggles are about giving to others. One is about giving to themselves. All three are questions of relational healing.
Soul and Spirit—Immanent and Transcendent Healing
The transcendent function in healing—the place beyond story, beyond relationships, beyond self-care, and beyond finding creative forms of service—must be approached with the greatest sensitivity. It does not have meaning for many people. And even for those for whom it does or can have meaning, it may not be what matters now.
Often, a cancer diagnosis is a true wake up call—an awakening—for both women and men. That awakening can be transitory (a state), or permanent (a stage). State and stage awakenings often feel the same and may not be differentiable until they either fade or don’t fade. The key metaphor is that the wound is not only a wound but an opening. Hence Jung’s phrase “wounded healers” and the ancient injunction: “physician heal thyself.”
We must also say the transcendent is also deeply related to the immanent—the embodied aspect of psyche—and therefore we often must address both spirit and soul, which have very different needs. Spirit is the transcendent function that takes us upward. Soul stays close to the body and remembers the body’s wisdom. The proper phrase would be “transcendent and immanent healing.”
We Are Each Many—and Our Parts have Different Concepts of Healing
We also must be aware that we are not one unified whole. This is essential if we are to understand that what heals one part of us may hurt another part. Roberto Assagioli’s psychosynthesis is useful here as it points to our many subpersonalities in the lower and higher unconscious as well as in the middle range of consciousness.
Other symbolic systems like Hal and Sidra Stone’s Voice Dialogue address our plurality. The reason this matters so much is that our subpersonalities often have opposed or divergent priorities—what is healing for one may be injurious for another. This is true at both the spirit and soul levels since soul and spirit famously may have divergent agendas. “When spirit laughs, soul cries.” The ancient image is that our chariot is attached to two horses—one pulls us up and the other pulls us down. But do not understand down as negative—it means down to earth, down to body, down to soul.
Assagiolians speak of four steps in subpersonality work—“name them, claim them, tame them and aim them.” We must recognize all these subpersonalities, especially the most exiled among them; give them names and identities; work to see if we can move them toward working more in concert than in conflict; and aim them toward life purpose.
Archetypal Psychology
In my world, Carl Jung’s influence has endured far better than Sigmund Freud’s contribution. That is a major statement. It is widely known that Jung aligned with the counterculture far better than Freud. While Freud has endured in atheistic France and in the Germanic countries allergic to Jung’s flirtation with Nazism, Jung’s many contributions to a transpersonal psychology aligned with Joseph Campbell, the Eranos seminars, Native American healers, the exploration of synchronicity, alchemy, the I Ching, astrology, and even (gasp) UFOs has long endured.
His preeminent iconoclastic inheritor was James Hillman, who turned Jung’s Christ-centric vision on its head as an atheistic existentialist Jewish thinker but kept his insight that archetypes live through us rather than within us. Hillman also took archetypal psychology out of the consultation room and into the streets exploring urban design, the men’s movement, suicide, masturbation, and much more. I differ strongly with Hillman, who eschewed spirit and spoke only for soul, and favor Jung in many regards—but Hillman has been a major influence. Jung, Hillman, Stanislaw Groff, and others have all understood the archetypes as living energetic nexuses that we do not control and that live through us. This has become a principal element in my own thought.
Hillman’s archetypal psychology map that vividly describes each of us as a boarding house with some subpersonalities that come out by day, others who only come out by night, and still others who never come out of their rooms at all. When two people fall in love, their daytime personalities are on display. It takes awhile to see how all the denizens of both boarding houses get along or don’t. Hillman notoriously eschews interest in spirit and speaks only for soul. He despises theories of transcendence.
Astrology, I Ching and Tarot as Mind Maps
Astrology is, in fact, such a symbolic system that “works” in entirely mysterious ways—yet most people believe their sun signs say something about them even if they don’t “believe” in astrology. The I Ching and the Tarot are similar symbolic systems that can evoke deep healing. Deep healing often works in realms beyond any rational understanding.
Enneagram As Mind Map
My favorite mind map for deep healing and self-understanding is the Enneagram. I see enneagram as another overlay on Assagioli’s neutral map of subpersonalities alongside archetypal psychology, astrology, the I Ching, and the Tarot.
The compelling difference for me is that enneagram is empirically based on people’s self-perception—you discover what you are inductively rather than relying on the stars or a Tarot or I Ching reading. Enneagram is a system of nine core personality types which track precisely with the Kabalistic tree of life, closely with the seven deadly sins of Christianity (they lost two), closely with Dante’s circles of hell, and closely with the DSM—the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM misses Enneagram 3 because the United States is a Enneagram 3 culture so “the achiever” is regarded as normal.) I work in the lineage of Oscar Ichazo, Claudio Naranjo, AH Almaas, Beatrice Chestnut, and others. In sixty years of studying depth psychologies, I have never found a more direct approach to understanding self and others. I find enneagram immensely helpful in work, in family, and wherever I turn my attention.
There are many other mind maps. Whatever mind maps we use deeply influence our sense of ourselves and of what healing means for us.
Psychophysiological Disciplines, Nature, and the Three Paths of the Gita
For the so inclined, meditation, yoga, Tai Chi, and Qi Gong also have profound implications for our maps of healing and the mind. So does immersion in nature. And so, of course, does love—widely seen as the greatest of all healing forces. The paths to healing may be infinite. Each path has both common and unique elements. In the Bhagavad Gita there are three great paths—love (bhakti) is the simplest, work (karma) is also very direct, and wisdom (jnana) is the most difficult and the one where it is easiest to get lost. Once again, the ancient triad of love, wisdom, and will.
The Future of Healing and the Mind
Now we come to the difficult task of exploring the future of healing and the mind. I will start by describing several dimensions of exploration and then try to make sense of them.
The Global Polycrisis
The first dimension is the global polycrisis. I’ve explored the polycrisis for decades in different iterations. The last decade has been especially fruitful. The polycrisis can be described as cascading crises, the metacrisis, the permacrisis, the great unraveling, the turning point, and with many other descriptors. The central insight is that environmental, social, technological, financial/economic, natural, and other stressors are interacting with increasing velocity causing future shocks of ever greater intensity and unpredictability.
This is the real world we are living in and it will affect our understanding of what matters now for us as well as all the underpinnings of our health—food, water, air, climate, energy, safety, community, and everything else. For example, we all focus on the climate emergency, but the impact of toxic chemicals on our health and the biosphere is astonishing, triggering a wide range of diseases and disorders both mental and physical. Likewise the pace of global pandemics is increasing. Refugee migrations are at record levels. The techno-surveillance state has increasing power. We live in a brave new world and it cannot help but impact our understanding of healing at all levels.
Technology
Technology is an immensely powerful driver of healing and curing. This includes medical technologies, self-care and complementary approaches, our ability to search therapies online, artificial intelligence (AI), and much more. The impact of AI on our definition of mind and consciousness is accelerating rapidly. What does AI mean for healing and the mind?
Neurodiversity, Infertility, Gender Bending, Cancer, and More
The growing neurodiversity of the educational system and the workforce is a direct consequence of many factors including chemical contaminants, social media, and changing conditions of life across the socioeconomic spectrum nationally and internationally. We are changing what it means to be human. It is happening very rapidly.
Infertility is another major trend driven by chemical contaminants in much of the world. Sperm counts have decreased dramatically around the world.
The impact of chemicals on gender orientation is a sensitive subject but scientists who know the field have no doubt it is a factor. We are thinking differently, gender orienting differently, and becoming less able to reproduce.
An immense array of diseases and disorders have chemical and other environmental contributors: cancer, heart disease, dementia, autoimmune, and neurodegenerative diseases. All these trends have profound implications for healing.
Collapse, Transformation, or Both?
The scholars and deep thinkers on the polycrisis know we cannot predict the future. But there is no question we are in the 6th great biodiversity distinction cycle, this one caused by humanity.
We are in a bottleneck of human and planetary evolution. What species and ecosystems will emerge from this bottleneck is unknown. Whether humans or post-humans will be part of the picture is unknown.
But we are a “weedy” species able to survive under many conditions. So the odds are that some human or post-human or techno-evolved species will survive seems reasonably high. But what the body, mind, emotions and spirit of this being will be is to be determined.
I doubt collapse will be total. It will be unevenly distributed, as Neil Stephenson rightly says it already is. Some will thrive, some will starve. Some will live and some will die. But we all will become different from what we are as our collective consciousness and civilizations continue to evolve. Commonweal should, in my view, do our best to be of service to those whose suffering we can alleviate as creatively and effectively as possible.
Preserving Unreconstructed Humanity
This is the state, in my very limited view, of the situation we face five decades after we founded Commonweal. Each of us and all of us must ask what our personal work in the world is now and what our collective vision of healing work at Commonweal should be. And that depends on our values and worldviews and personal situations and stage of life and much more.
At 80, I choose to prefer an unreconstructed human future as my ideal. By unreconstructed, I mean I favor humans as we are with all our faults. I’d like natural human beings to survive this apocalyptic period. I’d like us to be guided as much as possible by ancient wisdom teachings. I suspect the carnage will continue to be immense. But I think at some point grassroots groups around the world in growing conjunction with the powers that be will guide us toward a system that reduces warfare and invests in more just and resilient systems. I see the chances of this succeeding as modest but still within the realm of the possible.
After all, corporations, at a certain point, have a stake in a livable world. If there’s no justice on a dead planet, as Randy Hayes says, there’s no profit either. I think there’s a chance that some coalition of corporations, countries, and communities will—in the face of unending crises and devastation, forge some jerry-rigged approach to stabilizing and, indeed, regenerating the conditions for life. This is a deliberately modest hope. I doubt justice or compassion will have too much to do with it. But I do believe some version of humanity or a post-human or enhanced human species may well survive. Whether we unreconstructed humans with our current views and values would want to be alive—and whether we’d be free people or slaves of some pitiless cyborg beings—may be the fundamental question. I hope we can do better than this. I pray so.
In the meanwhile, I think it’s up to each and all of us to come together as best we can to protect what we can protect that is precious to us at whatever level we can reach. I see Commonweal as continuing to hold the vision of healing ourselves and healing the earth. What that means will continue both to change and to stay constant and ancient.
Consciousness Studies
As for me, personally, I hope to continue the work I’ve been given for as long as I can usefully do so. My new interest, some of you know, is in the nature of consciousness. I call it consciousness studies. It focuses on the question of whether consciousness is just an epiphenomenon of the brain or whether it is a transpersonal field—whether in fact the world or even the universe are constructed so that consciousness is primary. This field of research is sometimes called panpsychism and it is experiencing a renaissance.
Here is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy definition (plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/):
Panpsychism is the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world. The view has a long and venerable history in philosophical traditions of both East and West, and has recently enjoyed a revival in analytic philosophy. For its proponents panpsychism offers an attractive middle way between physicalism on the one hand and dualism on the other. The worry with dualism—the view that mind and matter are fundamentally different kinds of thing—is that it leaves us with a radically disunified picture of nature, and the deep difficulty of understanding how mind and brain interact. And whilst physicalism offers a simple and unified vision of the world, this is arguably at the cost of being unable to give a satisfactory account of the emergence of human and animal consciousness. Panpsychism, strange as it may sound on first hearing, promises a satisfying account of the human mind within a unified conception of nature.
Wikipedia offers this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism):
In the philosophy of mind, panpsychism is the view that the mind or a mind-like aspect is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality.[1] It is also described as a theory that “the mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe”.[2] It is one of the oldest philosophical theories, and has been ascribed to philosophers including Thales, Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, William James,[3] Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, and Galen Strawson.[1] In the 19th century, panpsychism was the default philosophy of mind in Western thought, but it saw a decline in the mid-20th century with the rise of logical positivism.[3][4] Recent interest in the hard problem of consciousness and developments in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and quantum mechanics have revived interest in panpsychism in the 21st century.[4][5][6]
I have been immersed in this set of fields for sixty years yet never embraced it fully—until now. T.S. Elliot comes to mind:
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
[This is the part we know but the last part bears remembering – below]
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
—T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets (published in the year of my birth, 1943)
To me, the potential shift from a materialist physicalist paradigm of reality—our current paradigm—to a panpsychic idealist paradigm could be one of the most consequential of all shifts we can work toward. Such a shift would make sense of all the non-material experiences we all have—inexplicable synchronicities, intuitions, promontory dreams, near death experiences, near death awareness, visits from our death, psi phenomena including telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience, remote viewing, visions of the past and future, and much more. All these phenomena fit with the view of the universe as sentient, with the Anthropic Principle and the Gaia Hypothesis.
[For those interested in this subject, I recommend a book by Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Flip—epiphanies of mind and the future of knowledge.]
I believe that this is the next frontier of healing and the mind. I see it as the greatest question I have ever engaged with. It unites Commonweal’s interests in healing ourselves and healing the earth. If 10% of humanity came together around such an ancient, perennial and renewed understanding of Reality, perhaps we would have a chance for an authentic mature eco-civilization as opposed to some jury-rigged miserable form of survival. I hold this vision as a real possibility—one worth working for alongside all the other great work people are doing for a better world.
I hope to participate in a modest way in this Great Work in this incarnation and perhaps from the other side as well. Remember, there is nothing new here. There is only remembrance. Likewise, there is nothing new at Commonweal—only remembrance of the great work of the commonweal—the well-being of the community.
Thanks for reading this. I welcome wisdom.
Michael Lerner
