Inner Development and Outer Effectiveness

Inner Development and Outer Effectiveness
The first pillar of the Inner Development Goals is “Being”. And the fourth of the individual points under Being is Self-awareness. “… having a realistic self-image and ability to regulate oneself.”
This is a good and noble ambition or goal, but how can we achieve this realistic self-image? And I would add, how can we get closer to a realistic image of the world? To develop one without the other would be very difficult, I believe.
A realistic self-image includes an understanding of where my motivations come from, what is it that really drives me? Here two ideas are fundamental to my thinking, and other ideas build on this fundament. The ideas don’t have a particular order, but rather inform each other.
Know Thyself
Firstly, how did I become who I am today? And in what way am I still becoming? This includes questions about the kind of society I was born into, the background I grew up in, personal advantages and disadvantages my upbringing served up for me, childhood traumas I might (or might not) have experienced and that may colour my way of interacting with others, with peers, inside hierarchies and the world at large. And how can I continue to grow, shed some shackles and become more aware of strengths or advantages I might have but do not really know or understand well yet.
The ‘Bodynamic’ system has a wonderful term for it: ‘White Holes’, where energy comes from, as opposed to Black Holes, where energy disappears. The more we learn about our White Holes -the skills we may possess but are not necessarily aware of- the more effective we can become in our lives. And it is a fact that the things that I personally find easy and entirely natural to do are not necessarily felt to be strengths, because I feel ‘anybody can do this’, so the very fact that these things fall in my lap can make them invisible to myself.
Secondly, what is my picture of the nature of the world? Do we live in a purely material world where what you see is what you get and what we can measure is all there is or is there something else? Why has in the history of humanity no culture emerged (as far as we know) without some form of religion? Is this just our human weakness and yearning, or is there really something out there? In other words, have our religions tried to describe something based on actual (if personal and wholly subjective) experience, or are they wishful fictions to help and assuage our deep sense of aloneness in an uncaring universe?
Exploration of the first topic is a very personal and individual pursuit, but nevertheless important, because without knowing thyself and having some understanding of your own strengths, weaknesses and deep motivations, I believe no real conversation and connection with others (pillar 3 of the IDGs) is possible. Otherwise, two people engaging are very likely to play shadow fights and wondering why they keep making the same experiences over and over. My personal experiences may well be shared by others in a similar society (aren’t most of us now living in very similar global societies?) and therefore personal experiences may provide helpful hints for understanding the larger society in which we live.
The Ways of the World
The exploration of the second topic, provided one has progressed some way with the first, is much more conducive to collective efforts and explorations (and links directly to IDG pillars 4 and 5).
Here, I believe, some basic understanding (if this is at all possible for a layman like me) or at least an inkling of the implications of the quantum world is helpful. At this lowest level the world is not analogue but digital, that is, here we find not a matter of degrees (a little more or a little less) but a strict yes or no, existing or not existing, true or false. At this lowest level of the building blocks of the world matter and energy are indeed not a duality, but different forms of the same phaenomenon, like ice, water and steam are different aggregate states of the same chemical H2O. And here potentialities are being lined up, and our behaviour, or even our thinking (a thought is information, and at the quantum level what is being exchanged is information, most scientists now believe) may then incline or nudge a particular available potentiality just that little more towards an actual realisation.
This is significantly more complex than simple “positive thinking”, but evidence appears to mount that the attitude with which we approach the world has some bearing on the world we do experience.
Consciousness
Another but related question is: What is consciousness? Is it an emergent property of a brain, or does a brain host a consciousness somewhat akin to a program that a particular computer and its operation system can host? If so, the program would exist outside of a particular computer and could be hosted on others of a similar kind.
This would rather imply that consciousness may be able to exist outside of a brain or can at least continue to exist for some time even when brain activity can be shown to have ceased completely in the clinical setting. So, what then is the nature of consciousness?
And so on…
Conclusion
I am aware that these musings may be a fair bit outside of the often very pragmatic conversations about personal development and of questions as to “what can we actually do?”. But nevertheless I believe (and hope) that they may be helpful in arriving at a more complete picture of myself, the world, and my interactions with the world, including my strengths and weaknesses in those interactions.
And my other hope is, that these musings might speak to others here, and that there may be persons here who would be interested in an exchange about these ideas.
At the end of the day, we do need to be able to talk to each other, on the basis of a sincere understanding of ourselves, which is a task that is never complete.
In my next post I will talk about conversations.
Martin Lixenfeld, 18.2.2025, Dresden, Germany