TRANSCENDING THE ENVIRONMENT

The high-trust process is, also, to allow other people to be where they are, to join them in an attempt to see together what is, and to collaboratively look at what might be. Mutual design of a high-quality environment is a high-trust way to do therapy, teach school, minister a church, govern a country, parent a home, and manage a business.

The following are six ways of describing a quality environment. Each description is an account of the same process. Each description is useful for different purposes. Each calls attention to a significant characteristic of the high-quality environment.

1. High trust level. The high-quality environment is one in which trust is high. The higher the trust level, relative to the fear level, the more effective is the environment for enhancing the usual organizational goals: productivity, creativity, organizational vitality, or personal growth. The ten-point environmental-quality scale described below is designed as a degree-of-trust scale.

2. Low constraint. The high-quality environment is one that allows freedom, creativity, impulsivity, and growth—that has minimal constraints. The TORI assumption is that all significant barriers to personal and organizational effectiveness are fear-based. Thus, a low constraint environment is a low fear environment or a low threat environment. Energy directed toward fear- and constraint-removal is more productive than energy directed toward increasing pressures to produce, create, or learn.

3. Optimization of the four TORI discovering processes. Efforts directed toward improving the quality of the environment are focused upon creating an environment for being, showing, wanting, and interbeing. These four processes mediate the forces that enter into creativity, productivity, and life enrichment.

4. Self-esteem. A good environment is one in which persons continue to feel good about themselves. A high attitude about the self makes possible the release of energy and the direction of that energy into productivity, creativity, and other positive personal and organizational outcomes.

5. Range of enrichment. A high-quality environment is one in which there is an optimal range of options available. At each new quality level a new avenue of enrichment is functionally available. At each level of quality new energy is released, new experiences are available, and new resources are tapped. A significant criterion in evaluating schools, churches, neighborhoods, or homes is option-enrichment.

6. Reduced defensiveness. A low-quality environment is one in which persons feel the need to channel energies into defense of the person or the system against apparent, perceived, or anticipated attack. Energy thus drained is not available for more productive, creative, or enriched living. A high-quality environment reduces defensiveness.

Practitioners who use TORI theory have found a ten-phase Environmental-Quality Scale useful as a frame of reference to diagnose the system, propose action programs, and improve the quality of life in the family, the workplace, the school, or any other environment.

I will describe each of ten phases briefly and then, following this description, describe the uses and characteristics of the scale.

EQ I—Punitive. Punishment is the dominant and visible process in Environment I. In early and primitive stages of fear and distrust, people attempt to reduce visible or prospective chaos and danger by punishing others. In spite of the overwhelming evidence that punishment accomplishes little or nothing of value, and that it does produce massive negative effects, punishment is amazingly persistent in the modern world. It persists as a regressive form of defense, and even as a deliberate and rationalized form of education, social control, rehabilitation, therapy, parental training, and supervision.

Punishment is sustained by guilt and hostility and can be visited upon any object: upon a child who fails to meet our goals or expectations; upon a subordinate who is a threat; even, animistically, upon a recalcitrant chair.

People who punish justify themselves in a variety of ways: I care enough for you to punish you; you need punishment for your own good; discipline is morally or psychologically necessary; spare the rod and spoil the child.

I look at the person as a social system. The EQ scale can be applied to the development of the internal environment of the person, the intrapersonal system. When fear is high, in relation to trust, the dynamics of blame and guilt are such as to predispose the person to punish self or others, and to see the world with a primitive form of morality in which all actions are viewed moralistically rather than descriptively. Feelings of blame and guilt are associated with a high degree of hostility.

Autocratic environments foster linear relationships, hierarchy of power and responsibility, span of control, and rational relationships.

The high cost of this fear-sustained environment lies in seemingly inevitable by-products: passivity, dependency, hostility, and conformity. Because autocracy seems so rational and so suited to the fear-based assumptions about an orderly world and its moral superiority, these costly by-products are accepted, overlooked, or not seen as related to autocracy, as such.

At the intrapersonal level, autocracy is represented in tight inner controls, suppression of feeling and impulse, use of rationalization as a mechanism of defense, low tolerance for ambiguity, and an authoritarian character structure.

The person caught in the dynamics of benevolency is likely to see the world in terms of punishment and reward, winning and losing, approval and reproof, and acceptance and rejection. Something good is seen as a "win-win" situation, rather than as a natural, intrinsically rewarded event. The high cost of this parentalism is apathy and emotional dependence.

EQ IV—Advisory. The foci are upon consultative help, data collection, expanding the data base, and enriching communication at all levels. As fears and distrust become less, there is a movement away from the leader group as the primary source of motivation, wisdom, and decision-making. Scientific management uses survey data, rational communication nets, training in decision-making, and external consultants. Management is a rational, scientific process.

As the person develops more trust, the dynamics of dependency and resistance become less crippling, and an internal dialogue begins to happen. The person develops an internal communication system and is able to process data from outside. This internal data processing is integrated into action and decision-making.

EQ V—Participative. With increasing trust there is a focus upon participation, consensual decision-making, and choice. Groups and communities are involved in all phases of management and group life. Participatory management is seen in most modern management circles as the highest form of management and as the ideal form of social environment.

From the standpoint of this environmental-quality analysis, and trust level diagnoses, participatory life is seen as a key transitional form of life. It is the highest form of leadership and the most effective form of environment within the limitations of leadership as a critical dimension of social life. The crucial limitation is that action and decision making are only as effective as the leader. The costs of leader-centered living are muted but still present.

At the level of personal development, the internal environment is an integration of the many internalized selves, roles, or aspects of the person. It is as if the many internal parts hold a meeting and make decisions and choices that determine the active life of the person.

EQ VI—Emergent. Environment VI is a quantum jump away from participatory living. The emergent group and community grow a new and leaderless level of reality and interaction. There are vestigial remains of the dynamics of power, control, and influence. Primarily, however, concerns about power, influence, and control are replaced by concerns about interpersonal skills, being, awareness, experimentation, and empathy.

At the governmental level, this environmental form is represented by experiments with socialism, communism, and anarchy. A recognition of the limitations of centralization and leader-centered environments has led to a wide variety of experiments with egalitarianism, community-centering, and spread of control.

TORI theorists have pioneered in the development of leaderless T-groups, consultant-less team training, leaderless communities, teacherless classrooms, supervisor-less work groups, and therapy groups without therapists. In general the results have been highly successful in terms of learning, productivity, profit, personal growth, and a variety of other outcome measures. There are obvious advantages to such groups, but full development of effective leaderless groups depends upon a cultural revolution in values and beliefs, the acquiring of new skills by a wide variety of people, and more experimentation.

At the personal level this emergence is seen as the growth of the centered person, the ought-free and structure-free individual, and the inner-directed life. The struggle of the person is for freedom from authority and responsibility, from the internalized parents bred in Environments I through V, and from the assumptions born of earlier fear. The search is for an internal security to replace the comforts of structure and controls.

EQ VII—Organic. With evolution of trust and greater familiarity with leaderless freedom and creativity, we begin to see reliance on empathic and intuitive modes of being and communication. We see a move away from dependence upon word interaction. There is a focus upon sensory awareness, physical touching, and nonverbal communication.

With the recognition that defensive life is embodied in verbal communication and the word-related conflicts of the relatively stormy Environments V and VI comes the learning of nonverbal cue systems, the satisfactions of silence, the deep-sensing reality of touch, and new awareness of trust and its significance.

I have seen these environments in children's informal games, small work groups that have been together for long periods, therapy groups, five-day and seven-day TORI communities, hunch-valuing executive groups, alternative communities, and isolated instances in a variety of organizations. It occurs enough for me to know that such groups are possible, that experience with such groups can change lives in significant ways, and that such integrated living is the wave of the future.

At the personal level this form of intrapersonal environment is characterized by new empathic and intuitive awareness, new integration of the sublingual processes into choice and action, greater availability of creativity, and less reliance upon words and concepts as integrative mechanisms.

EQ VIII—Holistic. In the holistic environment there is an integration of the unconscious and archetypical elements of life into all personal and organizational action. There is new creativity and an increasing spread of synergy and integration.

Initial experimentation with this form of environment may be furthered by personal growth experiences with psychosynthesis, hypnosis, dream analysis, holistic healing, prayer, guided fantasy, depth therapy, and a wide variety of other ways of integrating the unconscious and the foreconscious into everyday living. But essentially this EQ level emerges from sustained experiences in deep levels of trust and not from techniques or intrusive intervention.

In the organization we see many instances of the unconscious at work and play: collusive work slowdown, hidden agenda, the following of charismatic persons, bursts of high creativity, the collective punishment of deviants, the Peter principle, displacement of guilt, synergistic team action, leadership martyrdom, sibling rivalry, and a wide variety of quasi-conscious and recurrent processes that reflect the influence of other-than-conscious states.

At the intrapersonal level, new trust brings new retrieval of unconscious life, the expansion of consciousness, the integration of inner urges into conscious life plans, the healing effect of inner serenity, and the more total synergy of life forces.

EQ IX—Transcendent. This is another key transitional environment in which quantum leaps are made into new areas of being. This brings the integration of altered and extra-sensory states into being and consciousness. Environment IX taps new sources of energy.

In talking about this kind of environment I am going beyond the familiar world of organizational reality and management systems into a highly controversial world of mystic events, clairvoyance, prayer, visions, out-of-the-body experiences, reincarnation, extrasensory perception, faith healing, acupuncture, astrology, and a wide variety of events and phenomena which transcend the everyday world of experience. How much effect this new world of experimentation and discovery will have upon the organizational realities of decision-making, productivity, choice, and management is a significant question. My belief is that the next decade or so will see amazing changes, sowing the seeds of a new revolution that will surpass the "industrial revolution" in universal effect.

At the personal level there is clear evidence that many persons are moving into new trust states, have transcended the familiar world of Environments V through VIII, and are pioneering new areas of life enrichment.

So far my extrapolations of the fear-trust constructs seem to hold up well in integrating new developments in theoretical physics, holistic medicine, cosmic speculations, and a wide variety of marginal and speculative "scientific" literature. Trust is a unitary concept that differentiates environmental levels. Fear may be a process dependent upon bodily and sensory states, and may disappear in post-cosmic environments.

The environment is a flowing, continuous process. In classifying environments we have done violence to this unitary ebbing and flowing of life experience.

The environment is what we experience. Experience is unitary, flowing, global, wholized. The stages or levels are like momentarily freezing the action of a motion picture, so to speak, and are not abrupt or dichotomous.

1. The scale describes an evolutionary process—the ontogenetic development of a person, the evolution of an institution, the changes that take place in the history of the race, the evolution of our myths and beliefs, and the development of our attempts to "manage" processes and people

Some kind of integration takes place at each stage. Each new level of trust brings an emerging set of prepotent needs, a new set of assumptions about people, new functions performed in the system, new capacities and skills that become ascendant, new energy sources being tapped, and new problems and tensions. A new and integrating theme integrates these changes, gives a wholeness to the system, and helps to maintain a perceived rationality and order to the emerging processes.

Values central at one phase seem irrelevant or inappropriate at another. The focus upon obedience and approval-seeking in Environment II and III, say, is seen as dysfunctional and perhaps obscene in Environments VI, VII, and VIII. The focus of research upon the dynamics of power and persuasion is highly appropriate and illuminating in Environments II through IV, but irrelevant and meaningless in Environments VII through IX. In a rapidly changing culture such as we have now, with great diversity in phases juxtaposed in the same city or even neighborhood, the resulting dissonance and incongruence are difficult to bridge. I have found that the perspective provided by this scale is very helpful when working with diverse racial, cultural, and organizational groups.

2. Trust level is the leverage variable in this evaluation. The scale is essentially a trust level scale. When trust level changes significantly, the disequilibrium and tension in the system provides drives toward new growth, new levels of integration, and new EQ levels.

3. New needs become ascendant at each level. A needs- and wants-hierarchy is described in Table VII. A new set of dominant needs at each level becomes visible. The group, organization, or culture somehow creates activities that meet these central needs and wants. Needs seem to persist for long periods and attain a kind of functional autonomy. Thus people who want and get power develop even stronger power needs. Punishment increases the need to punish. Sensory gratification increases the need for more sensuality.

However, as needs become sated, are transcended, or become less relevant to the system state, the environment moves into a new level or phase. New needs and wants begin to replace older ones.

Each environmental level is integrated around a meshing of needs. A punitive climate is maintained by people who need to punish or be punished. These needs encourage the setting up of laws and rules which in turn provide new violators who "need" to be punished, and newly violated persons who "need" to punish. Values and norms arise which sanction and sanctify the rule-violation-punishment sequence which is the sustaining theme of the climate. An autocratic climate is nourished by the power-hungry, the structure-seeking, and the dependent. Those who need to obey and those who need to be obeyed create a dynamic tension that sustains autocracy, provides a visible need for power, and thus sanctions the feeding of power.

The benevolent system flourishes with the inter-meshing of those who need to protect and give counseling with those who need to be protected and counseled. The advisory culture is sustained by information systems and data exchange. There are those who want to give advice, share rumors, tell stories, and give opinions. And those who love to get information, enjoy rumors, and listen. Participatory climates are sustained by group-membership needs to get into the action, influence others, join in decision-making, and create the process.

Emergent flow and leaderlessness are sustained by a number of forces: needs to be counter-dependent, and long-simmering resentments of leader-power figures; the desire for the newly-felt excitement of an emerging community or group; and a variety of long-latent sensitivities awakened and nurtured in the new climate of freedom and emergence. Organic climates are nurtured by newly-sanctioned needs for sensory gratification, the mixed joys of impulsiveness and spontaneity, and new needs to be "real".

Holistic environments are initiated and sustained by newly-awakened needs for wholeness, for voluntary control over bodily functions and unconscious drives, for a re-discovery of the body and the healing processes. The exploding interest in transcendent states, altered consciousness, and ego-less processes is awakening a set of long dormant needs and wants. I suspect that the cosmic environment will transcend needs and wants and move into new and unfamiliar processes.

Something is worked through at each level, by the person or by the system, that provides resources for new movement in the evolutionary process. Each stage has key limitations, some of which are listed in column 2 of Table VI. Each primary-need system seems to have its day, its time, its season, its period of centrality.

Each level of integration, each environment, sets up forces that overpower the state of being and force new movement. Each stage is a transcendence of a prior dependency. Thus, Environment I produces guilt and hostility that erode the stage; autocracy sets up so much passivity and resistance that it cannot sustain itself; and benevolency produces so much parent-child emotional dependency that energy is displaced and sapped.

The overemphasis upon data and rationality produces an unsatisfying sterility in a consultative system, which fails to tap energy and motor action. Participatory climates focus so much energy on process, procedures, and the structure of living that the energy dies from lack of movement and action. Emergent climates die from a preservative over reliance upon rational and verbal processes whose sterility becomes apparent with growth.

Organic environments build an over reliance upon conscious processes, and when there is a retrieval of the unconscious it produces dissatisfaction with earlier incomplete experiences. The exclusive focus upon sensory data and experience in the holistic environment creates an anticipation of transcendence, which creates growth tensions. I have not experienced many transcendent group and community states and am not familiar with satiation and "growth through" at this EQ level, but my extrapolative view is that extra-sensory and altered-consciousness states would lead to movement toward out-of-the-body and cosmicallness states. My conviction is that the cosmic states are passageways into new levels beyond the cosmic. Our limited levels of consciousness prevent us from thinking or talking very clearly about post-cosmic states.

6. Limits of movement up the scale are determined by fears that are somehow un-integrated, displaced, unrecognized, or repressed. Table VI, column 3, indicates a listing of the primary fears at each level which reduce the flow through the evolutionary scale. The assumption in TORI theory is that the barrier to all growth is the way that the person or the social system handles fear. Table II in Chapter II gives a summary of how fear sets up and sustains the four defending processes which block movement on the environmental scale.

7. A fear-bred impasse occurs at the interface between levels. The boundary condition is a state of tension and transition. This point of disequilibrium may be a painful or fearful state, but also a point of optimal learning for the person or the system. It may be at this point where incongruity is most apparent—incongruities in attitude, energy level, wants, assumptions, and behaviors. It is at these impasse points where friends, consultants, ministers, counselors, managers—any empathetic person—may be most helpful.

8. Dysfunctional perseverance occurs when concepts and coping modes arise at one level of evolution and then persist beyond useful function into higher levels of environment. Thus it is effective and functional to use power and influence strategies in Environments I, II, and III. It is less functional to use them in Environments IV and V. It is dysfunctional and disruptive to use them in Environment VI and beyond. Punishment as a strategy is probably not effective after Environment I. Leadership concepts and strategies are useful during Environments I through V, and not useful and probably a hindrance in Environment VI and beyond. Assertiveness training is most effective in Environments IV and V, less relevant or perhaps harmful in other environments. Deep sensory awareness is most helpful in Environments V, VI, and VII, and perhaps harmful in other environments. Experiences that strengthen the ego are relevant to Environments I through VIII. To be in Environments IX and X one must be in an egoless state.

This phenomenon of concept- and theory-lag probably accounts for the very mixed and confusing results of research on power, leadership, sensory awareness, persuasion, and a host of other behavioral science concepts, the relevance and predictive power of which are clearly related to EQ level. The field of research and theory construction needs longitudinal studies and theories. Certainly consultants and practitioners need an evolutionary and longitudinal framework to understand the dynamics of environmental quality.

9. Persons or human systems produce more effective movement up the evolutionary scale through environmental design than through external intervention. Table VIII summarizes the distinctive characteristics of these two alternative styles of life management—of evolutionary movement.

External intervention occurs when a person outside the system attempts to intervene in the system or in the person's life by doing something designed to influence, improve, change, guide, teach, or correct the system. A trainer comments on the process during a conflict in a training group; a parent rewards a child for being polite to a visitor; a minister reflects a feeling or listens empathetically to a parishioner who has lost a family member through death; a manager intrudes at a critical inspection point to improve the quality of the product on the assembly; or a teacher points out an error in a solution to a problem in a classroom exercise. In each case a skilled interventionist has done something significant with the intention to improve the performance or life quality of the client-person or client-system.

The external intervention is presumed to be most effective when it is aimed at a specific behavioral objective, is performed in a skillful and sensitive manner, is part of a theoretically-sound overall intervention program designed for long-range significance, is geared to a depth diagnosis and not directed at superficial symptoms, is molecular in focus, is done with skill and understanding, and is performed in an ethical and responsible manner.

The external-intervention approach is essentially a low-trust, high-fear viewpoint. It is based upon several distrust attitudes and assumptions, among which are assumptions that:

1. the natural, uncontrolled, self-determined, free-flow environment usually found in life cannot be trusted;
2. the system itself or the person himself or herself cannot be trusted to come up with the most appropriate solution to problems in the person or system; and
3. only a few "certified" or professional people are qualified to join another person or system to work on a problem.

To use the environmental-design approach is to look at the environment with a view toward understanding and changing it; or for the social system to look at its environment to see if performance or the quality of life can be improved by collaborative change.

The environmental-design viewpoint assumes that persons, groups, or institutions can determine their own lives, improve their own environments, make critical choices, learn their own skills, solve their own problems, and live in surprisingly effective ways.

Persons and institutions seem to do best when they:

1. are trusted;
2. have confidence in their own capacities to make choices, solve problems, perform tasks;
3. have freedom to succeed or fail;
4. are with others in deeply significant ways; and
5. see each other as resources, friends, allies—rather than as enemies, competitors, threats.

10. Each level provides a new environment for the focus and release of new energy. Table IX indicates some of the sources of new energy at each environmental level. The concept is that energy is always available in sufficient force for all tasks that a person or institution wishes to perform or for any life pattern that is meant to be lived. Energy is blocked, constrained, and held dormant by fear-related processes. Each new level of integration brings in a new release of energy.

11. This environmental analysis can be used for perspective and for diagnosis by using any segment of the sequence that is relevant to the system being analyzed. A few examples:

Most management systems are struggling with moving through Environments II through V, which roughly parallel Likert's System I, II, III, and IV management styles. By opening up his or her vision of viable management options in Environments VI and VII, the manager can create subsystem experiments with emergent and organic modes and thus include expanded alternatives among the live options available.

Most organizational or person environments include elements of about three adjoining phases. The range of values, assumptions, fear, impasses, and ascendant wants includes three levels. The system can tolerate this much spread and dissonance. A larger range produces too many communication problems and too much gap for empathy to bridge.

On the North American continent there are clear examples of small systems in Environments I through IX. I am aware of some persons who say they are living in Environment X, but I am aware of no groups or organizations that see themselves in the environment. The range of environments is so large that there is considerable tension in the culture. This extreme spread makes it difficult for any one large organization to make movement along the scale.

A consultant is probably most effective if his or her customary internal-environmental state is within one or two levels of the stable state of the client system. One significant contribution that a consultant can bring to another person or system is an expanded perspective gained by experiential familiarity with a wide range of environments.

One use of the scale by TORI theorists is to plan pilot or demonstration groups or organizations that give visible and convincing evidence to others that environments can be changed, that the quality of life can be radically improved, and that life in our day, with people in our culture, can be lived in Environments VI, VII, and VIII. It seems to me that the North American culture is essentially within the range of Environments III, IV, and V, with each of these three environmental, organizational, and managerial styles familiar to citizens in the culture. The response of audiences to whom I have described this 10-phase scale has been very positive, with considerable understanding and interest. My illustrations of life in each of the phases seem to make sense to my listeners. The growing familiarity with literature about life in Environments VII through X makes the task easier. For over thirty years I have been consulting with large, conservative organizations and have a reputation for working with systems as they are, rather than for attempting to make intrusive changes. I am therefore known for talking about organizations as they are and am able to bridge the audience-speaker gap. I believe that this analysis puts all organizational and counter-culture experiences into a common frame of reference; it provides a common theory that is spawning considerable research and demonstration projects as a groundwork for significant cultural change.

My experiences with organizations give me high confidence that significant changes are happening in North American life and that we are on the edge of a breakthrough to new and radical changes in management styles and significant cultural movement up the environmental scale.

I do this in at least five different ways.

1. I create my own internal environment, my mindbody. Going far beyond the earlier and promising research on psychosomatic illness, holistic medicine is discovering awesome and mind-opening evidence that one's own self-determined attitudes {what I view as trust level) trigger and sustain the dramatically destructive ailments of our tension ridden day: headaches, hypertension, heart disease, cancer and all manner of system imbalances. In a functional and very "real" sense, I give myself hypertension. I kill myself.

Clear evidence from biofeedback and from more clinical approaches demonstrates that supposedly "involuntary" and "unconscious" processes can be brought under voluntary and conscious control. I give myself my trust and my joy. I create my life. I create my own mindbodyspirit in ways that would once have been discussed only in the wildest fantasies of science fiction.

2. I create my own reality through projection. Psychoanalysts use the term projection to refer to the defensive tendency of ascribing to the external world repressed mental processes which are not recognized as being of personal origin. A person, for instance, might have a delusion of persecution which is created more by internal fears than by external dangers. If we assume that "reality" is out there, then our quest for health becomes a matter of our learning to see and to live with external reality—to become "reality centered". In this view projection is seen as a mindbody error, a defense, an autistic distortion, a process to be remedied.

I am coming to see my own and other's internal reality as more and more important, valid, self-created, and subject to self choice. I create my own reality. When I see the world as I am and not as it is, I am flavoring the world with my own being. I create my world. Looked at in this light, projection becomes a positive, awesome, and creative process. What we wish, believe, and trust comes true.

When we feel good the world seems filled with warm feelings, and when we feel bad the world becomes malevolent. A less familiar process is one in which the "trusting" person sees anew with magical clarity all the hitherto unseen nuances in the world around him or her. This immense clarity may come from jogging, a religious experience, meditation, an intense TORI experience, impending death, or any number of other transforming experiences. With learning, people can bring this clarity into ordinary life.

A less well known, but now frequently documented projective process of transforming the "external environment" is to take a new and trusting look at the world. Christ walking on water, psychic surgery, the firewalkers walking in high trust through white-hot coals, the wonders performed by Indians after the sweat-lodge experience—many are the mind-expanding illustrations of trusting: of this process of creating an environment, creating a new reality, projecting self, and changing the world in which we live.

My own personal experiences of leaving my body, being in ecstasy, seeing cosmic "allness' with transcending clarity, and creating a new personal tranquillity have completely changed my view of this reality creating process and its practical use in everyday life.

3. I create my own external environment by contagion. I am a common carrier. My own authentic state, given full expression, is contagious. I infect others with my euphoria, depression, joy, hate, pessimism, exuberance.

I am a part of the environment that I live in—perhaps the part that exerts the greatest influence on my environment. My effective and functional environment is my perception of what goes on around me.

The contagion is usually a very subtle process. What is communicated, what spreads the contagion, is a way of being, a gestalt, a manner, a field of energy, a way of viewing life—all of which is caught in some way by the people around me.

4. I create my own environment by making choices. Each of us is likely to underestimate the range of choices that is available to us. Assumptions which are born of fear limit my range of viable options. Fears of failure, rejection, embarrassment, disapproval, or retaliation restrict my awareness of alternatives.

I can choose the environment I want. I can change the topic of conversation, leave a movie in the middle, turn off my TV, quit an unpleasant job, join a new church, get a divorce, get an abortion, fire an employee, not accept an invitation, ignore a phone message, move to another part of the country, move to a new country—the list is infinite. I can choose how to feel, choose to change my body processes, change my sex with an operation or a glandular treatment, take my own life, choose my own disease, move to a desert island—there are fewer and fewer areas of un-freedom, sacrosanct alternatives that one cannot consider, or sacred cows that cannot be milked.

Belief (trust) is a powerful factor. If I believe that my range of options is limited, it is. If I believe that my range of options is unlimited, it is.

5. I create my own environment by deliberate design. Each of us can make conscious, planned changes in the environment of the home, school, or factory in such a way as to have a major impact upon the quality of our lives. How TORI theory might guide this designing is the subject matter of most of this book.

This evolutionary-scale theory is designed to be applicable to all professional fields that deal with people and social systems. TORI theorists and practitioners are working on the specific implications for such fields as the following:

1. Environmental engineering and design. The design of environments to optimize flow, defense-reduction, transcendence, sensory enrichment, or altered states changes the priorities of architects, city planners, environmental sociologists, and others interested in environmental design.

2. Family and home development. The home becomes a fertile garden which is designed to enrich experiences, release impulses, expand consciousness—not a place for discipline, value training, and obedience.

3. Community development. The possibilities for a new look at community building are discussed throughout this book. It was in the TORI weekend "communities" where we first began to see some of the awesome possibilities for community living in all institutions.

4. Therapy and counseling. The process of evolution through the environmental scale is the process of therapy. Communities geared into environmental enrichment would not need therapy and counseling in the conventional sense.

6. Management and administration. The ten-point scale is couched in terms of management issues and extrapolates from directions started by McGregor, Argyris, Likert, and others in revolutionizing the concepts of management. Managers would work themselves out of a professional status, as would other specialists listed here. Every person becomes his or her own environmental specialist. My life is too important to turn it over to someone else.

8. Training. At the very least, conventional training would have a new focus. Much of training is now devoted to helping people adjust to EQ levels from which life is moving away. Training might be oriented toward environmental design. How much "training" is needed is something to look at with a critical eye.

9. Organizational development. The scale was developed as a way of conceptualizing an organizational climate. It has direct implication for the way consultants and managers view organizations. Some of these implications will be discussed in Chapter 8.

10. Moral development. One traditional view of ethics is that it is the study of "that which matters". Our TORI studies suggest that persons become "ethical" as they discover and create love for self, begin to have the energy to celebrate life, and transcend the defenses and fears that arrest and block life. In this sense ethical and psychological growth are the same. Moral development is a process of movement on the environmental-quality scale. Environmental design is an approach to the problems of moral mar-development: the drug scene, juvenile delinquency, violence, crime, rape, for instance. In TORY theory, all of these moral problems come from defense mobilization and are defensive acts, that is, anti-growth actions. The overall solution to such problems is to change the whole environmental quality in the culture. EQ I, II, and III styles, designed in part to maintain law and order, actually produce the unethical and disorderly behaviors they are designed to abolish. One of the sad (and "unethical"?) anomalies of our time is to see some holistic health centers, growth centers, schools, churches, and community-development programs managed and dominated by EQ I, II, and III styles, reinforcing the same diseases they are designed to correct.

11. The religious community. Many religious communities and others are designed to produce integrity, wholeness, healing, and transcending perspective in members of the church or the community. A healing look at EQ incongruities in the religious environment is proving to be useful in consulting with such communities. This is a very promising field. Much promising EQ change is happening in church and church-related institutions.

12. Government. Because of the overriding significance of the macro-environment, new developments and experiments in governing are of great interest to students of the environmental-design approach. The new African nations may be a source of new data because of their disequilibrium, instability, wide range of EQ level, and search for new life.

13. Health and medicine. The holistic health movement forces attention of some of the health professions upon Environments VI through X. The mindbodyspirit processes are unitary. Health is a holistic concept. Fragmentation and isolation produce ill health of the body, the mind, and the spirit. We are rediscovering some of the truths that the ancients seemed to know so well and that some of today's primitive societies have retained!

14. Personal growth. The EQ scale has been developed as a way of integrating personal and organizational effectiveness. The TORI theorist is interested in this relationship.

15. Group development. Chapter VII deals with this field and the application of the EQ scale to small-group life.

16. Volunteer work. At worst the volunteers do what the professionals do, only less well. At best, the emerging field of volunteerism can help the culture move up the EQ scale. Too often encouraged as a natural outgrowth of Environment-III management style, volunteers, freed from the monetary aspects of extrinsic reward systems, are more open to post-V environments and the intrinsically-rewarded life. This is a very promising transitional field.

17. Gerontology and retirement. Retirement and the onset of "old age" can be viewed as a release from constraints, a time of new vision and freedom, a move into transcendence. The post-bondage years can release new energies for new living. Old age and death have no terrors for persons living in Environments VIII, IX and X. They are commencement years and years of entry into enriched living. If the new gospel of transcendence has any message of significance for our age-bound culture, it certainly includes this message to those approaching the transcending process of death.

18. The alternative culture. The strength of the alternative schools, churches, and families indicates readiness for the concept of environmental design. Part of the message is that Environments I-V are unfulfilling, stagnating, and decreasingly relevant to modern life. Environments VI-X are the wave of the future, the source of new hope. This is a new frontier.

19. Art, science, manufacturing, and creativity-related fields of life. Two elements of quality performance in art, science, and industry are intrinsic motivation {the "perspiration" and courage part) and creativity (the "inspiration" and vision part). Each element is a direct function of trust as we have defined it. Each element thrives best in Environments VI through X. The heavy emphasis on discipline, order, and structure in Environments I through V in art, science and manufacturing creates a climate that constrains the development of intrinsic motivations and creativity, of courage and vision.

The order of quality in the EQ scale is the same for each of the fields discussed above. The same environment that produces high personal-growth rates produces creativity, productivity, and vitality.

In the following chapter, I will discuss the nature of TORI theory as an instrument for use by practitioners in the above fields.