Chapter 6
TRANSPARENCY AND BEING WITH

It is my assumption that all persons, at a deep level, want to be intimate, want to be transparent with loved ones, want to be trusting. But our self-created fears sometimes keep us apart and cloud our vision of each other.

Before we look at what moves us into a transparent interbeing relationship, let's take a look at what keeps us apart. My analysis of about two thousand hours of intensive group sessions (T-group and therapy groups) in which I was a TORI-like group "leader" indicates that the following eight factors were mentioned most often as characteristic of unsatisfying relationships between two persons:

1. People feel uncomfortable when others are dependent on them, when they are cloying, demanding, or asking for more than the other is willing to give. The other side of the relationship is also unsatisfying. Most people do not like to be dependent, to clutch, to be hungry, and to ask.

2. Most people feel discomfort in paying for a relationship or in being paid for it. Being a hireling, whore, or servant is less than satisfying. People resent being talked into things, manipulated, "invaded in my space", "sold a bill of goods", or persuaded. Most people feel uncomfortable either feeling obligated to others or having others feel obligated to them. There are only subtle differences between free-will sharing and building "obligations".

3. Most people don't like relationships that are programmed or routinized. They don't like to stay in old habits, boring patterns, or relationships that seem to be devoted to simply preserving rather than growing. We don't know how much this discomfort is a function of growth-oriented attitudes of people who seek therapy and sensitivity training. I suspect that the finding is rather general, that status-quo seekers are essentially frightened and defensive.

4. People don't like feeling disconnected, lonely, out of touch, and separate. People like to feel that they are unique and special beings, but they nevertheless want to feel related to others in some depth. A surprising number of people mention wanting to be into relationships that are spiritual, transcendent, of a new order, mystical, "real"— special in some way.

5. Many people are uncomfortable and dissatisfied with life as it is now experienced and with relationships as they now are. They seek something more exciting and adventurous. The time is ripe for change and new perspectives.

6. Coming through strong and clear is the dissatisfaction with being treated "as an object", as a segmented person (as a beautiful body, a brilliant mind, a person with a special skill), or as a non-person. People are no longer happy (if they ever were) with being treated as a hero or heroine, as a god or goddess, as a deified being—not human. Marilyn Monroe, Roger Maris, Freddie Prinze—many names come to mind of persons who received magnificent adulation and who found the process painful. Basically, we want neither to be deified nor put down but to be treated as human and real.

7. Most people don't like to feel defensive, evaluated, or compared with others. A high number of people express strong dissatisfaction with what they experience when they take examinations, assessments for certification and licensure, or appraisals for pay increases. Considering the amount of built-in assessment in our culture, we have here many danger signals that demand attention.

8. Most people don't like to be looked at as members of a class or category, even one normally associated with prestige or adulation. Each person wants to be seen as special, unique, and not simply like other members of a class. A beautiful woman sees herself as different from other "beautiful women"; a waiter would rather be seen as a distinct person rather than as one of the service personnel; no carpenter is like any other carpenter. There is no "typical youngster". No one can relate personally to a role or a class of persons.

The four TORI discovering processes are associated with states of high trust. When people are being who they are, are showing who they are to others, and are doing what they really want to do, they are then able to join each other in an interbeing relationship. Unexamined and un-integrated fears create in us the discomforts listed above. The process of growth is the process of learning to transcend these fears and to have significant depth relationships.

In our culture we seek many one-on-one relationships. At first glance, it seems least threatening to seek out one other person to build relationships one at a time. We seek companionship and warmth from friends, lovers, and spouses. We seek help from counselors and therapists in healing our mindbody wounds. We seek wisdom and learning from wise teachers, tutors, and gurus. We seek specific professional help from dentists, doctors, architects, or tax consultants. We try to find mates for golf, a movie, or a talk. We seek another person as a partner for study, work, meditation, listening to music, going to church, finding emotional support, or to share expenses.

For whatever purpose we pair, we find the partnership more satisfying and want-fulfilling if the relationship meets to some degree the criteria suggested in Table XII. Of course, relationships differ over a wide spectrum of quality. They differ in intensity, expectation, commitment, reciprocity, environmental embeddedness, and all manner of qualities. They differ also in duration, from a brief conversation with a seat-mate on a bus to a lifelong marriage.

When we take charge of our own lives and when we create our own environments, we can develop the capacity to make interbeing relationships of most of our links to others:

1. The interbeing relationship is self-rewarding. Interbeing is. It is like grace. It comes, in its goodness, from life, from God, from the nature of being. It fulfills itself. When our life-spaces overlap . . . when our life-energies fuse . . . when our light is the same light . . . when we discover the god in each other . . . when we cry in each other's arms . . . when we truly inhabit the same silence . . . when we love without words . . . when we walk in each other's moccasins . . . when we acknowledge the same enemy in ourselves . . . when we recognize the same dread . . . we then find it more possible to walk and talk together in communion and depth. We discover each other and share the same journey.

Such unions are redemptive. Such a process is worship. Being with others in this way can be therapeutic and healing. We turn to therapists only because we do not know how to discover such relationships ourselves. We fancy that we need ministers to show us how to discover such spirituality. Being together in these ways is loving. It rewards itself. It needs no other process for its completion, justification, or meaning. Being with is being with is being with is being with.

Fear is what keeps us apart. And the fear this time is most surely an illusion. There surely can be no danger—save our own fantasies— in being with another in such deep intimacy.

2. The interbeing relationship is co-authored and created in full by each of us. It was a long time before I really began to take responsibility for my own life—to realize that whatever happened to me was my own creation. And to realize that it was a cop-out to blame the bad things that happened to me on someone else, on my environment, or on the accidents of the universe. A similar process has been going on with me in regard to my relationships with other individuals. In the past I have allowed myself to be persuaded, to be captured—and allowed many relationships to be determined by the other person. Just as I have begun to learn that I can take full responsibility for creating my own life, I am learning how redemptive it is to take full responsibility for creating my relationships. And to allow the other person also to take full responsibility for our relationship. An interbeing relationship is one in which both persons share full responsibility for the way it is between them. This is the basis for a creative, active interchange. Neither party is able to back off and blame whatever is happening on the other person. Each can take full credit for whatever happens that is good.

In the best relationship, we both get what we want all or most of the time. There is seldom need of compromise, but we engage in a continual search for creative alternatives that are exciting to both of us. We are each active in showing our feelings, our wants, and our attitudes. We know where we stand. We don't worry about being consumed, violated, coerced, or manipulated. We are loving and being loved.

3. The interbeing relationship is dynamic and moving, growing toward new environmental-quality levels. Any relationship has the potential for being more than it is. Accepting each other for who each is, and where each is, both can go with the flow of the relationship. When two persons are with each other in depth, each without any intent to change the other, a dynamic tension results that leads to continuing new growth. As I go with the flow, when I am with other persons where they are, listen intently to their being, play with their rhythms, search for the uniqueness that is in them—I discover new feelings and new emerging patterns. I am able to tap into intuitive and archetypal ways of being, and I enter into new spaces with them. When we are not programmed or pushed, we create and discover.

The relationship need never be static. Any statement about how we relate is always a statement about the past. Each moment contains new promise. Knowing that the possibilities are there creates new energy that can transform us.

The growth of a two-person relationship follows the flow of the environmental-quality framework. In EQ level I, people who are hurting and fearful are likely to misunderstand each other's advances. The love-seeking of a person desperate for affection may seem to another fearful person to be cloying, even bristly or hostile. Bragging in a search for approval can be mistaken for arrogance. A simple question may be viewed as prying. Fearing persons have many ways of punishing each other. Even the most intimate relationships regress to EQ level I under fear and mistrust.

We all know of friendships, living arrangements, and marriages which are at a dominance-submission (EQ II) level, with one person leading the dance. Trust and experience can transform these into relationships that are nourishing, benevolent (EQ III), consultative, advisory (EQ IV), or genuinely participative (EQ V). In EQ I-V relationships, one member of the pair "leads" the relationship. The leadership may vary in its EQ theme as the context varies.

It is much more common for paired relationships to move into leaderless EQ VI-X states than it is for groups or organizations to do so. An EQ VI relationship can be said to exist when neither member of the pair feels that one or the other is leading or dominant; when there is true interbeing; and when there is true mutuality and interdependence in choosing and decision-making.

With increase of trust, the two people will build a relationship in which empathic and intuitive communication is common (EQ VII); where there is depth integration at an unconscious or archetypal level (EQ VIII); or where they move together into transcendent and mystical states (EQ IX). I assume that relationships at EQ levels VIII, IX, and X are very rare, at least in our culture. It is possible that these relationships are more common in more primitive, less word-bound, or more mystical or spiritual societies.

4 The interbeing relationship is itself a unique, organic whole, a transcendent reality. Each relationship is unique, never repeated. It is to be celebrated and honored, as each of us as an individual person is honored. It is for nurturing, sustaining, gardening, and caring.

Just as I, as a person, am very different from any one of my parts or even from the sum of my parts, so is a significant pairing a new whole—a new reality that is more than the sum of you and me. Stern and the other person-centered psychologists performed a high service in reminding us to honor the person. And this honoring has been a powerful antidote to the de-personalization of our society. But this emphasis has reinforced the intense individualism of our sometimes compulsively self-determining and free-enterprise culture and has been a strong factor reinforcing our fears of intimacy and community. It is time to recognize the reality and power of paired, group, and community relationships, and to accept and honor the transcendent quality of such events. When persons are accepted and honored in their own right, they discover their richness as persons and beings in transpersonal and transcendent experiences with others.

People are often put off or even frightened by images of other-than highly-individual living because there is fear of loss of personhood: communal or collective-living arrangements, the consuming zeal of religious orders and sects, or the de-personing dedication to national supergoals of fascistic states. Because of these frightening images, many people rightly reaffirm individualism, but they may also allow these fears to hold them back from the enriching experience lies in learning how to live intimately and transcendentally with others. We achieve freedom, self-love, and self-determination, in the fullest sense, as we learn to live with others in deepest intimacy and community.

5. The most enriching relationship is a co-discovering adventure into the unknown. We join each other to search for what we may become, to determine our being, to reach out with zest toward the ever unknown. With high trust, adventure is zestful. With high fear, the unknown and unstructured path is not inviting but constricting and defense-arousing.

The critical importance of trust is never more clearly seen than in this predisposition to adventure and play. The unknown is enticing and can seem even better than the present. Living is a process, a never-ending quest into the unknown. When we know this, we know also that holding on to what once was and which can never be again is the fear path. Boredom comes from fear. Trust helps us to welcome the ever-new moment and to look forward to ever more-promising new moments.

6. The fulfilling relationship is a personal one. I am unable to think of a relationship that could not be improved by becoming more personal. Keeping things impersonal is costly in terms of any significant measure of effectiveness. Health care is improved by a more personal patient-doctor relationship. Police are safer and law and order are more effectively served when police are more personal with lawbreakers and potential lawbreakers. Military action is more effective when the traditional structured relationships between officers and enlisted men are personalized. Productivity of the factory is improved when relationships are more personal. The minister-parishioner relationship changes significantly when it becomes a person-to-person search for a spiritual path. Even in science, the desirability of "objectification" of relationships between the observer and the event is being reexamined.

7. Each person in an interbeing relationship feels better about himself or herself when they are together. Militant individualism is essentially a revolt against processes in the first four EQ levels—against relationships that are punishing, controlling, benevolent, or advice giving. People who continually feel coerced, smothered, persuaded, demeaned, controlled, assessed, supervised, taught, protected, or led find it difficult to feel good about themselves. As relationships move into higher EQ levels, members discover that each person is a significant part of the environment of the other—and that this environment is most effective (for all purposes?) when it contributes to my feeling good about myself.

Yesterday, the day before I wrote this paragraph, I joined a group of about 20 adults for the afternoon. Susann had brought 11-month old Damon, who was playing in our midst. As we watched Damon walk confidently and trustingly up to each person to play and hug, Lana said with excitement: "Look how good he feels about himself!" We celebrated and enjoyed this expression of trust. We felt re-dedicated to its preservation and nurturing in this boy and in ourselves. This so rare and oft-battered expression of divinity and eternity is to be found within us all.

8. In an interbeing relationship each person feels unique, special and truly incomparable, not to be compared with another. Each relationship is unique. Each partner in the relationship is unique, special, not to be compared with any other being. Whenever we place ourselves in a category or box, we set up processes which diminish our specialness. This is a powerful lesson for all of us, especially parents, teachers, managers, or anyone in a position of responsibility and visibility. So many administrative and institutional processes set up comparisons among persons: grades, spelling bees, pay scales, awards and prizes, competitions, offices, hierarchies, organizational charts, parking permits, or memberships. Rewards set up as many comparison processes as punishments. "Win-win" relationships aren't better in this regard than "lose-lose" relationships. Be-be relationships are non-comparing processes.

The celebration of uniqueness and diversity is a mark of fulfillment and realization. What is real is to be one's self. I am who I am. I am unique. I am.

Many relationships are casual. They occur in passing and may involve no contact of significance. The stranger on the street, the taxi driver, the next person in line waiting to purchase something, the elevator operator, the person in the adjacent seat at the airport—we are not likely to have any significant interaction with any of them. But I know some fortunate people who know how to make these contacts memorable. They relate personally to almost everyone with whom they interact, even casually, for they choose to recognize the personhood in everyone—even if only with a glance or a communion of spirit. I am always impressed and warmed by this, and I realize again that it does not take time or energy to be personal. A full contact is a matter of presence, of focus, of intent. It is a matter of my being where I am.

All relationships can be mini-adventures of this kind—discoveries, a sharing of the joy in the universe . . . a touching rather than a manipulation . . . a glance of trust and not a furtive distancing . . . a warming rather than a chilling . . . an invitation and not a rebuff. Interbeing simply takes trust, not time.

It is very clear that I create my friendships and my companionships. I have a clear choice in the matter of being lonely or friendly. Friendship and companionship start with the intent to share my being with others.

Loving is something more than friendship. It is made possible as persons grow into higher levels of environmental quality. Love comes with the removal of defenses, the reduction of constraints, the quieting of possessiveness and the giving of freedom, the sensing of the essence of each other, the emergence of higher trust.

Love is being into each other's flows and rhythms. It comes when lovers trust each other's processes. It cannot be commanded or persuaded. It happens, grows, emerges.

Love is an uncomfortable foreigner in the home of the ego. Loving is released into fullness as the person grows out of needs, out of the ego, out of powering and controlling, out of sensory gratifications. Loving changes as persons move into new levels of growth. It always holds new wonders, new being. Whenever I have discovered what loving is, I have found that it was more than what I sensed it to be before the new experience. Loving is as full a process as is the fullness that the lovers bring to each other. Loving transforms the lover and the loved.

Whether or not there are marriage ceremonies, life is enriched by stable primary relationships, either of couples or those that exist in larger communal-living arrangements. How nourishing a home environment—one that moves into higher EQ levels—a couple can build depends on the quality of the interbeing relationship they are able to achieve.

I have observed and interviewed 21 couples who met each other for the first time while in the TORI Community Experience and who then went on to get married or decided to live together in an enduring relationship. Possibly because these people knew each other in considerable depth in one or more TORI experiences before choosing each other, the relationships are notably fulfilling ones. Factors that contribute to the positive strength of these relationships are:

1. The members of the couples have a shared belief in an lifestyle. Their attitudes and beliefs about the key elements in shared living are very similar. They have experienced each other's behavior in a wide variety of social situations and know each other's significant attitudes. The congruence between attitudes and behaviors is high. There is thus a sharing of fundamental values, perceptions, and belief systems. This underlying agreement is a stabilizing factor especially when conflict and emergencies arise.

2. Most members of the couples have a basic trust of each other and a valuing of trust as a key ingredient in their relationship. They do a variety of things that foster the trust.

3. These couples are more open than most in showing feelings, not hiding secrets, confronting differences, sharing perceptions, living open lives. The more I experience these couples the more significant I see openness to be a critical factor in family living.

4. Almost all of these people believe in the importance of community in life. They believe that it is important to live a TORI-like life, largely because this makes it easier to come together and create a shared, communal, and caring family life. Living interdependently is a shared value.

5. In most instances with the 42 people interviewed, the person is very much into building her or his special, distinctive lifestyle, very much into taking care of self—a self loving process. This is especially true of the women in the couples. These women are getting into their own freedom and learning the excitement of making new choices. Options are opening that they hadn't seen before. They are discovering that they had restricted themselves to roles that they didn't want and had allowed others, particularly men, to assign them. The TORI lifestyle and philosophy are highly congruent with the aspirations of the women's liberation movement. TORI Associates is one organization that has about an equal number of men and women involved in activities at all levels. But it is important that both the men and women in the observed couples are moving out of role, into special and unique ways of blending their own individual wants and talents into new occupational choices, careers, ways of spending leisure time, or ways of making friends.

6. For most of these individuals there is a new, emerging integrity that comes from listening to messages from within, rather than to messages from outside themselves. This is dramatic in many instances. They are asking—demanding—that their lives be more whole, that they put what they are fully into their crafts, relationships, jobs, vacation periods, education, and all aspects of living. As I'm writing this and examining my notes, I'm suddenly very much aware that I'm having difficulty in classifying and naming "aspects" of living that apply to these people. This is probably a healthy sign, for life for them flows and merges so that categories don't apply. These people seem not to work, take vacations, use leisure time, have mealtimes, work for voluntary organizations, or have schedules; rather, for them living blends into all living. It flows. It is integrated and spontaneous.

7. Life for most of these individuals is filled with feelings, highs and lows, change, excitement, instability, discomforts, emotion, fear, fulfillment. They wouldn't want to go back to the way they were, and perhaps they wouldn't be able to.

8. All of these couples are often in EQ VI to VIII Levels. Many are experimenting with new ways of relating that increase the number of transcendental experiences they report. They are naturally having some difficulties living in a culture that is primarily in EQ II to V levels and are experiencing problems in relating to existing professional and occupational environments and with the schools, neighborhoods, and churches as they presently are.

It should not surprise us that people are expressing impatience with institutional religion. Many have turned away from organized worship and religious institutions when they found them characterized by the same fear and distrust mechanisms that they see toxifying business, government, and schools. Paradoxically, these "rebels" increasingly turn to other varieties of religious or spiritual experience—the mystical, transcendence, the prospects of afterlife and reincarnation, prayer, and healing.

I see the spiritual life as expressive of a higher level of trust. To be spiritual is to be in tune with the infinite and cosmic elements within us, to move into higher levels of environmental quality. Is there some critical demarcation between phenomena that are humanistic and those that are spiritual? Possibly not. In my own experience, probably not; my experiences lead me to believe that all being states flow into each other. They move continuously into new levels that differ only in degree from one another.

Spirituality is available to each of us. As we develop higher levels of trust we gradually transcend the barriers that at each level keep us from achieving our full spirituality: our dependence upon rationality, our wishes for sensory gratification, our ego needs, our bodily processes, even our dependence on awareness. As we grow, we get in touch with inner forces that are integrative, cosmic, and nirvanic.

Life would be so greatly enhanced if our spirituality could be integrated into all aspects of living! Unfortunately many of us relinquish the major responsibility for our spiritual life to a special professional group and to a separate institution, and then we reclaim it, more or less, for an hour or two a week.

In many ways, the place to start in building strong interbeing relationships is in the workplace. Work can have a dignity, meaning, and purpose that can center the life of the worker. People who work to "ether at self-selected and fulfilling tasks develop strong attachments, loyalties, warmth, respect, and interdependence. This is especially true if the work is honored by the person who is engaged in it—if it provides a long-term meaning to life. I have seen this dedication and centering notably in people whose lifework is painting, creative writing, architecture, space engineering, chemistry, and other highly creative callings. Think for a moment of changing the workplace from one dominated by competition, management, and extrinsic motivation to one that fosters and nurtures synergetic, self-discovering, self-rewarding, and creative work partnerships and teams. Imagine work as the medium through which people discover each other; work as having spiritual content; and work as the process which leads to transcendence.

The interbeing relationship could replace the conventional role relationship in the workplace. Interbeing relationships will be more frequent as work institutions substitute a new set of assumptions about work which differ from the present classic assumptions. We would then assume that:

1. Work can be intrinsically rewarding and need not be stimulated by differential pay.

2. Work is most productive when performed with self-selected and compatible work-mates.

3. All work relationships can be lateral rather than hierarchical and they need not be supervised or controlled.

4. Work of all kinds is a discovery process, a quest for new solutions, new satisfactions, new personal relationships, new processes— work can be play, an adventure, a turn-on.

5. The better and deeper the relationship between work partners, the more productive the work. A good relationship is one in which each person is doing fully what he or she wants—which is the nature of creative and satisfying work. I'm talking about all activities in the market place—everything that needs to be done can be satisfying and intrinsically rewarding to work-mates.

6. Every person has a unique contribution to make to a productive organization—each person can create a job that is uniquely suited to his or her special set of attitudes and talents.

7. Work-mates can build transcendent and higher EQ-level relationships that are as fulfilling as in any other setting, and often more so.

Selling and marketing are processes that have become identified with our competitive, free-enterprise, capitalistic economy. Because of the manner in which we define the business world and the discipline of economics, particularly the economics of a "free market", marketing becomes a critical process in the business world. Because our society is dominated by business elements, the concepts and language of the marketplace have filtered into all aspects of our lives.

Selling is a good example. One markets oneself, sells personality, markets university programs, advertises sermons, markets growth techniques, attempts to sell ideas to others in social conversation, competes with other friends in the love market, and markets religion and the paths to salvation. It is somehow ironic to see high-pressure sales techniques used by some personal-growth programs to sell the doctrine that "one is not in this world to meet other's expectations"!

The buy-sell relationship is antithetical to the interbeing relationship. Persuasion leads to resistance, distrust, the arousal of defenses, and the distancing of the participants from each other. The experienced salesperson recognizes this defense-arousal process and learns to use a variety of techniques to reduce resistance, to simulate trustworthiness, to pretend not to be selling—processes which reduce the likelihood of an authentic relationship between buyer and seller.

There may be economic considerations that make a buy-sell system necessary in a free-enterprise culture. The costs in psychological and social terms may be so great as to warrant serious examination of the system. Can we run the economy without "selling"? In the language of the marketplace, perhaps the whole process is a "trade-off"— we put up with the distrust-sickness produced by the persuasion mode in order to distribute the goods so as to keep the system going. We are left with the question: How much production and distribution goes to pay for the mindbody distrust and fear that is created? How many units of distrust are equivalent to how many units of goods availability?

Many organizational functions as current practiced are related to the buy-sell mode of living—public-relations, customer-relations, marketing, advertising, communications, and fund-raising. How can persons who work in these areas experience—give or receive—trust, candor, authenticity, and openness? Studies show that the distrust of such people for each other is very high. I have consulted with several clients in these fields who see the issues very much as I do. They are working hard to find reasonable solutions to problems of distrust and believe that they can be solved.

One other familiar institutional process will illustrate my point further. Some activities are not congenial to the TORI interbeing processes. Evaluation is a notable example.

Much of the pressure toward evaluation in our culture comes from the business world. When I asked an educator who believed in the grading/evaluation/assessment process why schools continued to use such a dehumanizing process as giving grades, he replied: "The major reason is that the business world asks us for grades and evaluations when we send our graduates out into the world to get jobs." However, my experience with business is that most employers have little interest in or respect for the grades of prospective employees—little more than most educators do.

Another pressure to evaluate is the belief that the threat (fear) of evaluation motivates people. Students will study harder if they are tested, workers will work harder for pay and for good-performance appraisal, felons will develop better character and be constrained from criminal activities if they worry about the evaluation given them by the prison warden or parole officer, children will "do" better working for pats on the head, and Boy Scouts will learn more when working for Merit Badges. I suspect that, within limits, some of this is so—unfortunately so. If people learn, work, and live out of fear, they build up tension systems that produce sickness, guilt, and self-concepts that are tenuously based on social expectations. The more "effective" the evaluation, the more negative the effects on those evaluated.

Powerful pressures to evaluate, perhaps the most powerful, arise from the need to influence and control the people one is evaluating and the insecurity one has about the outcomes being appraised. Our felt need to evaluate or to have others evaluate us is in direct proportion to our lack of knowledge or lack of confidence about what we are doing. The more we know what we are doing and have confidence in the processes we are engaged in, the less we need evaluation.

Interbeing does not thrive in a climate of evaluation. Neither the person doing the evaluating nor the person being evaluated is comfortable with the process or with the other person in the relationship, and the two find it difficult or impossible to enter into an interbeing relationship.

Institutions in a free society must be challenged to develop processes that are self-generating, rewarding in and of themselves, and that require little, if any evaluation.

The modern organization has been founded on the philosophy, assumptions, and life styles of EQ levels I, II, and III. Based upon the process assumptions listed earlier, a managerial and administrative class structure has arisen in organizations that makes interbeing relationships very difficult. Some of the most effective managers and executives with whom I consult are often able to break out of role, cut through the structural barriers, and relate to others at any level in the organization as unique persons. It is usually the less effective managers who get caught in the depersonalizing processes that prevent managers from seeing other organizational members as individuals of dignity and uniqueness.

Interbeing relationships are only fully possible as systems and people move toward EQ VI levels. Differential power, so significant at EQ levels I through V, is a large part of the problem. When one's "boss" can hire and fire, recommend or give pay raises or promotions, talk privately with managers another level up, make performance appraisals of one's work, and have a variety of other formal and informal powers "over" the subordinate and the environment in which he works, it is difficult to create interbeing relationships between boss and subordinate.

In Chapter 7 I will report some promising experimental attempts to reduce these many barriers. Much progress is being made, but I think that we still underestimate the psychological costs we incur in maintaining hierarchical and competitive systems. It is incredible that we continue to encourage this very powerful class system in a democratic society—a system which exacerbates the very real differences that already divide people. We ask the "second class passengers" to "step to the rear of the bus" in our airliners, where they sit in less comfortable seats, eat different meals, go to segregated bathrooms, and are generally treated like the under-class. We have executive washrooms and luxury dining rooms for the first-class people, special parking places, private secretaries, stock options, and a variety of perquisites for the upper classes and a series of down-graded lesser privileges for the various under-classes. This multi-level society is highly structured in our industrial and military organizations, and perhaps increasingly so in our religious, educational, governmental, professional, and even charitable organizations.

Years ago, when I left the provincial world of the university to consult with large organizations, I became "educated" into this world of privilege, social class, and segregated living. The privileges of power, rank, wealth, and position are larger than I had then thought. The class differences are greater, the lines of demarcation are clearer, the class structures are even more well defined than I had imagined.

What strikes me now, as I write this, is the social cost of all these class- and power-differences, in latent hostility, enforced lowering of self-concepts, informal legislation of differences in worth of persons, structured alienation across class lines, built-in role formality, and institutionalized distrust and separation. Is it surprising that all this erupts in blackout riots in New York City?—class warfare between athletes and their upper-class management owners?—latent conflict between the governors and the governed that breaks out in such symptoms as organized cheating on income taxes to "get at the bastards in Washington"?—the prideful way the doctors pilfer from Medicare?—the sullen way the new youth boast of living off welfare?—and the constant tension and warfare between the police and the citizenry?

We joke about the "Imperial Presidency" of Nixon and the light penalties for Watergate crimes, but we all collude in nourishing the class-determined management levels in our institutions, the unnecessary management featherbedding that sustains alienating organizational structures that we inherited from the medieval church and the Prussian army.

It is especially discouraging to see this class-level alienation in religious and educational systems. If we really looked closely, the rationalizations we accept for hierarchy in the military (national security is at stake), and in business it's the only way we can "be competitive" and make money), are probably not based upon fact, but seem more justifiable somehow. The justification for hierarchization in schools and churches is on even more tenuous grounds. Efficiency? Cost reduction? Complexity of the task? Such rationalizations seem especially noxious when we think of the purported aims of the churches and the schools. Do we need such alienating structures to provide an environment for people to worship God or to learn with each other?

The interbeing relationships, so central to the mission of the school and the church, are made difficult or impossible by formidable power and role specifications that accompany the increasing formalization of educational and religious institutions. The difficulties are increased by the growing trends toward more professionalization of administration, computerization, sophistication of managerial technology, and formalization of role theory.

I recently had occasion to visit, as a consultant, the huge central offices of a large-city public school system. They reminded me of the New York offices of some of the corporations for which I consult— except that they were considerably less elegant and comfortable. The similarities were plentiful: awesome complexity, unfathomable procedural mazes, ambiguity and duplication of function, and multi-level coordination that added to the problem. But there was also obvious boredom, depersonalization, resentment, apathy, officiousness, impatience, special deference to me as an "upper-class' consultant person, and the other usual constraints. It seemed depressingly ironic that they were hiring me to find a way to make their relations "human".

Interbeing is incongruent with managing, administrating, controlling, supervising, evaluating, and governing as they are often practiced. We need to take a hard and long look at the whole concept of management of an institution, to see what forms of management are necessary in terms of organizational goals, and to see if these forms are compatible with the process of making the world more livable by reaching higher environmental quality levels.

Interbeing relationships and high-trust community living mediate health and well-being. It is increasingly more difficult and relatively meaningless to separate physical, mental, and spiritual aspects of health. We are mindbodyspirits who give ourselves our health and our sickness. Practitioners in many branches of medicine, psychology, and related fields are now taking a holistic view toward health, healing, and therapy. The result will be a revolution in the health-care field.

Wellness is a holistic, developmental concept and process. The developmental aspects of wellness are described in the Environmental Quality scale. Poor health is associated with the lower EQ levels. As we move into holistic, transcendent, and cosmic processes, we move out of anxiety, psychosis, hypertension, depressions, heart attacks, all manner of physical and mental ills, and perhaps even cancer. Cancer and anxiety occur in organisms weakened by low-trust states such as self-hatred, over-control, guilt, latent conflict, repression, defensiveness, unintegratable fear, disowning our lives and our bodies, over-rationality, passivity, and congestion of the mind and the spirit.

The road to health is the discovery of interbeing and taking responsibility for living one's life at new levels of environmental quality. We may well find that persons who spend a large share of their lives in interbeing states do not get sick—in mind, body, or spirit. Anxiety or hypertension are to be treated as cues that one is not relating with trust —and are signs that one can use to reexamine relationships and to create new relationships in depth.

Taking responsibility for one's self means creating a new environment, seeking interbeing relationships, creating trusting communities, examining one's TORI processes: looking at who I am, how I'm opening myself, how I'm doing what I want, and how I'm creating interdependent relationships.

Wellness, as I view it, starts with interbeing relationships in the key areas of a person's daily life. Such relationships are at the core of the holistic health orientation, which is causing a reexamination of health-care concepts and institutions. The conventional health-care systems are sometimes even more distrust-managed and alienating than other institutions mentioned in the section above. Rationalized as necessary because we are dealing with literal life-and-death issues, the hardening of the organizational arteries in the hospital and medical clinic is notably visible. This is especially incongruent, considering that the formal aim of the hospital is to heal. It is of first importance that the atmosphere among staff be humanized. Historically, the medical setting has been class-structured and hierarchical. This must be changed.

Because of what we know about the powerful influence of the larger environment upon mindbody health, a high-priority aim of holistic-health reform must be the humanization of the hospitals. I still remember, vividly etched, the words of my mother after spending two weeks in a hospital following major surgery on her stomach: "Jack, I would rather die than ever to come back to a hospital." It is not necessary (even in the most "intensive" ward) to depersonalize patients and each other in the name of emergencies, efficiency, and life-saving. As many hospital programs are now demonstrating, a hospital environment can be made personal, human, caring, loving—and healing, in the fine sense of the word.

Even the most efficient and modernized health care is severely under-effective when given by other than loving hands. The effects of the interpersonal environment often outweigh the effects of medical and chemical care.

Called by a wide variety of terms, provided by people with an even greater diversity of training and background, viewed with a variety of feeling-states from transference-worship to fear-hostility, therapy is on the increase. More and more people seek help from clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, counselors—but also astrologers, holistic healers, palm readers, psychic surgeons, hypnotists, nutritionists, pediatricians, vocational guidance advisers, teachers, psychics, chiropractors—anyone who offers help to troubled people.

A number of professionals find TORI theory useful as an orientation in doing therapy. My assumption is that the most therapeutic relationship between a therapist and client is an interbeing relationship as I have defined it in Table XII. The client and the therapist co-author the experience, are as personal and open with each other as they are able to be, and develop a relationship that is self-rewarding. The therapist becomes an "environmental designer", looking, with the client, at the environment they create together. Together, they move into whatever EQ levels are possible for them.

The interbeing relationship is difficult to create in a twosome where one member is paid and the other pays, where one member comes for help and the other provides it, and where one enters the relationship defining himself or herself as unwell and the other person as well. Many effective therapists are able to move beyond these initial barriers and get into a reciprocal and synergistic relationship that is growthful, nourishing, and healing for both parties.

If this TORI-like, loving relationship is indeed the most effective form of therapy, we therapists are in a sense legal prostitutes, taking pay for love. That the process works so well is a devastating commentary on our fearful, loveless, and low-EQ society. We in the helping professions are unfortunately and unintentionally something of a parasitic class, living off the ill health and dependency that is bred in an EQ II-III-IV society which we help create. These crippling dependencies are not likely to be substantially reduced by the kind of education, counseling, and therapy that we currently practice. Required, I think, is some form of "therapy" for institutions, programs similar to the ones I describe in Chapters 8 and 9, in which drastic changes are made in the prevalent environments in which we live. People living a large share of their lives at EQ levels beyond V do not need or seek therapy.

The process of education is the process of personal and institutional development into higher levels of environmental quality. Tables V, VI, and VII show that the "educational outcomes" necessary for such life development would include processes such as the following:

— socializing

— nurturing

— consulting

— collecting and using data

— choosing and deciding

— creating our own resources

— learning to live in an emergent community

— increasing our empathy and intuition

— integrating our archetypical and unconscious processes into our conscious living

— re-capturing our extra-sensory and transcendent skills

— getting in touch with our integrative, cosmic and spiritual beings

Achieving these and similar outcomes need not be an interpersonal process. Persons can learn from meditation, self-hypnosis, introspection, books, television, cassettes, videotapes, teaching machines, and any number of readily available processes and resources.

However, what is likely to be the most significant learning of the processes listed above comes while building interbeing relationships with people with whom we work, play, worship, invent, sing, discover, transcend, learn, communicate, or travel. We learn to live in the being.

This is not to go back to the concept of "learning by doing", which had a flavor of routinized, motoric, repetitive, drill-to-perfection schooling. It is learning by doing/feeling/being/thinking, learning in all processes of living. The more nearly the co-learning is done in an interbeing relationship, the more significant the educational process.

The most effective two-person education process is one in which the learners are in a full interbeing relationship, co-discovering the attitudes, skills, knowledge, and abilities necessary for a full and transcending life. Can a teacher-student relationship be an interbeing one? Many effective teachers now build such relationships with students; but there are many barriers to such relationships. The "intervening" teacher, who tries to "teach" the student, is likely to learn while the student watches, as most beginning teachers discover rapidly; to build dependency in the student, especially if the teacher is skilled in doing the learning for the student; to create a frustrating and alienating environment in the classroom, as Holt and a number of other contemporary writers have pointed out so compellingly; and to create defensive resistance to the intervention strategies.

The teacher who has learned to build interbeing relationships can learn with the student, share a sense of wonder and excitement in the co-discovering, and create a process together that is fulfilling, even ecstatic or transcendent.