by

Jack R. Gibb

An Omicron Book

Of the seven Omicron processes, the one that is the most intangible and initially unclear is the "universalizing" process. This process is for some of us the most significant and illuminating, as well as the most applicable and practical guideline for action.

Touching The Universe is the third book of my trilogy on the Omicron orientation. The first book, The Passionate Path, deals with the theory as it applies to the journey of any person through this lifetime and through the cosmic allness. The second book, The Magic Of Self-Regulation, deals with the theory as it applies to the hard realities of life in the corporate world of organizations. This third book looks at the application of our theory to the "universe," the significance of ontogeny and phylogeny, to the evolution of a transcending society, and to our interdependent journeys to the allness.

My theme is that all roads lead to Rome—and to entry into the transcending universe. Each of these avenues—I choose to focus upon twenty-one (three magic sevens)—is sacred, fortunate and honorable. Each pathway leads to transcendence and nirvana, as does any one of hundreds of other pathways, known to us and unknown to us. Each journey provides a guide to the Spirit, a road to Heaven, a successful life, an honorable career, a joyful adventure.

My own passionate path is leading me toward a friendship with the universe, a unique eternal individual life journey, and an eventual transcendence of my own individuality as I move into a full joining of the allness and into an eternal rapturous state that is beyond rapture.

I invite you to join with me in my totally playful and totally serious fantasies.

Preface 
Avenues To The Infinite 

1. The Compassionate Heart 
2. The Passionate Body 
3. The Fresh Eye 
4. Beauty And Balance 
5. Magic And Mysticism 
6. Metaphor And Mathematics 
7. The Path Of Pain 

8. Talking With Nature 
9. Being In The Truth 
10. Being On The Path Of Inquiry 
11. Shooting The Moon 
12. Two Become One 
13. The Caring Community 
14 The Self-Regulating Organization 

15. In Giving My Life I Find It 
16. The War In Heaven: The Satanic Scenario 
17. Transcending Polarity And Paradox 
18. Dancing The Cosmic Dance 
19. Walking With God 
20. The Passionate Path Becomes The Spiritual Journey 
21. I Am The Universe 

22. Beyond Nirvana 

REFERENCES 

Most people think of themselves as wanting to be more whole. People may differ on what they consider to be wholeness. And they differ on how to get there.

Wholeness seems to be a worthy state. Like trust. I want to be more whole in a world that often seems segmented and un-nurturing of wholeness. I want to trust in a world that often seems untrustworthy. I know that trust and wholeness are good for me. I have no doubt of that. I'm sometimes not sure what trust and wholeness are. I'm especially unsure of how to attain them.

My current fantasy is that trust and wholeness are the same. And the processes of trusting and wholizing—of getting there—are the same.

As I described it in the first volume of this trilogy, my spiritual journey is one of discovering my way to wholeness and trust. It is all right not to get there. The nature of wholeness and trust is that, like the universe, they stretch and grow with the growing. The discovering—the journey—is the key. For me, the significance and meaning of my life come from the nature of my journeying, not from the goal or the end state. My life has meaning as it is wholizing, becoming more trusting, getting in touch with the universe. Three ways of saying the same thing, referring to the same process.

The universe is the "whole body of things and phenomena observed or postulated," as it is sometimes defined. How do I get in touch with it?

First, there are many, many roads to travel. All of which may be sacred, worthy, fruitful. In planning this book, I listed 195 different ways, and then stopped listing. Each traveler will have a road or a few favorite roads. I picked a few. To be sportive, I picked three groups of seven, even classified them, responding to some vestigial taxonomic impulse remaining from my scientific training. My rule of thumb: when the task becomes overwhelmingly awesome, play with it.

I have picked a list of paths that I have followed and described these paths, herein, and report some of my experiences. My journeying is at once playful and a life-support system, representing my deepest value.

Every person to whom I have talked at length about a passionate path sees himself or herself as moving toward some in-touch-ness with the universe, moving in some "noble" direction. When I first started observing this phenomenon, I found it startling. Later I began to see it as obvious and to be expected. But I was aware of this necessary connection retrospectively. I then became aware that we are all (every form in nature?) moving toward a connection with the universe, and that this is the nature of trust and wholeness. Such has been the intensity, and wonder, and life-transforming-ness of my journey that I now see the universe in a very personal way, and am very much aware that I feel that I am talking with you about a very dear friend. As you can see in my dedication of the book and in my experience I report in Chapter 21.

The road to contact with the universe may be primarily affective, rational, sensory, demoniac, mystical, religious, psychotic, or any number of other noble routes. It is my impression that whatever else the road may see to be, it does involve some kind of perceptual shift. One learns to see things or scan things differently, perhaps in a non-sensory way, or almost certainly in a non-sensory way. Beyond sensing.

I have been talking with people who see themselves as being in some way "in touch" with the universe, and reading widely and avidly about the process. Information about all this comes from the most unexpected sources! For some people, the quest for the universe is intentional, longed for, sought after. For some, it "happens," comes on them unexpectedly, a gift from the universe. I have tried to make some "rules" or general principles but this has proved extremely difficult for me, one who loves to generalize! Perhaps later. Perhaps, as some say, all mini-generalizations disappear in the immutable oneness. Perhaps we will find this out when we reach the end of our journeys over the endless roads.

Although most people are very willing to talk and write about their experiences with the allness, it may very well be that experiences which transcend words are not communicable in words. My most deep experiences of which I talk about here and in The Passionate Path are certainly beyond words. At the same time, I speculate in Chapter 6 about playing with the dance of words and symbols as one of the magical roads to the universe. We sensualists and mystics tend to put down the word-trip as a lower road. I wonder. If my words come from the heart, are they part of my heart journey? Suppose they come to me from the allness.

Some impulse prompts me to talk about the "benefits and outcomes" of all this. And makes me want to laugh. And to cry.

Touching the universe awakens the heart. With this comes deeper compassion, a broader empathy, a feeling into the flower, the music, and the child.

Touching the infinite invites the unconscious to join the journey, to get on board, and perhaps to help steer the ship. Our self-created unconscious integrates with our evolving wholeness.

An adventure with the universe cleanses and defilters the seeing. We gain new perspective, deeper sensitivity, a cosmic frame, fresh eyes. Things never look the same again.

Touching the universe inevitably brings on transcendence. Transcending is the definitive process of the new era: the emerging Age of Transcendence. The mystics join the physicists in forming a welcoming committee.

A depth experience with the universe provides a quantum leap in trust. Trusting is the key to joining the allness. There is no other way. Trusting is wholizing. When I truly trust the universe, I trust my siblings in it.

Touching the universe provides the nurturance for serenity, wellness, and the vital state "beyond wellness" that is another sign of the new era.

I see life and after-life as collaborative ventures, as a continuing dialogue among all the beings that mirror the universe.

I write this book to introduce you to a friend of mine, in case you haven't met. To invite you to a dialogue with those of us who live in the Omicron world. To clarify my own experiences and to get my head together. To continue to build my family.

Warm hearts are not always warm. There is so much hurting in the world that even the most empathic people develop an overhardening of the calluses as a protection against over-empathy.

Projection is so much a part of seeing that some say that all compassion is a projection of our own pain. I see my pain in you, and, selfishly, feel sorry for me as I express my compassion for you. Compassion is always a camouflage. Is there no way out of this dilemma?

Part of my job for a time as a psychologist in the Army during the war was to check up on soldiers who wanted to get out of service. I was to testify as to whether they were malingering. One of my psychologist friends felt that those who went through all the turmoil of faking an illness were in more pain, needed more help, and should be discharged more quickly than those who were "real" casualties. I don't know the answer to this dilemma. Whose pain is more difficult to handle and who "deserves" more compassion than other people?

From this point of view, the major concern in our country is the massive numbers of persons suffering and unemployed, with the related depression, suicide, and loss of self-regard. It is possible to defend oneself against this massive misfortunate hurting by saying, "They did it to themselves; we all create our own reality," or, "If they wanted to work, they could get it; they are malingering," or, "The universe is punishing them for their sins."

My brother said to me one time, "Jack, the only thing wrong with you is that you have too much empathy for those who suffer. You are a sucker." Over the years, I have had a number of reactions to what I see as my compassionate heart. I used to feel guilty about feeling this way and wanted to change and become more "realistic." I no longer want to change this. My feelings of hurt, empathy, and compassion have no relationship at all to the motives or factors that got the person into trouble. They are ~ compassionate feelings. I believe in an interdependent universe. When someone is hurting, it is my problem, as a brother to the hurting person.

When all else has been said, the basic fact that outweighs all others is that we are all in this together. In my ideal society, if we used money, I would have pay unrelated to work, merit, or contribution. Each person would be paid the same. Perhaps we would have a "negative income tax" in which those who made less than the median income would somehow be equalized. Hurt, sorrow, and pain are social responsibilities. I believe we are doing something to reduce the hurting, that we can do more, and that it is our privilege, as members of the universal family, to devote even more energy to doing it.

My three sons have been a magnificent blessing to me, and are avenues to the infinite. I have learned more from them than from any other "teachers" I have known. They came from the universe to bless my life. I constantly think of them as I write this trilogy.

Larry was sent to me by the universe to enrich my soul, to expand my ability to feel love, and to show me the compassionate path. He lived for seven years on his life mission, and has since been with me as my spiritual guide. He was severely retarded, could never learn to use words while he was here, had a "blue baby" heart, a brain tumor, and other "disadvantages." Blair and John and Larry are blessings, sources of wonder, my gurus and teachers. Larry taught me about the heart and about compassion, and about how to care. As is so wisely said of retarded children, Larry came direct from God (57).

I have difficulty thinking of the compassionate Buddha without tears filling my thoughts (100). His wisdom, compassion, big heart. He acted upon his compassionate feelings. I want to start out my journey toward the universe by walking, for a time, in his footsteps. I want to reduce my emotional blindness'. I want to learn to empathize more with people that I find it difficult to empathize with. For instance, fathers who punish their children, and persons who hate people of other races. I want to be able to feel with all manifestations of the infinite—animate and inanimate. I want to be able to love those things and people who seem to my unnurtured eye to be unlovable. I want to be able to care for those manifestations of God and nature that seem to be uncared-for.

It is easy for me to see the compassionate path as sacred, as a way of being conscious of the distress of others and as a strong desire to alleviate the distress. This pathway is indeed a way to the infinite.

I am a jogger. I admit to it. When pressed, I will brag about it. Joining the universe through the passions of the body is a sacred trip.

The body is a beautiful tabernacle of the spirit. Narcissus was correct in loving his own body, even in worshipping it. The Tantric way of joining the universal allness through sexual expression is a noble path. My first powerful transcendent experience came during a trance state while jogging. Honoring the body through keeping it fit, full of energy, flowing and emergent, and increasing its inner and outer beauty is a joyful way to touch the universe.

It is inappropriate, of course, to talk about all of these individual paths, to break the discourse into chapters, to discuss separate pathways, to classify the "parts" of the whole, to discuss the body as though a separate. There is really only one way to nirvana, to wholeness. One whole way. We all do this atomizing. It is more inappropriate, of course, when others do it. I remember my awe at hearing people in a "holistic health" conference talking about the 43 ways they had to offer to "make you whole." And I was even more astonished when at a conference designed to discuss "holistic" management, they talked about the several distinct techniques to give people the impression that you were a "holistic" manager (12, 28).

The body is, of course, a whole, in some important sense. It is well to view it as a whole, to treat it as a wholizing process, to treat it as non-divorced from the mind or the spirit or other processes, and to honor it and not compare it with other forms in a usually-ascending hierarchy of body, mind, and spirit. The body always seems to come off worst in any comparisons. The comparison process seems to do this to any thing or phenomenon. Makes one want to quit comparing things.

Ecstasy through the body is somehow of a lower order, done by athletes and business people, not by saints and mystics. Sex, especially masturbation, is something we do behind closed doors, and admit to only reluctantly. In school one gets more points for being in the debate society, and certainly from the chorale group, than from the athletic team.

I feel that the body is sacred. The joy of movement is both sacral and carnal. That carnal, sensual, and sexual are saintly. The body is a holy tabernacle, to be honored by me as at least an inhabitant. The wholistic process of being my body, as distinguished from being in my body, is a way of moving toward wholeness and trust. I guess that each of us has his or her own informal arrayal system. I remember when I first heard in an anthropology class that religion sometimes started with worship of sex, this seemed somehow unpalatable. I have since, partly through my touch-the-universe experiences, come to see things very differently. There is, of course, something very whole about sex and religion (and, of course, anything else) starting out together. Carnal is sacral. As Sam Keen (38) points out so engagingly.

Such people as Hanna (30), Keleman (39), Lowen (56), Montagu (66), Schutz (4), and many others have done us a service by looking anew at the body, bringing it into focus, centering on relationships between the body itself and our other sacred processes, and helping us to transcend cultural viewpoints that have been limiting.

Being with my body is an early and relatively easy way to get into the flow. Physicists and mystics (70, 93) agree that flow is in the fundamental nature of life and matter. I am deeply aware of the interdependent flow of my body. If I get into jogging or fast walking for about thirty minutes, it is impossible for me to stay in a down state or a depression. Everything seems to move together. If I am really turned on to my writing and the ideas flow, it is easy for me to cry, have a bowel movement, start whistling, go into flights of fantasy, or get into creative bursts of flowing energy. Everything gets moving. Headaches, bodily pains, fatigue, restlessness, boredom, and other bodily symptoms disappear as if by magic. It is magic. My mind, soul, spirit and self seem to become expressions of my body. Each becomes an expression of the other. None is a separate. I begin again to see all of me as a wholeness. To trust my processes. Nothing seems out of flow. I am also in the typewriter (especially in my typewriter!), the chair, the room, the universe. I often move into a state where everything is me. I am the universe.

I think that the body is an especially good place to start to touch the universe. It is so available. So nearby. Always around to hang out with. Seldom on vacation from the work force. Or the play force.

Let me say at this juncture that I think that each person is in touch with the universe. This is a characteristic of the human condition. And especially of the animal condition. If you have ever been spiritually energized when watching a flower respond to the sun, you know that plants are in touch with the universe. We pick it up from them. Neither people nor plants need to be told how to get in touch with the universe. Sometimes some of us forget.

By the "eye," of course, I mean the ear, the skin, the nose, the labyrinth, the mouth and the other senses. The freshness of perceptions is especially important in getting in "touch" with the universe because, apparently, the medium for our adventure with the allness is some kind of perceptual shifting. Some change in seeing or sensing.

Perception is a powerful process. Perceiving the universe is to take a new look at it.

One way to change a "universal" of the perceiving process is that the viewer projects his or her own nature upon the object viewed. Joyce and John Wier suggest to their training groups that each member when describing another member say something like: "I like the me in you," or "I'm angry at the me in you," to dramatize and call attention to the fact that what I see is in the "Eye of the Beholder." Living in one's projections a bit helps one to see something of the nature of love, hate, identification, and other universal processes.

It is possible to choose one's perceptions. I can, for instance, look at this projective process as a defect or as a magnificent talent. I can see it as distortion or as creation.

Perception plays a magical part in life process. My perceptions become self-fulfilling. When I see a person as magnificent, I begin to see the magnificence more fully. The person changes and becomes more wondrous. My perception sets up processes in the universe that change the perceiver and the perceived. This enlivening process goes on in me and in others even when I am not aware that it is going on.

One way to change the universe, myself, and other forms in the universe is to see them all differently.

Perceptual shifting goes on in fantasy, trances, dreams, euphoria, intense emotions, and a variety of changes in inner and external environments.

Every form, child, moment, blade of grass or institution is a mirror of the universe. Each moment is timeless and eternal and contains all moments. Every child is infinitely complex and purely simple. If I open up my "fresh" or "soft" eyes to seeing the universe in the child, a magical range of vision opens up to me. I see the child changing before my eyes. I am opening up to reality. I have some control over all this. I create the child, the perception, the relationship between me and the child, the universe. My attitudes alter, my feelings change, my verbal and nonverbal expressions toward the child are different, I change, and the child changes. Perception is magic. The universe is there to see in each moment and in each child. The growth and excitement come from seeing it (21).

Perception carries contagion. It is the Typhoid Mary of the universe. The lead variable. The contaminant in the barrel. It carries the disease of transcendence.

Fortunately, perception is the easiest to change of all the person variables. If I see a person as an enemy, I get frightened, I am conscious of many nonverbal patterns that I now see as hostile, I may walk across the street, literally or mentally, when I see the person coming. My voice may betray my fear and my caution. I may come to dislike the clothes the person is wearing. I devalue his or her contributions to the group. Everything changes. If I decide to see the person as a friend and deliberately look for new cues and make new interpretations, I find that all of the feelings, actions, related perceptions, thoughts, and attitudes change along with my new perceptions (40).

Jung used the term synchronicity to describe the tendency of events to happen together in seemingly miraculous ways. The timing of such events can be seen as a message from the universe. One can intentionally make the assumption about such timing that the universe is protecting me, putting felicitous persons and events in my view, making it possible for me to accept this largesse. If I see the gift as generosity, then my job is to make it a gift by seeing the implicit and often hidden gifting and make it work for me. Accepting the abundance of the universe is an act of grace and of depth in communication (37).

A student and friend of mine, John Wood, did as a doctoral project a study of space engineers who had been fired after a government cut-back. After workshops and interviews in depth, he wrote a book called "The Joy of Being Fired" to reflect the prevalent awareness and perceptive shifting that allowed the engineers to take advantage of this timely gift of the universe, allowing them to find new and more fulfilling careers, create passionate paths more congruent with their inner quests. Whether the synchrony of firing and inner states is seen as a gift or a fatal flaw of fate depends upon the view of the beholder.

Missing an appointment, losing an address, having an auto accident, a death of a friend—any event can be seen as a part in a majestic symphony by a benign universe that is caring for me. The proactive, self-perceiving, gentle-eyed person can see the message, improve the inner path, wholize the vision, and create the friendly universe.

The proactive perceptual shift that harmonizes with the synchronous universe is a way of touching the infinite.

Every experience can be viewed by the participant as synchronous, as a way of seeing infinity, as a gift from a caring universe. I was drafted into the Army in 1943 and spent about four years in the war in Europe. The experience seemed, at the time, to be as painful and negative as anything I had ever experienced in my life. My war-like opposition to war in any form allowed me to resist the experience from the beginning and to color it painful. I'm sure 14 that I at least colluded with the universe in giving me this experience. It was for a long time difficult for me to own the fact that I created this experience, as I do all experiences. I was a college professor with a Ph.D. and was drafted as a private, after being classified as "essential" as a civilian. My pompousness was punctured. I showed my commander in France a memo from the War Department asking for any soldier with at least fifteen units of college work in psychology to be immediately transferred to a psychological service unit. He refused to let me go, because I was such an expert typist. My wife left me while I was overseas in service, an event which, at the time, seemed by far my most devastating life experience. I, at one time, used to enjoy listing these and a long list of other blessings that came from the service.

As I began to understand myself better and as I made a radical shift in my perceptions it became equally easy (well, almost as easy) to describe the positive outcomes of the war experiences. The war-time universe did provide me with gifts that transformed my life, deepened my character, created my trust-level theory of organizations, helped me to become a mystic, brought me closer to my mother, deepened my spiritual values—and gave me much more. My change was largely due to my conscious and intentional shifts in the perception of myself and of the world.

Perceiving is a whole process, of course, and only seems to be a sense-organ process. A perceptual shift is a total re-orienting of the person to self, to the environment, and to the universe.

Re-perceiving is a kind of magic, a total transforming, a re-integration of the spirit, a re-birthing.

To re-see the world of experience is a choosing process, or can be transformed into a choosing process. It is part of the process of making life a self-created flow, wholeness, a way of taking in and a re-making of me.

As I touch the universe I join the universe and transform me into the being that I want to become.

The universe is beauty and balance. For some there is no other way to communion. My friend, Jon, whose marriage to my sister, Gwen, was bonded in heaven and in music, believed for a long time that Bach was the only musician and would, with purity, listen to nothing but Bach. He is a deeply spiritual man, quietly in tune with the universe, finding his serenity in music and religion, twin avenues to his redemption. I have a vivid memory of a college friend, Duane, saying, moments after hearing the symphonic rendition of one of Beethoven's communions with the infinite, "Jack, I would trade this whole university for that one piece of music." His specialness was inseparably connected with his union with music. When he listened to his special pieces, he was "gone," unavailable to us mortals. There is an "inner pulse," as George Leonard says, that connects us with realms beyond the senses, that literally tunes us with the universe in ways that we are but beginning to experience and to understand. Mystics and saints have known this long before we had words to describe the experience. It is likely that primitive archetypes and infinite universals are communicated in some such way. More about this in Chapters 5 and 19.

The beauty about beauty is that it is already, in the borning, beyond symbols and words. We accept that. Richard Clarke has a marvelous and all-knowing friend, Harry, who often said to him, "If you have to know, you can't go." Harry was responding to Richard's question, "Where are we going?" but I'm sure that Harry was talking also about understanding, words, and such stuff. Stuff that touching is about. Touching of universes. You don't have to know what music and art are about and why they touch you. In fact, if you know, you just might not be able to go. Knowing gets in the way sometimes. "Touching" the universe may well be beyond touching and knowing. It may also be that to be whole the touching and the knowing are inescapably necessary. What do we leave out of the wholeness?

Beauty purifies. Makes it simple. Makes it graspable. Beauty is form, order, focus, balance, symmetry, wholeness. Beauty trusts itself. Beauty is trust. Trust is beauty. Keats felt and knew his way into the universe. The simplest principle of literary criticism is that art is great when it is whole and trusting. Like the universe. Beauty and balance are universal, cross-cultural, beyond history, unisexual, timeless and spaceless. Like the new universe that the quantum physicists are pointing at.

Beauty is trust and wholeness. The trusting person is living in harmony, balance, congruence, in elegant tuning with self and the universe. The trusting person is a self-regulating organism. The balance, internal grace, and organic harmony of self-regulation is beauty. Harmony is wholeness, new wholenesses forming and reforming in balance with larger patterns and forms of wholeness. The self-regulating person in the self-regulating organization in the self-regulating universe is a concept of beauty. Such beauty is inherent in wholeness. Each wholeness is a mirror of the universal wholeness.

In Chapter 14, I talk about the self-regulating organization, a process of beauty and balance. The self-regulating person is a form of beauty, trust, and wholeness. In Table 1, I list several characteristics of the person of beauty, of self-regulation. These characteristics parallel those listed in The Magic Of Self-Regulation as features of a self-regulatory organization.

When I think of examples of self-regulation, it is easy to think of persons, particularly in Omicron, where people are tuned in to the concept. The process is self-fulfilling.

The example that comes to mind most easily is John Gibb, whose own self-trust predisposes him to be spontaneously and unconsciously self-regulatory. He is always in a delicious harmony with himself, with others, and with his intuitive sensing of his environment. This, for example, makes him an excellent broken-field runner in football. His coach asked me, "Ask John how he can tell which direction he is running after he spins away from tackles a few times." He integrates the cues from his environment, so is excellent at collaboration. This is true of the best of athletes. For instance, the paper today mentions the two basketball players who received the highest votes for the All-Star team. They were the two most "beautiful" and "graceful" players magnificently collaborative. Magic Johnson received votes in the NBA West. Among his other achievements the assist leader with league-leading average of 9.8 per game. The best measure of effectiveness in collaboration, of course, is "assists." Julius Erving is the top vote getter in the East. He is another "magic"-al artist of grace. Self-regulatory.

John is magnificently alert, integrating his internal and external cues so that he is proactive in his environment. He moves into action and is always "in charge," never seeming to be controlled or structured, always flowing. There is an organic "wisdom" of the body, an integration that is largely unconscious or quasi-conscious. This integration includes psychic energy. He says that he "can always tell before the play when he is going to intercept a pass," an intuitive and clairvoyant quality that is true of many self-regulatory people in sports, music, science, and other fields. John often recovers fumbles, intercepts passes, responds proactively and integratively to the "whole" field of stimuli.

John's career choice is indicative. He is majoring in stage design and is delighting in learning about lighting, carpentry, principles of design, context, harmony, and the integration of all of the multiple fields of craft and art that go into the theater. He is an "artist" at anything, always interested in something new, always a participant (proactive) rather than an observer; always visionary; usually oriented toward the wholeness aspects of the theater, art, life, sports, and relationships. He is his own person.

The self-regulatory person is in balance, symmetry, wholeness, integration of all aspects of the person. The delicate harmony of sensory input processes with the cues from the inner organism, together with the responsive systems of the body is a marvelous symphony. The system of the person is a marvelous form of self-integration in any person, child or adult. The more we discover about the human body, the more impressive is the synergy, the magical self-regulation, among chemical, physiological, immunological, sensory, circulatory, cognitive, muscular, and neurological systems. What we have been talking about in this trilogy is a further integration of all these processes through the creation of a spiritual path, an integrational and wholizing process that brings higher levels of awareness, higher forms of "artistry, psychic energies, paranormal processes, intuitive and cosmic processes to bear upon this normal magnificence of the human body.

I am sure that the focus upon self-regulation in persons and in community will move persons and cultures into spiritual forms of integration that will soon lead to an historical breakthrough in the development of persons and the race.

These self-regulatory processes work rather well with persons, less well at the group and organization level, and in a very primitive form in governmental and international systems. The concept is a credible one and fully applicable to government at local, national, and global levels. We have made giant steps in the last forty years in creating and using self-regulatory systems in small groups, largely as a result of the historic and creative efforts of Leland Bradford and the National Training Laboratories. We are now exploring ways of creating self-regulatory communities and organizations. The future is bright (4, 22, 58).

In Chapter 12, I talk about two becoming one, in such harmony and wholeness that each is transformed in the oneness. It is certainly this way with beauty and a person. The talent of anthropomorphism is that beauty then becomes my proactive friend. We hang out together, have a love affair, transcend our separateness, become one. We grow together, take on each other's characteristics. One sees this process in great pianists, majestic artists, in anyone who has ever fallen in love with sailing, in architecture, making toys, creative stitchery, writing a novel, designing clothes, or writing a symphony. The activity takes over and becomes alive, a breathing companion in the adventure, an active participant. Beauty creates me and I create beauty. The boundaries between us are fuzzy. We are one.

Along with the harmony, balance and synchrony between the two of us, we at the same time enter into harmony with the surroundings, the universe. We are not so much aware of our three-ness, beauty, the universe, and I, but rather of our unity and wholeness. We lose our individuality and sense of separateness. Harmony is wellness is beauty is serenity is balance is freedom is community is trust. Oneness is a miracle.

Looked at this way, it is easy to see how inconsonant with wholeness and beauty are such processes as comparison, arrayal, evaluation, hierarchizing, intervention, coding—so many of the defensive processes in a society. Beauty emerges, happens, and cannot be commanded, forced, autocratized, pushed. Wellness and beauty cannot be judged, rewarded, given a prize. I remember one year being on the Board of the Association for Humanistic Psychology. In our enthusiasm, we considered giving an award to the "Humanist of the Year." I'll always remember gentle Abe Maslow asking, with a twinkle, "What would be the criteria that we would use in judging the person?" We all burst out laughing and moved on to other more "humanistic" and wholizing tasks. Come to think of it, is there any thing, any person, or any process seen as beautiful and whole to whom we would wish to give a prize or whom we would put in a contest? Or is it that beauty and wholeness are inherently incompatible with competition, hierarchy, and prize-giving? Abe always did have a delicious sense of harmony and wholeness.

Touching the universe is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. It is its own reward.

When something makes "sense," it is impaired. Somehow, to be "only" rational makes it already a fragment, a limited view, non-infinite. To be nonsensical is to be many things. It is both fashionable and universal to move beyond the senses and the rational to a world of a different order, a beyond-ness, a newness, a higher order of enlightenment, a "realization" of the ultimate, an in-touch-ness with the universe.

The world of the mystics, already an elite and esoteric realm, has been newly validated by the quantum physicists. Lo and behold, mystics and scientists are saying the same thing (105).

The world of the magician and the mystic is beyond logical and rational verification, beyond sensory validation, out of the easy reach of the usual scientific, statistical, or even empirical criteria of acceptance. This lack of grounding in the mundane and the pedantic makes this special domain much more attractive to some. More like the "universe" in its initial unavailability (49, 70).

After twenty years of academic respectability in the university, I left the safety of the scholarly life for the practical world of organizations and the significant world of the mystic and the transcendent. Perhaps not strangely, the scholarly world prepared me for both the world of business and organizations and the world of transcendence, spirituality, and mysticism. This career movement parallels my inner spiritual movement. I find that I am much more at peace with myself, tuned in to my inner rhythms, and on my more congruent spiritual journey.

The world beyond the visible, observable, and make-sense-ably familiar is attractive to me. In many ways, the future belongs to this less orderly world. I believe that we are already breaking through the limitations of the sensory, measurable, experiential world of the early scientists, and are moving into a more inclusive, spiritual, and universal world beyond our earlier concepts of the "natural." This movement is very rapid. In contrast to our more sensory world, this new "world" seems infinitely more promising to me, more adventurous, more suited to the magnificent potentials of the human spirit, more trustworthy, and more whole. Some worry about people who may have fraudulent, opportunistic, or manipulative aims and intentions. This concerns me very little. I trust people to move with spirit in this new world. The dangers, if any, are more in the direction of caution and tepidity than in the direction of overly rapid movement into the unknown. The relatively minuscule dangers of losing our money to the fraudulent are as nothing compared to the dangers of losing our spiritual grandeur and our majestic courage.

My own mystical experiences have been freeing, gentle, highly illuminating, and spirit-enriching. They have given me a deeper sense of mission, trust, and courage. My earlier hypotheses about trust level and its significance for personal and organizational creativity and development came from the laboratory, from traditional science, and from logical deductions from experimental and empirical data. I was excited by my concept of trust level and its generalizable and practical significance for management, education, and government. My new mystical, transcendental, and beyond science experiences have created in me an incredibly increased sureness, and a greatly increased awareness of the profound significance of the trust-level concept. The theory, in retrospect, seems to have come out of my inner, mystical awareness, translated into conventional psychological terms. My newer insights are much deeper and more in tune with my new awareness of the universe. I have found new courage and perspective. That is, I trust more. I feel that I am more at home in the universe. And, as serendipity would have it, I am seen as much more effective in the practical world.

I get uncomfortable in discussions that separate the whole-brain into a left and a right, a rational and a mystical, an ordered part and an emergent part. Such analysis is self-fulfilling. We do indeed split our brains when we bifurcate our selves, our brains, our feelings, or any sacred processes.

Separating our brains from our hearts is toxic enough. We all do it. We create an hierarchy of seven chakras, and it is the mystics and wholists who do the classifying. We even classify and name the kinds and qualities of trust and love! We need a wholizing language that honors the wholizing processes. Mysticism is a way of getting to the wholeness through some avenue that is not easily apparent to the senses or the intellect, that is wholeness-oriented, imprecise, fuzzy, harmonized, beauty-tinted, symphonic.

In Omicron, we are building a language that carries the harmonic message, that is whole-brained, mystical and magical. That honors the harmonies, mysteries, and beauties in organic nature. A language that enhances the light finger-touching of the universe, that flows with the harmonies of the universe itself. The task is a playful one.

Is the "universe" a metaphor? Of course, and much more. I speak of the universe as existing at all of the levels of "reality" of which I am aware. It is available to me as a hard sensory "thing," as a productive fantasy, as a parasensory awareness, as a positive force that impinges on my everyday life, as a palpable form that is manifested to me as a toucher, as a creature of my active imagination, as an image that I call up to guide me, as a personal friend with whom I have conversations, as a meaningful metaphor, as an analogy or figure of speech, as a symbol, or as a trance dream.

Can it be used in a mathematical equating? Of course, depending upon its definition and use. Mathematics is a tool, an abstract way of using symbols to provide order to otherwise less orderly and measurable constructs. Mathematics, in its myriad forms, is an aid to understanding, prediction, and control—an aid for almost any conceivable task that can be clearly formulated. We are probably in our neonatal stages in our discoveries of the usefulness of mathematics.

Moving into metaphor and moving into mathematics are both ways of using imagination, clear vision, mental daring, and broad scope to bring some kind of perceptual order to the universe. Each process is a tool that uses symbols, images, postulates, fantasy, and language to bring to pass this orderliness. Each uses "theory" as an aid to the quest. Each takes advantage of flexible postulates as temporary expedients and sign posts on the road. Neither is limited a priori in any significant way. Each approach can be expanded infinitely, the expansion tempered only by temporary limits of imagination and mental dexterity (5).

Each approach arrives at "conclusions" that are bounded by the nature of the assumptions of the game. Each approach is enhanced by the presence of experienced players who know the initial rules. Each pathway has been proved to be extremely useful to the tasks formulated. Each arrives at "knowledge" that is, in turn, used by others who carry on from there.

To a casual glance, the two fields of metaphor and mathematics seem vastly different, of different orders. One is deliberately structured and one purposefully unstructured. For one, the roadway is well marked and posted. For the other, the roadway is intentionally fuzzy—posting would handicap the players. One seems clearly on a left-brain adventure. The other is just as clearly a right-brain gambol—and a gamble. One is play. The other, too, is play-in a different league.

Kurt Lewin demonstrated the reciprocal enrichment of these two approaches to significant universal issues. In his

short life, Kurt demonstrated a beautiful wholism in scholarship, life, mathematics, and disciplined fantasy. He integrated these domains, just as in his everyday life he so beautifully integrated his warmth and his acumen, his heart and his head. His explorations in topological space opened new vistas in mathematics. His use of these mathematical symbols was enriched by his imaginative adventures in concept formation. His concepts are still being used, with marvelous freshness and productive heroism, by social scientists in a wide range of fields. Metaphor fed his mathematics and his math fed his metaphors. He was a field theorist, a systems person before the term became popular, a gestaltist, a wholist. An integrated person.

I, of course, use metaphor as a metaphor. For the domain of fantasy, figurative play, imagination, the fanciful use of language as a tool of inquiry, muse-ical poesy, the flow of life. I use mathematics as a metaphor for the more disciplined use of symbol, the more logical and left-brained adventures, the use of numbers and the metaphors of numbering, the use of rigor.

In Chapter 17, I talk of the transcending of dualism, polarity, and paradox. As Lewin demonstrated so well, there need be no duality between metaphor and mathematics, and really no duality in any other aspects of nature (33). More about this polarity later.

One but needs to experience Blair Gibb to see the excitement and wonder of the mathematical quest and the effect of this passionate path upon the person. Like Kurt Lewin, Blair moves with grace between metaphor and mathematical symbol, understanding and being in both. Not accidentally, Blair is like Kurt in wholizing his head and his heart. Perhaps there is a message here! When one lives in the poles easily and is caught on neither horn, one is able to transcend even the paradoxes and to transcend the other polarities of living. I learned what I know about the topics of Chapters 6 and 17 from experiencing Blair. I follow in his footsteps.

My friend, Leigh Wright, is an Omicron co-adventurer who moves with grace in both metaphor and mathematics, understanding both. His understandings are immense, and his energy awesome. I suspect that these fortunate aspects of his life come from his transcendings of this polarity, his moving beyond each pole, impaled on neither.

I point to three avenues to the universe: (a) the way of metaphor, (b) the way of mathematics, and (c) the path of transcending both of these. Each of the three roads is an entry to heaven and a way of touching the universe.

I put a little masochism in my life. Sometimes a lot. Who doesn't? Pain, even intentionally self-induced, has many useful functions. It is a cue system that suggests action. It is a tool in therapy. It is one of nature's organic tools in its inevitable behavior-modification programs. It gives me messages about what to avoid, or perhaps try out a little bit. I translate it into guilt and it becomes a punishment system to help me adjust to my minor and major transgressions in life. It is an aid in helping me set up insurance programs against heart ailments and other failures.

It may also lead me into transcendent and mystical experiences with the universe. And this leads us into the content of this chapter.

I have created a lot of pain in my life. And, it seems to me, I've had some help from others. I've created a number of temporary and painful ailments: a divorce, job failures, depressions, rejections, an occasional enemy, financial woes, service in the wartime Army, hypertension, a couple of car accidents—the usual. Everyone creates some pain. From my current state of serenity, I see all of the above and a number of other pains as blessings, opportunities for learning and growth, as a welcome deepening of my character, and especially as a welcome enrichment of my compassionate and eternal self. Some of my pain, in truth, led me to getting in touch with the universe. In enriching ways.

Is pain necessary? Some say yes and some say no, with, as they say, reservations on both sides. I'm inclined to feel that pain is not necessary and that it is a symptom of a temporary stage in the inevitable and progressive movement of the universe into new states of energy, spirit, and consciousness (22, 23). As in "growing pains." While, in retrospect, the pains I have created have enlivened my life, I would not choose to repeat any of them. I will choose alternative growing styles when I have evolved further in my own transformation.

The human-potential and other movements have so often honored pain that it has taken on a positive aura. Living in the pain is one way of moving out of it. Granting that one gets into such states, this manner of coping may be useful. This way of coping may apply to stress, depression, sorrow, loss, dis-ease, rejection—the varieties of pain seem infinite.

Some religions have advocated self-flagellation as a sacred form of reduction of guilt and sin, or as a way to a higher state of enlightenment. Each of us may practice this ritual in simulation. Each of us gets some relief from guilt and pain through masochistic feelings and practices. I suppose that all self-discipline is a form of masochism, muted mutant of self-flagellation. I suspect that self-discipline is a vestigial self-punishment, an unnecessary form of control. It may come partly from historic feelings of guilt at pleasuring one's self, at giving in to one's non-sacral impulses. Historically most mystics have placed the senses and the delights of the body on a lower rung of goodness than the more abstract delights of spirit and mind. It is very difficult to transcend vestigial masochism. Even A.S. Neill, a pioneer so freely committed to freedom, felt the need to assure us that he certainly didn't go so far as to approve of "license"! I'm sure that this view is reaffirming to closet flagellants.

Pain and living gracefully with pain have many positive outcomes. Certainly this process kindles empathy, enables one to feel with another person, get a heart understanding of another human being that is not possible through the head, however accurate the information processing.

I have known people who, suffering immense pain, have come through this, even while the pain continues, with a deep gentleness and serenity that transcend the frequent negative accompaniments to pain. This saintliness is often good to live with, serenes the lives of others, expands the understandings of others who experience pain, seems to cut through or bypass the frailties of less sainted persons. I know several people like this who, I believe, are profoundly in contact with the spirituality of the universe in ways that others of us are unable to discover.

The experience that many persons have had with Alcoholics Anonymous and kindred places where people discover the miracle of shared and genuine empathy is clear testimony to the community-building effects of knowing a common pain. The positive outcomes are many. understood by others. It is other human beings. It is good to know that I am understood by others. It is good to feel a genuine bond with other human beings. Even if the caring has a known projective base, it is good to feel it for another person, and to feel cared for. It is good to be listened to. It is a powerful experience to really listen to another. And rare.

AA is a formally-planned and structured program for bringing people together who share pain. It is very true that many other organizations bring people together who share "interests," values, professions, and traits. Some undetermined aspect of every interest, value, preference, and trait is based upon the awareness of one's own pain and the consciousness of the pain in others. The fear of pain, the delicious seductiveness of it, the joy of coming close to pain and missing it, the pride of keeping a "stiff upper lip" while weathering pain, the public adulation of people who flirt with it—pain is a mixed bag, certainly not all bad.

It is very easy to point to activities that are attractive because of being in, dealing with, or transcending pain: surgery, parachute jumping, driving race cars, performing in a circus, butchering animals, boxing or observing boxing, football, bull-fighting, nursing, running for public office, running a marathon, piloting an airplane—the list is endless.

People may join each other in organizations, clubs, neighborhoods or informal groups when they have had common experiences with getting into pain, flirting with pain, or getting out of it.

Pain is a universal experience, a common metaphor, one aspect of most every activity, a basis for bonding, a root of empathy—and much else. It is a way of touching the universe.

I am an animist and an anthropomorphist. Unabashedly. And, if I believed in being orgulous, I'd say proudly. I see nature as people. Forms in nature are friends. Are like me. And you. We are kith and kin. Kithin cousins, as it were.

I feel a oneness with nature. This feeling of oneness is newly fashionable. People started out in early historic times being animistic, seeing life and energy in clouds, waves, fire, and thunder. "Nature" was even of a higher order than persons. Gods peopled the natural forms. Were the forms. Goddesses and gods were larger than life, larger than persons. Perhaps unfortunately, some of us lost this inclination and the accompanying ability to talk with nature. Really talk in depth. And draw energy, trust, and oneness from the two-way interchange.

With the aid of courageous and adventurous spirits, we are regaining this skill. On the train the other day, I heard a little girl saying, as we pulled out of the station, "Good-bye, Del Mar," with purity and fondness. She hadn't lost her childish trust and intouchness. I had the feeling that Del Mar talked back to her. A beautiful, warming experience.

Getting in touch with the grandeur and scope of nature is a wholizing experience. I remember how moved I was when, after a breathtaking climb, I first looked out on the world from the top of Mt. Hood in Oregon. Mt. Hood is tiny, compared with many mountains. But from 13,000 feet it looks like a long way to the sea-level surroundings. Much later I felt a similar grandeur when I looked at the moon at about the time that the first astronauts were circling it. I felt the smallness and the immensity of the universe. I felt, for me, a similar consciousness-expansion on reading for the first time about black holes in space. And in reading about the wonders of sub-atomic activity. And on seeing tiny objects move and come alive under a powerful microscope (23, 106).

But, especially, I felt this kinship with nature during a trance-walk one morning near Toronto. In my mystical experience, described in depth in THE PASSIONATE PATH, I felt that the cells, the trees and the storm loved me and looked kindly on me as a brother. In this deep experience that has transformed my feelings about nature, I felt the oneness.

Nature is like an enormous Rorschach Ink Blot. We can project anything we wish upon nature. And, as we grow, the relationship becomes more than a projection. It becomes a dialogue, a relationship, an interchange, a being together. A oneness.

Seeking the truth, however one defines it, is a noble passion, a path of good repute, a pathway to the universe that is high on nearly everyone's list of magnificent ventures. Professions and institutions have been built around the search. The quest is often pursued with religious and spiritual zeal.

This quest is high on the list of respectability and merit. The goal, "truth," is an amazingly nebulous product. Adored and even literally worshipped in the abstract, reviled and rejected in the concrete, defended to the death, studied with passion and boredom, in the center of most polemics, never established with certainty—truth is an elusive wisp fading away when you come too close. Sought after but never discovered. Permanently written in stone or on the masthead, but always temporary and changing with the fashions (8, 83).

Often behind this quest is a need for certainty, a desire for the security of sureness and infallibility, a need to escape the discomfort of ambiguity, on impatience with the "creeping relativism" that is the enemy of dogma, bigotry, and deification.

At the base, truth is always a perceptual thing. Truth is determined by consensual validation. A "law" is an observed uniformity in nature, established, in practice, among scientists and scholars, by some indication of degrees of certainty, always relative to the number of careful observations, perhaps measurements. A "law" or a "truth" is not something discovered for all time, permanent and immutable, written on tablets by the right hand of God, or found "there" to be discovered like a new continent or a previously unexplored island in the sea.

The perception of truth can serve as a belief system, as a permanent peg to hang our attitudes on, as an anchor to hold our life styles in place, or as an island to come back to when we need a place to call home.

The search for truth as a way of touching the universe is usually a search for a perceptual shift, a credo or belief system that one can cling to, feel safe with, be immune from criticism and ridicule, feel respectable and perhaps even honored and adulated.

The quest for truth as a pathway to the universe may also be seen as a search for an infallible authority who is omniscient. God. So the quest becomes a kind of religious path, a desire to worship something worthy. Truth. Infallible (48).

Seen in these ways, truth can have much power. Start wars. Command allegiance. Force camps. Buttress the barricades.

Seen in any of these ways, the pursuit of truth is a noble enterprise, a worthy search for contact with the universe, with the universals, with the durable, perhaps the infinite.

I was heavily involved in the pursuit of knowledge and truth for about twenty years as a college professor. I found this extremely satisfying for a number of years. For ten or fifteen years, I felt that I had found my calling, my permanent mission, my way of life. I was sure that this was the way to discover and touch the universe, to change it. The road to the universe was through the search for truth and knowledge. The place to do it was in a respectable graduate school where one would have a community of scholars, scientists, highly competent searchers. At some point, I began to sense the aridity of this life and this pathway. Both the search and the seekers were in a closed system that fed back upon itself. That had little promise of finding "truth" that was relevant to the universal issues, particularly in psychology, where research theories and methodologies model after traditional physics, where people discover generalizations that apply with high relevance to the behavior of white rats and colored pigeons, but less and less to the attitudes and perceptions of people, especially after they are contaminated by language.

Life in the purified laboratories was exciting and life in the practitioner "field" was absorbing, but there were huge expanses of wide open spaces between. Neither camp talked with each other, read each other's papers, or coffeed together in the faculty dining room. In point of fact, the one camp was seldom even allowed on the faculty.

I discovered that the promising areas of truth searching were precisely in that great in-between, the vast unexplored country between the "basic-science" laboratory and the practitioner field. I want to discover the "truth" about the formation of a loving community, the building of a life of "artistry," the relevance of "touching the universe" to the building of a spiritual life, the creation of a national climate that is not based upon economic issues that are not really relevant to the significant life of the nation, the development of a true utopia, the building of a true international community in an interdependent world, the creation of genuinely collaborative organizations that are non-competitive, the creation of self-regulatory systems, the abolition of war, police and related distrust-based institutions, the building of businesses that are self-regulatory and focused upon spiritual and humane missions, and other issues that are largely ignored by both camps, the laboratory psychologists and the practitioners in the "field."

I believe that I am now in the middle of the most productive pathway to significant "truth," working on real and relevant problems significant to persons and society. Omicron theory is relevant and useful to this search. The Omicron collaborators are highly motivated, competent, and on passionate paths that are tuned in to these relevant and workable issues. We are "on a roll," making promising progress, pointing to 1983 as a high-energy "Year of the Omicron." Exciting stuff. I feel that my life is significant and that I am working with the right people on the right issues.

To be in the truth is to be on a promising pathway to "truth," to knowledge about significant issues.

Being in the truth is to be immersed in the quest for knowledge and wisdom, to seek in-touch-ness with the universe by being in a genuine search for such knowledge.

To seek for truth as I see it is one true avenue to being in touch with the universe.

Discovery is the definitive theme of the full life. When we recognize this seeking as the center of every thing and process, we join the universe as a companion. The universe is a fellow seeker, discovering itself as it journeys. Discovering is the definitive process in the universe of forms. This process makes us human, animals, and natural. When we live, we join each other in the path of inquiry.

An orientation toward seeking provides its own motivation. People who seek are motivated. They turn on easily. They make excellent students, workers, members of the congregation, citizens, professionals, and persons. Institutions that nurture members' unique quests, and that provide an enhancing environment for true discovery, are always "successful" and of high quality.

The Edison saga—that, for instance, he brought a cot to his office and, working around the clock, would take an occasional quick cat nap and go right back to work—may not be true in specifics. But it is a metaphor of the universe. I have seen several such people and have gone through such periods of my own. Dedication to a self-determined quest is like nothing else as a source of energy and zest for life.

The true search is endless. Searching is its own reward. Seeking leads to more seeking. The search may be for a Grail, a new continent, a Lost Atlantis, a new pleasure, the secret of youth, the nature of truth or beauty, the perfect mate. The end may be attainable or guaranteed to be impossible. The goal may be a lofty abstraction or a concrete object.

An attitude of searching can bring worthy passion to any way of life. When one's discontent is focused upon something divine, the inquiry is dignified, sublime, and spiritual. To beautify the walking of one who comes to you for a shoe shine. To ease the pain of those who suffer, hurt, and want for caring. To bring love and lightness to the traveler and to make the night of rest a tender pause. join the student in his or her search for enlightenment. To walk beside the person who worships and to make the search a joy. If whatever I do is made sublime by my continuing quest to do it with quality, beauty, and grace—then my search is a spiritual one and my journey is blessed with grace and joy.

I'd like to explore the concept that anything that results from spiritual searching is sacred. That searching is divine and that it bequeaths the process and the product with sacral dignity. The search for improved clothing may result in synthetic and artificial fabrics. The quest for alleviating of illness may result in synthetic, non-natural

chemicals. The attempts to improve the process of feeding human beings may produce "inorganic," artificial "food." Highway engineering may improve the safety and life enhancement of human travel—and produce artificial, inorganic roads. Boat design may improve the beauty and grace of a boat used for pleasure. The temple of Taj Mahal is made of synthetic forms, man-made building materials, human effort-and results in a non-organic edifice. A skilled artisan creates a fine piano, certainly not organic in any sense. Creative engineers build a robot that replaces a human worker in an essential job in a factory.

What makes a process spiritual and sacred? Are the pure, natural, organic, un-improved processes spiritual because uncontaminated, sublime because part of non-artificial nature? Does meddling in the pure "work of God" reduce the spirituality of process?

I pose that all forms are intrinsic to nature and can enter into all natural process, be organic, be pure, be sacred. This, then, can include chemically-improved food, cement roads, robots, artificial hearts, face paint, nose rings, telephone poles, food with additives, artificial flowers, nuclear fuel, warships, a man-made painting, and other articles "contaminated" by human hands.

I suggest that all forms in the universe interact and change with the interaction. Whatever results from the interaction is sacred and sublime. To be celebrated. Part of the universal family. Maybe more or less in tune with the infinite. Machines and machine-made products are part of the family.

My dear friend, Maudeline, always signs her name as "the Seeker." More than anyone I know, she is a true searcher after the good, the true, and the beautiful. Her search is part of the grace of her life. She is full of grace, wisdom and love. She is a true seeker. She comes to her earthly experience with a divine discontent, an earnest wish to know, a way of being that is a testimony to her passionate path. It is an honor to be in her presence. She touches the universe.

Insanity, lunacy, is said to be produced by movements of the moon. That is about as valid a theory as most. That lunacy is thought to be a pathway to the infinite is an intriguing viewpoint, very likely to be the case. An impressive number of competent people have written about this idea: Boyers (10), Dubos (18), Frye (26), Laing (47), Perry (82), Schett (92), Szaz (103, 104), to mention only a few.

Insanity may be a sought-after adventure in right-brain exploration of the edges of imagination and imagery. It is often difficult to distinguish the drug-induced fantasies (115); religious states of euphoria and worship; certain special states of schizophrenia (103, 104); mystical states; dreams; sustained hypnotic episodes; extreme fatigue; relatively uncontrollable anger and tension; deliberate role-taking and malingering; intense imagery and flights of imagination; primitive rituals; religious ceremonies; and many other well-documented states of disorganization and creativity.

Orderliness can be a powerful defense against experience, feeling, and exploration. Insanity can be a flight from external controls and induced orderliness, a strong protest against social control.

Insanity can be a trusting adventure, a quasi-voluntary seeking of respite from the bothersome necessity of meeting of expectations of others. A group of us studied seriously the first seventeen psychotic breaks that occurred in the intensely ambiguous T-groups at Bethel, Maine, that were used by the National Training Laboratories to teach executives. In the first ten years, there were seventeen psychotic episodes, cases in which participants were placed for a brief period in mental hospitals to receive treatment. One thing that surprised some of us was that fifteen of the seventeen were psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, an incredibly higher percentage of psychotic breaks as compared with the percentage of clinicians among the participants. Clinicians made up about 90 percent of the breakdowns and about 8 percent of the participants. All but two of the breakdowns among the clinicians came in groups where the T-group leaders were perceived as highly competent, clinically-trained leaders! It seemed that clinicians were quasi-consciously choosing to have an intriguing experience under expert care. They were choosing an exciting adventure, and a kind of "coffee break" from the stress and a situation that was very much like it was "on the job."

These data are much more significant than we first thought. A psychotic episode is therapeutic; with expert help it is a vivid learning experience. It can be a kind of insurance, very much like jogging to tone up the heart to get it familiar with stress. It is an adventure in free play, a "letting go," a transcendental flight of fantasy and imagery. It may be an exploration of the edges of the mind, a sampling of one's unconscious, a kind of dream state. It is many things. It is a transcendent experience.

It is a touching of the universe, a look at the universals, an adventure in mental space travel.

Just as jails produce criminals and locks produce robbers, so do doctors produce disease, police forces produce crimes, and mental hospitals produce mental illness. Iatrogenic illness is much more common than has been supposed. Occasionally illness is produced by the physician or by the treatment as an error or an accident, through lack of skill or lack of awareness of such things as the side effects of drugs.

A far more significant aspect of the iatrogenic effect is similar to the well-known findings from the studies at Stanford University where experimenters put students in a role-playing experiment where some students acted as jailers and others acted as prisoners. They stopped the experiment prematurely because after a very few days the participants became so upset that they were showing signs of pre-psychotic behaviors. Even simulating the role of a jailer caused so much tension that people could not continue. It is not difficult to imagine the incredible "side" effects and permanent damage done to the staff and the patients in mental hospitals and in prisons! Would it be possible to imagine institutions that would be less good for people who have "criminal" records or "psychotic episode" records than the present ones (10, 104)?

We need new and more inventive institutions for people who "choose" to go on psychotic trips, so that these trips will be transcendent and curative adventures, exciting glimpses of a new world of experience, a disorganization that breeds new forms of mental organization.

To some degree, any person who takes on a "lunar" experience creates the experience in the service of some internal need. The psychotic episode is co-created by the universe as a gift to me. Thus my mooned creation is a bridge between me and the universe, a basic way of touching the universals, a joining with others who have creatively journeyed to unknown places.

The creative disorganization is in my process, a part of me, a part of my spiritual journey. Even though it is often covered up by me and relegated to my quasi-conscious netherworld, the experience is never lost to me, becomes part of my resources and my being, is integrated in some way into my spirit, my self.

I create the psychosis itself, and also, perhaps more importantly, create my perception of the event and its relationship to me and my pathway. I have full choice in seeing the episode.

The universe may bestow many gifts by arranging for me to join this psychotic experience: it may deepen my character; my empathy is increased for others who disorganize or trouble themselves; it may make me more exciting to myself, more complex; I may get to know more of the wholeness of me; it may give me glimpses of my real nature that has been heretofore hidden from me; it may give me a new range of options; many are the potential benefits of such an experience. I create my experience. When I touch the universe, it is I that does the touching.

While an undergraduate in college, I lived at the home of a caring couple who usually allowed two male students to live with the family. This relationship with the Bennett family was a lovely one for me. One time, twenty years after my graduation, I was introduced to a group of her friends by Mrs. Bennett as: "I remember Jack so well. He was the one who loved his mother so much." Her remark, coming from one who knew me so well, identified something about me that has had a powerful redemptive effect upon my life.

One avenue to the infinite is through a close union of two spirits, an intimate love, a giving understanding, a true joining of two spirits. My relationship with my mother was one of pure love. Each for the other. The relationship continues to deepen since her death. In three of my transcendent experiences she and Larry, my son, have been with me as my spiritual guides, nurturing, loving and guiding me, particularly in times of turmoil and loss of my trust. It is easy to think of positive things about our relationship. It is impossible to communicate the nature and depth of it.

It seems impossible to describe the pain she went through to have me and to keep her love-child when the pressures on her to give me up were beyond understanding. I felt loved by her and by my grandfather. The presence of her love has brought me much joy, and has sustained me through moments of depression when it seemed that all I had left was this love. Our reciprocal love was unabridged, without reserve. Not in any way contingent upon what the other did, or even how the other was. Neither of us had to earn or to deserve the love.

Through our love, I have an open window to the heart of the universe.

Loving someone without holding back is a way of seeing what the universe is really like. Defensiveness is the block to clear vision of the universe. Loving, in the deepest sense, cuts through the defense, removes the blinds, and allows clear vision.

The universe, for me, is pure love. This would be clearly evident and easily seen were it not for our defenses. Our fears create the imagined dangers. The dangers produce the feelings that we need to defend ourselves. The need to defend colors all vision of reality. We then create a fantasized universe that is filled with dangers. We prepare our feelings, attitudes, perceptions, behaviors, and wishes in ways that ready us for meeting the imagined dangers that await us in the "universe," in all things. Our alerting system creates the dangers that our system is preparing to meet. We create our fears, our defenses, our distrusts, the dangers, the unloving universe.

An environment of love and trust provides the garden for the growth of the loving universe—the universe that we create in our projective and contagious ways of being. We build loving, proactive, and open inner states that produce the feelings, attitudes, perceptions, behaviors, and wishes that, in turn, create the loving universe. The universe against which we need no defense. There is no danger that we have not created.

I certainly realize that all of the above is just words that have little meaning for people who feel that they need to defend themselves and who have not experienced, in depth, the kind of love and trust that transforms the universe.

When two people feel that each has to defend against the other, who takes the first step? Too often neither do. And this is the very real basis for genuine tragedy, for existential dread, for the growth of evil, and for the prevalence of pain. The unfriendly universe.

An experience of genuine love presents us with a mirror of the universe. We touch the universe. Experience it in depth.

Love is a universal. It is the true fabric that clothes the universe, warms it, gives it essence.

Feeling that somehow true "community" was the secret to changing the universe and bettering our lives, a number of us set out in the early '60's to discover how community was created. We developed a "TORI" theory. We were so successful in creating loving communities for ourselves, especially throughout North America, that the word "TORI" became, for the 20,000 people who joined us, a loving noun and gentle verb, a caring word that transcended its initial carefully rational meaning. To TORI was to care. To be in TORI was to be in a loving community. To "TORI it" meant to let the love happen. The TORI story is still happening. Some of the early part is told in the Trust book.

TORI, like Camelot, utopia and nirvana, is a universal fantasy that becomes manifest for some of us when we create for ourselves those defense-free, loving moments with a community of like-intentioned persons. The moments may last many days or many months. The moments come and go with our defenses. Defense and true community find it impossible to be together in the moment, let alone to live together, to walk off into the sunset, or to weather bad weather.

I was a full member of about 250 TORI weekend communities. They are leaderless, not pre-structured gatherings of from 90 to 160 people, all coming with a common theory and a warmly-felt intention to create a caring community, a high trust place.

Whatever we did together, the experience became a powerful, intense, caring "community" experience for the 80 to 100 percent that stayed from Friday night through the final Sunday afternoon. The most vivid experience I remember was with a group of 138 Winnipeg adults who came together one Friday evening, brought food to prepare together, and stayed through until Sunday afternoon about 6:00 p.m. We had prepared finger food for our Sunday lunch and spread it on a table at one end of the large, carpeted room. The meeting of the whole community came together about 9:00 a.m. with people sitting close together on the floor touching each other, feeling quiet and peaceful. The group was so involved and intimate that not a single person got up to get food during the meeting, which lasted from 9:00 a.m. until about 5:30 that evening. What happened to make it so powerful?

Feelings were intense and expressed very openly. Persons owned their feelings and talked about them, not about what others had done to cause the feelings. A man and a woman talked about falling in love during the weekend. They had not met before and expressed the intention to get married. A nun talked movingly of having decided during the weekend to leave the Catholic church. A gay expressed some of his feelings about being gay in our relatively straight community. Members talked about being scared, elated, disappointed, angry, hurt, loved, cared for.

Persons were extremely personal with each other. There were no leaders, organizers, teachers, roles. Interactions were mostly spontaneous, often intense, often spiritual. Various kinds of spontaneous groupings happened around common interests, reciprocal attractions, issues that arose during the weekend.

There was a remarkable absence of attempts to control, advise, blame, judge, attack, influence, teach, and help. These behaviors dropped out as the community began to be more and more caring and trusting.

Community forms when people are doing what they want to do rather than what they ought to do, when they are open with each other, when they are personal and get out of role relationships, when they make little or no effort to control or influence each other, when they "let each other be." TORI is one good environment in which such community happens. Though rare, community happens in many different ways, and as a fulfillment of many different theories. We know too little about how we create and sustain such community feelings (117).

My own deep feeling is that learning to create community is the next great breakthrough in the evolution of the universe.

When I am in true community, I feel that I am in touch with the universe.

We are learning to create the non-organization organization. Perhaps we need a new word to describe what it is that people do when they get together to work, play, worship, learn, be and live.

I want to point out that one avenue to getting in touch with the universe is to get involved in the powerful movements that are afoot to create viable organizations, forms, communities, neighborhoods, congregations, gatherings-new and more nurturing ways of getting together to do what it is that we do as members of the human community.

What we are now getting we need more of: (a) new joining-together images that are nurturing, creative, transcendent, spiritual, (b) new pilot projects that test guesses and theories about how to make all this happen, (c) courageous people willing to venture and to break boundaries of tradition and habit, (d) new theory about being together in enduring ways, (e) dedicated people with vision who create passionate paths toward these aims, and who give their lives to the quest, and (f) new images of trust and wholeness that fan the imaginings of all of us.

In the second book in the trilogy, The Magic Of Self Regulation, I develop propositions of relevance to the thesis of this third volume. The self-regulatory organization is as near as we can come to mirroring what we think to be the definitive nature of the self-regulating universe. This self-regulating structure is also the most effective, productive, and harmonic organization, best suited of available forms to the needs of our evolving culture.

One avenue, then, to the infinite is through the invention of, and the living in a self-regulating organization. Especially having a part in creating one, in joining other self-regulating people in forming a mirror of the universe, a livable community home, a humanistic and experimental microcosm of the universe itself.

The construction of such an organization is not, of course, like making a machine, creating a replicable model that could then be assembled to meet a blueprint. If we in Omicron are on the right path, this organization would look something like the following: It would be collaborative in structure and process rather than competitive. It would enhance a harmonic flow rather than be hierarchical and highly structured. The organization would have in its structure and function an environment that predisposed it to continual discovering. The structure and function would be continually new, constantly revising itself, creating new forms and structures, not preserving itself or teaching its new members to preserve it. It would probably not have, for instance, any constitution or constitutional precedents. It would be renewingly custom built by its members, unlike any other organization that co-existed; it would not have role prescriptions. It would be a community that prized proactivity and intrinsic developments; it would not have a reward and punishment system to preserve itself. It would be a continuously transcending and transcendent energy; community enhancing high artistry it would be a trusting and wholizing place with little or no fear and defensive structure. It would be deeply into its mission of joining and creating the universe; its goals and mission would not be oriented towards efficiency or cosmetic and managerial effectiveness, but towards noble, spiritual, and universal aims.

For as long as I can remember, I have conceived of my spiritual journey as a search for in-tune-ment with the allness, for a way to join others in collaboratively creating a changing universe. After examining a myriad of options, I have chosen to create a professional career in the field of organizational development, feeling that this professional field is at present the most appropriate and creative way of collaborating with others in my mission. Our universe is in need of more fulfilling ways of evolving a self-regulating ecological community for persons and plants, of ways of organizing ourselves for collaboration on these missions, and of touching the universe, tuning in harmoniously with the universe as we evolve.

The field of organizational development is in turbulence, has multiple and diverse goals, a multitude of growing pains, and a fortunate instability, turgidity, and diversity that makes evolution possible. Some "specialists," for instance, are opportunistically involved in serving the efficiency aims of highly competitively-oriented business, aims that are not likely to result in building a "spiritual" profession. Some are caught up in "training" aims, in refining the reward and compensation systems, in improving competitiveness, and in refining role prescriptions—aims that are inconsonant with the self-regulatory systems that I am talking about. I think that these shortcomings are tied into the numbers of people in the field who are embedded in the economy-related short-term values and goals of the contemporary society. Books like those in this trilogy and a number of others that are being written will have a powerful effect on the growth of the profession and the larger aims of tuning the profession into the spiritual, universal, and transcendent processes of a rapidly-evolving society and world.

I am impressed, in reading widely in current professional literature, by the great diversity in approaches to the field of organizational creation, by the disagreements, the conflicts, the diversity of approaches to divergent theories. I am equally impressed by the growing consensus, the incredible agreement in widely diverse fields of cultural anthropology, ecology, theology, oceanography, marine biology, mathematics, health care, finance, psychology, physics, epistemology, systems analysis, politics, sociology, psychiatry, astrology, mythology, history, healing, nutrition, computer systems, and a host of other fields. A small sample of such readings are in the selected bibliography at the end of the book. It is impressive that such radically diverse methodologies of research can create such similarity in issue focus, speculations, predictions about the future, spiritual values, soft data, assumptions, and theory. Both the diversity and the commonality are appropriate, encouraging, and related to the state of the art (32, 91).

In the past year, I have made presentations in several graduate programs in organizational development. It is fascinating to see the promising diversity of people who are moving into the field with some background in other careers: military science, finance, the ministry, anthropology, law, philosophy, teaching, and management, to mention a few. Part of the attraction of the field lies in the possibility of high earnings. Mostly, however, as I see it, people are attracted for the reasons I am discussing in this chapter: the real possibility of making spiritual changes in the heart of our culture and in the institutions that are at the core of our evolving civilization. Our society is in a period of massive reconstruction, paradigm shifts, evolution of new values, changes in the universe itself.

For a time, the field attracted people who thought of themselves as "technicians" and "specialists" and called themselves by these terms. Technicians and specialists are not likely to be interested in the issues I'm posing in this trilogy. Nor are people who call themselves "change agents," "practitioners," "trainers," "personnel managers," "information specialists," and the like. A growing group of people in the field who think of themselves as professionals are thinking in creative and wholizing ways about the total picture and see themselves as working and thinking in this domain.

These professionals see the arena of the organizational development professional as something like this: I am concerned about the whole picture. I am an expert in collaborative designing organizational structures, missions and processes. I am a diagnostician that works with the total organization in collaboratively creating organizational processes that more than accomplish our evolving corporate mission in the country, the globe, and the universe. Like the high-quality CEO, the executive committee, and the Board of Directors, I think of every factor that bears upon this global mission. I take the same perspective they do. In addition, I perceptually stand aside and focus upon even a larger systems view. Organizationally, I am a co-president of the organization, may "report" to the CEO, but am seen as reporting to the total organization. My concern is with everything—the whole. Obviously, I do best when I have a broad theory base that continually changes, an optimum breadth of experience in organizational settings, and the greatest possible flexibility and scope of perceptual vision, fresh eyes. I see my function as the most critical function in the organization, and, rightly, others see it this way, too. I interface, collaboratively, with every person and function in the organization. I am the liaison person between the organization and the universe and way-points in between.

As I have said, this visioning of the transformational organization for the new age is a way of touching the universe .

The professional in organizational development is a resident theorist in the organization. Together with others in the organization, the OD professional formulates an emergent concept that has the scope appropriate to the above vision of the task. The OD person is a bridging person, relating the operating tasks of the organization to the universal mission in such a way as to be able to track the bridging pathway on a day-to-day basis. And on a long-range basis. One advantage of a unitary theory is that one uses the same theory in deciding how to sweep the floors or whether or not to sweep them, as one does in devising manufacturing and marketing policies that prepare us to both transcend and fully harmonize with societal trends that develop fifty years from now, or into the infinite future.

Our Omicron group is formulating a wholeness-based and a trust-based orientation that is explicitly aimed at the above bridging perspective. We believe that we are moving in the right direction with an appropriate vision. We will continuously re-fashion the theory as we learn more about ourselves and about the universe.

Bill Peruniak and others have invented a self-regulating organization that pioneers the use of Omicron theory in organizational development. He discusses his theory and his courageous and visionary pioneering in his book, The Northwest Odyssey: A Flow-Centered View Of Management. He is an adventuresome member of Our Omicron community who is illustrating the principles discussed in this chapter. His pilot organization will be an historic landmark in the history of self-regulatory organizations.

Omicron Discoveries is the corporate name of a pioneering adventure in organizational invention and application of Omicron theory. Barry Johnson, Dana Wilcox and others conceived the idea, are creating the underlying theory, and are solving the multiple problems incident to such a pioneering, leading-edge venture. This is another historic landmark in the history of self-regulatory organizations. Barry's book, mentioned in the second volume of this trilogy, presents a detailed study of this pioneering effort.

Astronarts is an experimental corporation applying Omicron theory to the creative intermeshing of business and the arts. It is being pioneered by Lorraine Gibb and will involve other Omicron collaborators in developing a theory of creativity and wholizing. Lorraine will present the essentials of her adventure in organizational development in her book, mentioned in volume two of this trilogy. There is no doubt about the intensity of the passion on her path and about the nature of her touching the universe. Her corporation will be another landmark in the history of self-regulatory organizations.

What I give away I will take with me. In life and in death. What I give away enriches me. What I have that is of infinite value I keep as I give it away. Like life and love. I discover and create my own life as I give it away.

There are many ways of giving up my life. A caring soldier may throw his body on the grenade to save the lives of his buddies. A mother rushes into a burning building and throws her baby out the window knowing she will die in the process. A mother chooses to let her baby live when the doctor informs her that only one of them can live in the birth process and she must choose. Christ gave up His life so that others might be saved. Giving up one's life seems, at first glance, to be the ultimate sacrifice (3, 45).

There are many other ways of giving one's life. To a cause. To one's children. To one's parents. To a value. To a business. To a vision. To an adventure. In many ways this is a more noble sacrifice, a more enduring one, a more graceful tribute, one that changes the universe in a more vital way. In giving my life energy to a cause, I am touching the infinite in a significant way, joining the universe, changing it.

Dying for the cause is a universal symbol, a metaphor, a physical reality, a way of changing the universe. It speaks to a universal archetype; it revives racial memories; it dramatizes the infinite. It is a way of touching the universe. I think of Joseph Smith and it brings gratitude, feelings of pride in the majesty of his actions. He knew well what he was doing and knowingly gave his life for what was all important to him. I think of Martin Luther King with many of the same feelings. He also knew well what he was doing and felt it was very much worth the sacrifice. He knew and felt what he believed in so strongly. I think of Jack Kennedy and his courage and strength. He may not have known so surely the costs of his venture in the way that Smith and King knew, but he was surely aware of the dangers of his calling and the increased danger produced by the intensity of his belief in his cause. These men fought and died for what they saw as noble causes, universe-enhancing life journeys. Each made the universe a better place.

Giving up one's life, donating it to a universal cause, devoting one's energies to what one hold's most dear, living one's mission at all "costs," dedicating one's living moments to something that one thinks is greater than one's self—this is also a way of joining the universe, getting in touch with the infinite, creating a living metaphor, making the ultimate noble sacrifice.

I think of Eugene Debs giving his enormous talents and energies to the labor movement, a cause that he saw as of universal significance. Who, reading of the moving scene, could possibly ever forget the hundreds of workers standing with heads bowed and hats off as a living tribute to Debs as he walked out of the prison where he had served a sentence for helping the workers. I think of Franklin Delano Roosevelt giving his multitudinous energies to creating a number of history-making transformations in the government of our country, acts that forever enriched the lives of generations of appreciative people. I think of Sojourner Truth, who gave of her marvelous energies to make the world better for all of her people, with great compassion for the people of her race but also for all persons. She moved with incredible talent, with gracious love and caring.

These people, as well, made the ultimate sacrifice. They fought and lived for the betterment of humanity. They gave their life energies. They touched the universe itself. They changed it for the better.

And then there is the issue of good and evil. I keep backing off from writing this chapter. I am less sure about what I feel about this avenue than about any of the others. What I am sure about is my own ambivalence.

I do know that evil is a universal. I believe that the war between good and evil is universal. And that perhaps that war itself is a universal. Each of these three issues touches each other. Each touches something in each of us. Novels about each are widely read. Dramatic plays are written about each and they bring out the multitudes. Humor about each brings laughter and tears (90).

Evil and the experience with it heightens awareness, enlivens the mind, sharpens sensitivities to values and the process of formation of values, and certainly provides an opportunity to experience empathy in depth.

Evil clarifies the poles of some of the critical life dilemmas. The paper this morning reports a number of letters to the editor triggered by a strong statement about war. War is seen by some as a seductive evil. It provides social acceptance of hostile, punitive, defensive, revenge-oriented, and other "evil" feelings and behaviors. These behaviors can be rationalized as valor, courage, patriotism, and other acceptable, even saintly virtues. It is compelling, in this rationalizing, to argue that war is a deep-seated and necessary universal act that fits the definitive competitiveness of all life, that it provides for the evolutionary and necessary survival of the fittest, and that it is good preparation for success in the practical world that is always a war for survival and for the emergence of excellence.

A strong article about a week earlier in the Los Angeles Times had decried the fact that the Vietnamese War had created a sad and dangerous situation, causing an immoral state in which "America has lost the will to win a war." The letters were about evenly divided between those who felt that we should really admit the "shame of defeat" so that we would "rekindle the spirit for future victories," and prepare for new wars with a renewed dedication, on the one side, and, on the other side, those who saw war as "utter waste and destruction," believed that the "gains of war were less than the losses for victors and vanquished alike," and that it was high time "we lost the will to war." Strong stuff. A war about war.

Certainly war brings out awareness of polarities. Even those who advocate war as a necessary and desirable state often feel that an unprovoked predatory attack is "evil" and not valorous enough to justify the destructive results. War does bring opportunity for awareness, and for living out the antithetical polarities of life: deep fear and emergent trust; pain of death and the awesome glory of sacrificial or transcendent death; destructive competitiveness and transforming cooperativeness; the way of power and the way of humility; and many more.

I am assuming that defensive feelings occur in every person. These defensive feelings manifest themselves in feelings of hate, greed, envy, anger, pride, a competitiveness, and perhaps wishes to punish, hurt, revenge a grievance, steal or kill.

Civilized persons get impulses to deny, repress, pretend, cover up or even to consciously lie about such feelings, thus seeming to compound the sinning.

Joining the race, owning one's darker sides, living fully with one's hates, looking one's jealousy in the face, having a full experience with the desire for revenge—these wholizing ways of viewing self may be developmental and growing processes.

Certainly these full experiences constitute one way of touching the infinite, one way of creating empathy with one's fellow creatures in the evolution of our universe, and one way of becoming fully human.

Does moralizing confuse the issue, deflect our attention to irrelevancies, make the problem more difficult? Or does a focus upon the moral aspects of behavior and feelings help clarify important issues, aid our growth, move us into a significant and wholizing contact with the universe?

Many people in behavioral science and in management, both theorists and practitioners, favor looking at process, content, and issues with a neutral eye of detachment rather than a moral eye of judgment. One useful way to look at the world is to "note" what goes on, see it with fresh eyes, accept and empathize with the person and the behavior, describe it clearly, and get a wholized perception of it all. Getting fully into this noting of one's own behavior and feelings and the behavior and feelings of others enables one to be more whole and more trusting. And makes the observer/ participant a more organic part of the process, avoiding the pitfalls and distortions of comparing, defending, interpreting, classifying, influencing, evaluating, filtering, approving, rewarding, and other defensive processes.

With this view, one would not look at sin and evil in any other way than one would look at righteous or moral behavior or feelings. One would look at sequences, correlates, what leads to what or what is related to what. One would describe accurately rather than judge.

I am very much aware of the moral freightage of the concepts that I have been using: trust, wholeness, universe, spirituality, nobility, compassion. Use of such words triggers moral judgments and flavors in me and in the reader. Attempts to denude language by using symbols do little to get us out of the predisposition to value and devalue. Using Omicron, Theory X, System 3, or Environmental Quality VII soon creates associations that imply an hierarchy of value, and doesn't fully remove the problem.

Perhaps what we can work toward is clarity, directness, openness, and accuracy of description. These, of course, are values too.

I discuss similar issues in a discussion of perceptions in Chapter 3 and a discussion of polarities in Chapter 17.

Learning to accept, to love, to be in one's full self is to move toward the universe. My wholeness is a mirror of the universe. In loving me, I love all there is.

Transcending is the process of grace whereby people move beyond themselves into new states of ecstasy, serenity, or spirituality. Or to new energy, light, and peace. There are literally no limits to the extent to which transcendence can move. There are no boundaries. And the knowing (trusting) that there are no boundaries is a leap in the transcending direction.

In The Passionate Path, I have described in detail the seven mystical experiences during which I learned from the universe about the seven Omicron processes. These experiences have changed my life in miraculous ways. I see myself as a new person and people see me as a new person. I associate these changes with my readiness for transcendence experiences and my new ability to create these mystical experiences when I wish. I know that I am now communicating regularly with my new friend, the universe, and transforming my living.

I believe that such mystical experiences are readily available to all persons, and not, in any sense, available only to some mystical elite, some enlightened few. I, as a person, as a member of the universe, create my own mystical experiences, and proactively create my own life, in community with you and all members of the universal family. All such experiences are open to any person who wishes them. It is largely a matter of creating an inner environment of trust, wholeness, and transcendent availability. I have talked in these pages about some of the avenues to transcendence, doors to the universe, with its abundance of available love, energy, knowing and essence.

One of these avenues is through expanding consciousness of the duality's in which I am embedded, and perhaps blocked. Awareness of these duality's and the nature of this blocking frees me to move into the significant polarities of living, to move alternately into either pole and to simultaneously and comfortably live in both poles, seeing the process with clarity, humor and some detachment. Then I may become free to move into the paradoxes, to experience the wonder, humor, and wisdom of each paradox, and to then move beyond these paradoxes to a place of transcendence, full being, and grace. I am then free from the paradox and fully into a state of pure consciousness, ready then to start my eternal journey anew, in an endless beginning. To discover new and hitherto not-imaginable relationships with the universe (16).

Some paradoxes are awareness' of major dilemmas inherent in lives burdened by dualisms: The only way I can save my life is to lose it. The road to true community is through true aloneness. The meek shall inherit the earth. The only way to increase my love is to freely give it away.

Defense does not defend. The only truly influential person is the one who never tries to influence. A humble person cannot be humiliated. The only truly safe person is the one who is completely defenseless. Jails produce the criminals. A paradox is a paradox.

The paradox disappears with deep consciousness. To transcend is to move into direct perception of reality. To know that I am the universe. To cut out the middle man in the transaction with nature. To end the game. To be beyond the here and now. To be process.

Marilyn Waller, whose book is mentioned in volume two of this trilogy, has done more than any other one person to make possible and transcendent the TORI-Astron-Omicron (TAO) adventure. What I know about polarity and paradox, I have learned from her. She was aware of the centrality of the issues discussed in this chapter before the rest of us realized the deep significance of them. Her many passions are wholized in many paths, all of which lead directly to the universe, with which she is on intimate terms. Marilyn is a magnificent being, brings courage and beauty to our community, and gives to all of us a deep energy that is grandly contagious. I am honored and made whole by her love. She and I are together on an eternal spiritual journey and share equally an unboundaried passion for Omicron.

When I touch and come to know the universe, when it is a personal experience to me, then it becomes one gigantic reference point against which I can look at any idea, image, feeling, aspiration, pain, person, or sacrifice. When I have tackled the universe, when the universe becomes my intimate lover, when the universe is truly my friend, when I understand and empathize with the universe—then I am able to look any thing or process in the eye, come to terms with it, be equal to it, be free to be with it, take off my shoes with it, be defense-less. I am then free to fully be in the moment, to live with my past, and to create my future.

Humor is one form of coming to terms with the grandeur of the universe, the magnificence of my worthiest moment, the magnitude of my worst pain, the formidability of my most powerful conjured enemy, and the undoability of my most impossible task. The challenges of life pale against the grandeur of my image of infinity. Cosmic humor puts everything in perspective.

In the most magnificent humor, tragedy becomes comic, pain is for laughing, death is put in its place, everything is possible, all dolls have pins in them, and pompousness is dethroned.

Humor is a way of trying things on for size. Humor climbs on either pole and points a finger at the paradox. Humor removes the tooth from the tiger and puts it on the saint. Laughing allows a choice; we can fight or run, love or watch. Laughter tells us where to look—and when to look. Humor bridges the abyss, climbs the mountain, transforms all reality.

Humor is a powerful way of touching the infinite, walking up and giving it a caress.

Humor tells you to come close or to stay away. It allows you a choice. Gives you freedom.

Humor delays the action. It says, "Wait a bit and let's look this over. Have patience, Babe."

Humor releases the healing chemicals, provides wellness, cures arthritis, may take away the stress or make it endurable, is the wellness.

Laughing at one's self is especially curative, releases the spiritual juices, puts one in tune with the best of the universe.

Humor is always hostile and always gentle. It gives you a choice of viewings. What you see is what it is. It always says, "Have one on me." Humor is the perfect projection screen, the best of ink blots.

Humor is the ideal tranquilizer. It serenes you, cuddles you, makes the moment un-momentous.

Humor can do it all. It is all things to all people. I call attention to one function that it performs best.

Tom Howells was a colleague in the Department of Psychology at the University of Colorado. He was, undoubtedly, the most gentle man I have ever met. He saw the gentle humor in all things, in every event, in every divine spirit. He saw the best in you, laughed with you. His wit was a caress. He sometimes pointed a finger in a way that allowed you to join him in a tender look at life. It might have been possible not to love him, but it would not have been easy. He seemed to see everything and invite you to join him in joying the connection. My speech teacher in college used to say that whenever anyone laughed someone was hurt. However right he might have been about most mortals, he was wrong about Tom. I learned from Tom that laughing can be a gentle religious experience, a celebration of the tenderness of life. To laugh is to dance with the infinite, to join in the cosmic play, to be with the fairies and the sprites. To elfinize the dangers and the demons.

I celebrate Tom, a beautiful friend who made all of our lives better. I know he was welcome in Heaven and makes it more heavenly. What a fun place to be!

The look of laughter is indeed one way to touch the universe.

Diane Beakey is a person who laughs with joy. Her humor is playful, aware s one of the joyous juxtaposition of incongruous events in the cosmos. Like Tom, she is deliciously intellectual. Unlike Tom, who is always cuddly and tender, Diane is also pungently quick. She has a magnificent range of humor. Mostly, her laughing is playful, brings joy to her and to those she loves. She is quick to see the infinite in any event, looks unerringly at incongruity and makes it playful. She is enticingly pungent, spicy, never hurtful. She is quick to laugh, always with you and not at you, makes a triad among you, she and the cosmos. The cosmos seems homey, joins you around the hearth, is a comforting and comfortable visitor. Her humor draws you in, encompasses you, holds you in its arms, neighbors you. Like Tom, she is friendly and comfortable with the universe. She knows it well. Is on familiar terms. First name stuff.

I have learned a lot about the universe from Diane. Her love affair with the universe serves her well. She looks unerringly at the essence of the moment, of the event, of the person. She trusts her gut reaction. Her stomach and her heart speak directly to her, getting cues from the universe, who is always close at heart. And hand.

A magnificent professional, Diane brings her full person to her passion for Omicron and to our Omicron community. It is a thing of beauty to be a fellow traveler with her on her journey to the heart of the universe.

It may be that there is a little worship in all truly loving relationships. Even deification. I, anyway, make a god or a goddess out of the people that are most dear to me. I enjoy that.

Humans find it easy to attribute powers, transcendent abilities, protective feelings, grander-than-human attitudes to those we admire, worship, allow to rule us, deeply love, or create as God. Though people often speak of the dangers in this deificatory process, I think that there is also much good in it. People (and gods) tend to rise to our expectations, to discover god-like qualities heretofore dormant or undetected, to see themselves writ large, to dignify the occasion and the relationship. Heroines and heroes create themselves. But, also, we create them. We rise above ourselves to create Gandhi, Joan d'Arc, Florence Nightingale, and Martin Luther King.

We become a little better than we are in learning to walk and talk with our heroes. Our heroes change as we change. God has changed over the centuries. As we have evolved to create a more heroic creature. She, or He, changes to meet our expectations that change with our spiritual evolution. We create our goddess in our own image.

God, whether or not She or He exists as a person "with body, parts, and passions," surely does exist in all of the most useful meanings of the word. Our lives may be but a dream or an illusion in the minds of others, as some are saying. We may create God or God may create us. Our universe may be a cosmic joke, may have no inherent meaning or purpose, may be a kind of emergent accident of impersonal action of implacable forces, or may be the design of a supernatural being. The number of hypotheses about the nature of God are limited only by the imagination of humans. In any event, I think it is useful and ameliorative to learn to talk and walk with God, however we choose to image and to manifest this relationship.

It is fashionable to say that we create our own reality. I believe that this is true. I choose to create God, to walk and talk with God, and to be, in the process, my highest and most enlightened self. To accelerate my own evolution to a higher consciousness. To create my own passionate path and spiritual journey. To be God and to be at one with God. To be the universe and to be at one with the universe. I'm not even sure what all this means in a denotative sense. This unsureness doesn't concern me. I am in the process of discovering all this. And it is very important to me to be in the process of discovering. Discovering, actively and intentionally, the deeper meaning of me, as an expression of God, and of God, as an expression of the universe.

In knowing me, I know God. In knowing God, I come to know me.

When I say that I create God, I mean nothing blasphemous. I also create each person that I know. Such is the nature of the perceiving process. God is one's highest and most enlightened concept of the grandeur of the universe. When someone knows my concept of God, they know the very best in me, my highest awareness and level of consciousness.

God is limited by my perceptual limitations and boundaries. Some people see God as a kind of bell hop. I pray to Him and He will fetch my lost dog or retrieve my misplaced ticket. Or see Him as a benevolent parent, better than the ones that I have. Pray to Him and He will forgive me, protect me, guide me to goodness. Or see Him as a strict but fair supervisor, who will see to it that I keep on the straight and narrow, continue to do a good job as He defines the job, and obey His laws, particularly the Golden Rule, which is always appropriately capitalized. Or as my pet expletive, one who is significant enough to swear in the name of. Or as a neutered figure, one who is certainly above having a sex. Or as a symbol of mystery, someone who represents everything that I don't understand and is thus powerful and fascinating (48, 83).

God, for me, is the universe, a friend, a person, the largest value of which I can conceive, a loving traveling companion through the allness, the infinite, the "whole."

Walking and talking with Him is my highest moment. He is my valued consultant, my constant collaborator. He is with me in any way that He and I like it to be, that is best for both of us, that keeps us in touch with the universe.

Such is my new awareness of the wholeness function of language that it is exciting to think of each person being both God and the universe, and each of us at the same time being in touch with the universe, and moving toward the universe.

I believe in worship, in adoration, in reverence, in love. Any form of this celebrative process. I believe in worshiping—God, man, woman, a child, a flower, a process, any form. It is fine for the worshipped and for the worshiper, as well as for those who observe the process. It means to see the absolute best in the person or the event. Because each form is a mirror of the universal allness, seeing the best in someone is a valid and reality-oriented process. It is a form of high awareness. Accepting the process is a form of exaltation, a high state of well-being. The promise of Omicron is that every person and form will live in well-being and exaltation, and that this expectation is a realistic one. All forms other than exaltation are being transcended. Evolution is a movement toward exaltation.

Worshipping God is a worthy process, something devoutly to be desired. Hopefully it will generalize to other divine forms, other processes that mirror God, as we all do. It is sad to think of waiting to worship until the seventh day, or for a special time, or for a special feeling.

Learning to honor God is thus an exalted and worthy avenue to the universe, a way of touching our highest image, a way of touching our selves.

Worship is, then, a form of self-love, a narcissistic exaltation, an incorporation of self-love into communal and universal love. It is the highest form of oneness, of sacral existence, of enlightenment.

A therapist friend of mine says that guilt is the most powerful of barriers to the good life, to well-being and exaltation. She is right. Meaning that I agree with her.

It is unfortunate that for many of us God has been used as an instrument of escalating guilt. Ministers, gurus, and religious persons in general have often preached in ways that heighten the feelings of guilt rather than alleviate them.

Transcendence is a way of moving beyond guilt, moving beyond forgiveness, even, because forgiveness implies that there is something to forgive. Moving beyond punishment, penance, error, sin, evil, the Devil, hell and purgatory, and all the other concepts associated with the planned maintenance of guilt. Beyond blame, onus, fault, and culpability. Beyond innocence, righteousness, and virtue, because these owe their good health to the existence of and the overcoming of sin and guilt.

Creating a God that has transcended the guilt process and that collaborates with us in such transcendence is an exalting avenue to being in touch with the universe.

God, as my highest self, as my co-creator of the universe, is the ultimate theorist. He or She formulates the most universal and most valid inner guidance system for God and for me. The true blasphemy is to create for myself a less than glorious theory or set of values. The more I see of trust theory, wholeness theory or the Omicron orientation, the more I see them as our nearest approach toward a universal guideline. Trust and wholeness represent my highest conception of the good life, my most God-like view of being.

Each person, as God, creates for himself or herself the most perfect guideline, the most glorious pathway, the most enlivening theory that moves him or her into a unity with the universe. God is I, seen whole.

For most of us, a passionate path comes from inside. It is part of our inner journey. This intrinsic hunger expresses itself in our choices about feelings, actions, relationships, adventures. It forms the basis for a career decision, a life style. It is closely tied to all decisions and choiceless choices in everyday life. It is the integrating and wholizing force in the person. It changes as the person grows.

Every person who goes deeply inside seems to discover a strong want to move in some noble way to some process, mission, or quest that is beyond the person. In some sense, each of us moves toward the "universe." Each person, then, is a toucher. Wants to touch the universe in some way. Beyond the "self." Creating and enriching the self may be, and usually is, a significant part of this spiritual journey, but it is neither the central mission or process nor the end state or hoped-for product of one's mission.

This spiritualizing of the journey is an inevitable aspect of the true path of any person. Individuals may differ in degrees of awareness of this aspect of their mission or in the degree of recognition of the centrality of this aspect, but I am assuming that each person creates this larger, sacred and nonmaterial pathway that centers life.

This spiritualizing and nobility aspect of every person's existence is an underperceived and undervalued aspect of life. It is ignored in our design of society, our models for government, our creation of institutions, and our theories of management and ministry. If what I am saying is true, and I am sure that it is, it has awesome implications for personal and societal transformation.

What a different it would make if we made this assumption in creating educational, religious, governmental, and economic institutions! We make antithetical assumptions in designing our current institutions. When we consider that our assumptions tend to be self-fulfilling, it is even more important that we examine them. We get the people in the institutions that we assume we will get. In creating our institutions, we assume that we will get unmotivated and materialistic workers in business, apathetic and troublesome students in the schools, hardened or hardening criminals in our prisons, unimaginative workers in government, and unenlightened and irreverent members of the congregation. And, lo and behold, we get them! Our theories (assumptions) create the people and these people then are used to confirm the validity of the theories.

I have, since early youth, seen my life as a pilot experiment. I have been intentional about this, continuing to create a "theory," an articulated way of viewing a life and an effort to live this life to its fullest. My life is a one-case, "n of 1," pilot study of a human life. I am building an idiosyncratic theory, rather than what Lewin calls a "nomothetic," or general one.

Many people have done something like this, with varying degrees of intentionality. Bucky Fuller describes his attempt in his "The Critical Path." Martin Luther King lived the life he wanted to live and dedicated it to humankind.

To some degree this single-case-ness and experimental journey-ness applies to each person who lives. What makes my pilot study interesting to me is the constant creative interaction between a continuingly-articulated and constantly changing theory, on the one hand, and the constantly living human guinea pig applying the theory, on the other. Each changes the other. The experimenter, the experimentee and the theorist-designer are the same person at all times. Again, to some degree, this triadic state exists for each living person. A housewife creates hypotheses about how she can relate to five kids, tries out the hypotheses, and observes herself and the kids in situ, makes whatever changes she wishes in the theory, tries it again, and sees what happens. A farmer does the same. An executive does something similar.

To a degree, this is a commentary on the human, and perhaps the animal condition. We do a pilot run, observe ourselves, make adjustments in our inner theory, and make another run. We observe others, compare theories, read books to get new information and new theory, get observations from others who are observing us, make new adjustments in the theory. Each of us does it differently.

The above descriptions come from retrospective analysis and imply a much more structured and articulated process than what happens in life. Spontaneity is much more prevalent in even the least flexible of us. But spontaneity, freedom, and situationalism can be built into the "theory" and the practice. The theory can include the intentional disregard for "theory."

The improvement and refinement of this process contribute to the evolution of the civilization and of the universe. People, institutions, and cultures do change, improve, move toward more noble and spiritual states.

My lifelong articulation, observation and living of this process have been explicitly directed toward: (a) bringing trust, wholeness and love into my life; (b) joining others who are doing similar things with their lives and creating some kind of community or communities; (c) building a body of articulated theory that may interact with others' theories in improving our society; and (d) journeying collaboratively with all of the other beings in nature to bring about changes in our universe.

I like what I am doing, and feel that I am moving toward these aims. This is one way to touch the universe.

Some of us talk more than others. Some may talk less and often do more.

Lorraine Gibb is one who talks much less and does much more. She and I see our spiritual journeys as very similar, with some exciting differences. We are each on a quest for trust and wholeness. We each have been passionately devoted to creating a congruent theory, and practice about joining children in a wholizing life. Most of what I know about doing this has come from experiencing Lorraine and being actively involved with her as she relates to Larry, Blair and John. Her trust of them came from deep within her body and soul, very little from the articulated theory. I have never seen or read about another person who is as trusting of children. This was particularly evident when she related to the children before and during birth, in the early months and in the first, pre-school years. Most mothers don't even get on the trust train until they think the kids "have grown enough to be trusted." This period when they supposedly can't be trusted is precisely the period that separates the true mothers from the ribbon clerks, the trusters from the fearful, the ones who let the world be from the ones who meddle with it.

Lorraine is deeply personal with the children, never acting "like a mother." She is open and clear with her feelings. She lets them be who they are. She never controls them or makes rules, either explicitly or implicitly. This is the theory, the trust-wholeness theory. We formulated the theory, largely from observing what she did and how she felt. Her actions came spontaneously from her gut and heart. The theory was more of a head thing, fully integrating the gut and heart.

I remember Lorraine coming home one day when Blair was about seven. She noticed that two little Japanese vases on the fireplace mantle had been broken and were lying on the floor. She said, "Gee, did the cats knock the vases over?" We all heard her question. Blair said, "No, I broke them when I was playing ball in the living room." Lorraine, saying nothing as was her way, and feeling much concern for Blair's feelings and very little about the broken vases, joined Blair in picking up the pieces, and having some fun with all of us in the process. I can think of many illustrations of her caring concern for the children, for her putting them ahead of anything, particularly anything material, and for her deep trust in the processes of family loving and living.

As a result of her loving and trusting, the three children are among the most caringly considerate, spontaneous, honest, and loving children that I know. I grant my full and complete bias as an observer. It is my impression that they are seen this way as well by neighbors, teachers, and other parents.

Being with and loving Lorraine is a delight, a powerful experience in seeing a theory grow and manifest itself, a confirmation of the full centrality of trust as the primary ingredient of the enriched life, an enlightenment about the divine value of quiet serenity, and a way of learning about one ideal way of living with children in a home. I'm sure that Larry, Blair and John would agree with me.

They, like Lorraine, live the theory and talk very little about it. It is okay to talk about one's theory or to not talk about it. To live it as a spiritual journey is to be in touch with the spiritual universe.

Since my seven transcendent experiences that resulted in the seven Omicron orienting processes, I have had many mystical states. Some of them happen spontaneously during or after intense experiences in community or in-depth interaction. Some of them I produce intentionally, on impulse, or in response to some deep surging in me. The experiences are consistently enriching, seemingly always an "answer" to an inner query.

Three of these experiences were especially informative to my spiritual quest. They followed each other, about 20 to 30 days apart. During this time, I was in some turbulence, churning as I wrote about experiences that were significant to me and seemingly relevant to my evolving books. It was a period of inner probing, feeling my conflicts, facing me.

The first experience seemed to contain a message: the universe is friendly. During the experience I felt an amazing calmness, an alert serenity. I was aware that I was feeling gentle and that the universe was benign. Gentleness was the true and essential natural state of every process and person. I felt that I now knew something of awesome significance and that I knew it so well that it would be ridiculous to ever be turbulent or fearful again. I can restore this feeling often and it reduces any dysfunctional stress that I am giving myself.

The second experience was similar but more personal. The message was equally clear: the universe is friendly to me. The vastness is with me, at my side. Danger is a thing of the past, an irrelevant and fantasied aspect of experience that doesn't apply to me. I am safe. The universe is my friend, a very personal friend. This relationship is the true relationship against which to look at all others. This awareness has continued with me. I sometimes lose the feeling, but can call it back. This awareness is the theme of this book, pervades my life and most of my moments.

The third experience was a startling one, a sudden flash, a quick insight, a deep awareness that flooded out all other content of my trance. At the moment it became a thunder bolt, an awesome revelation, a visit from God. It was an unprecedented experience for me, like no other, a new breakthrough into consciousness, a pervasive wave. It seemed to color and change all of my thoughts and feelings. The awareness was simple: "I am the universe." This, of course, is not a new idea, but a fairly familiar one. What I am talking about is how it hit me. It struck me like a completely and startlingly new and prophetic view. It changed everything. I would never be the same.

This awareness that I am the universe came to me with startling newness. For me, it was new. More than any other of the "messages" that have come to me (that I have created) from the universe, this message had a kind of total significance.

It means many things to me. One is that my theory of wholeness trust is appropriate in perspective to fit the scope of this startling concept. A unified and universal theory applies to everything. An orientation toward wholeness and trust is a practical guideline indicating what I "do on Monday morning" in the schoolroom and what I do about the bottom-line decisions on the assembly line this minute. At the other end of a scale, the theory is equally applicable to the quest of the organization to be in optimal harmony with its vision of the universe and its spiritual mission.

In The Magic Of Self-Regulation, this range of relevance of wholeness and trust to the vast expanse of organizational and personal issues is discussed in detail.

If the manager, minister or parent is the universe then this global wholistic theory, Omicron, is both the most practical and useful orientation in everyday affairs in the organization, and also in guiding the formulation of the transcending mission of the corporate body.

It often takes a major crisis, a terminal case of cancer, a powerful trance experience, or a bankruptcy to get one in touch with what really matters. I remember, for instance, Abe Maslow, when he knew he might die soon, deliberately taking a long trip around the country visiting all the friends with whom he had some unfinished business, an apology to make, a declaration of previously undeclared love, a true statement of feeling. Abe said he suddenly became aware of the deep importance of this to him. What I'm suggesting is that an autogenic and fully internalized theory of universal scope can function for every person in the way Abe's approaching death functioned: to put things into immediate perspective.

This "universal" theory performs as an inner guidance system to cue the person to the relative importance of every moment and every act, so that one comes close to always "unconsciously" doing and feeling exactly how one wants to do and feel. God, the universe, or the theory all function the same. They are the same.

If the executive or the worker is tuned in to this universal theory, he or she will move toward the self, toward the universe. It is good business—and good religion—to move toward the universe.

If the parent is tuned to a universal theory, one that is universal to him or to her, then it is good parenting to move towards the universe.

If a person is tuned towards the universe, to the self, then it is wellness enhancing to move towards the universe. It is the road beyond wellness and beyond nirvana.

In the next chapter, I look at my view of what lies beyond nirvana.

The last few times that I have written out my vision of my spiritual journey, I have been very sure that my own passionate path is a movement toward transcending my own feeling of individuality. I will move into a full joining of all others in the universe, into a state beyond the beyondness, beyond a feeling of individuality, into a rich-textured allness, a true wholeness that may or may not include bodies, minds, or individual spirits.

My mystical states, recently, seem to focus upon states that are "beyond imagery," some non-sensory, not limited to images. In the past, my psychic states have been very similar to my dreams in that they took the form of free-floating, cloud-like, dim-boundaried scenes. But they were images (usually visual, something like avant garde movies) that played out my fantasies. With difficulty, I could describe my "experiences" to others, especially sympathetic others, who would seem to get some message from them. More and more my new experiences are beyond word-able messages, beyond even concepts, not perceptual or cognitive, almost beyond awareness or consciousness. It is as if, as I feel less dependent upon my body and my own individuality, I create experiences that are without physical bodies, without

perceptual imagery, and without cognitive awareness. It seems to me that I am preparing for something quite new, beginning to make transitions to some immanent state between states—perhaps a transitory holding pattern, a trial run at the cosmos.

The state beyond nirvana, beyond any image or concept that we now have of a beyondness, is perhaps inherent, in some manner, in our evolutionary or transformation process. Nothing is embedded in the process but a beyond-orderliness that is discovering something truly novel, that is setting up the unpredictable conditions that intertwine in some novel way, creating its own non-image-able future.

My fantasy is that this truly emergent state will be beyond individuality, a true universal oneness.

My fantasy includes the speculation that these new states will have a quality of hitherto-inexperienced grandeur not, for instance, dependent upon an antithetical polar opposite for its contrasting splendor. The state will be true to itself, perhaps beyond quality, and beyond any other characteristic yet possible to image, value, or even scan with our sensory or bodily mechanisms.

As I write, I am suddenly very much intrigued by the limitations of language for the task I have set for myself. To describe a future that is wordless, concept-less, imageless, non-dependent upon consciousness, individuality, or bodily forms. Though often chided by friends for having a vocabulary that moves beyond communicative ease, I am suddenly wordless. My organismic fervor for this task, however, gives me zest, an upper, attracting me to the task rather than repelling me. It gives me a passionate feeling of fantasy moving beyond feelings, a strong burst of energy to contemplate moving beyond energy, and a beatific and resplendent image to anticipate moving beyond perceptual imagery! Surely there will be some vestigial residuum to conserve, to which to clutch, to need in this need-less state. Perhaps humor.

Surely, we, as the universe, will invent some kinds of new process, perhaps megaminds, megaconcepts, megapleasures. I am much more confident in this grand ability of the cosmos to move beyond into something splendid than in my own ability at the moment to put my fantasies into words.

The issues I am looking at seem at the moment to be minuscule and insignificant. They seem inherent in our current bodily process. Fun to look at, challenging, but perhaps irrelevant to our perhaps-not-so-distant new evolutionary states. Surely we will move beyond even the issues of which we can conceive in our current state. We will move beyond the beyondness.

In the Trust book, I speculated about ten "environmental quality states" that were characteristic of the evolution of persons, institutions, and other organic processes. This framing has been extremely useful in extrapolating from current states to potential new states, in personal, organizational and universal transformation.

In taking a playful and earnest look at transcendent evolution, I find my process and content very useful. Especially in taking an extrapolative look at our spiritual journey as a universe. Looking from this universalizing viewpoint, what of our current institutions and spiritual aspirations are worth keeping? What constructs, theories, models, values are worth revamping and restructuring? Which are not worth keeping at all? Which are worth taking back to the drawing boards? Or do we need something more useful than a drawing board?

I am very confident that doing it is useful. Theory guided pilot organizations are our best bet at societal reform. What concepts are worth trying out? We Omicron pathfinders and playmates are looking at these issues. We have much agreement and many differences. It is fulfilling to co-vision and co-create a here-and-now-ness that is tuned in to the cosmically-humorous task of creating a new universe.

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