The name was not my idea.

The name itself comes from a life-changing vision Abraham Maslow had just a day after the Pearl Harbour attack.

On that day, as he shed tears over humanity's lack of understanding and all the unnecessary suffering that ensued , Maslow envisioned a peace table: a place where he saw people sitting around and talking about "human nature and hatred and war and peace and brotherhood…" and all the things needed to truly understand human beings and finally make real progress forward. Unfortunately, he died before he could establish that table.

In this space, I want us to run with his idea—to talk about the things mentioned above and more. The goal is to provide concepts, ideas, theories, explanations, and guidance on what we need to do so we can fully understand Human Development and Human Potential, and so we can reverse this planet's accelerating downward spiral.

If you want to contribute, you can. Help us with intelligent, grounded discussions, do some research, promote us on social media, subscribe and become a student—maybe even a teacher. Really, we're open to whatever you think can help us achieve our vision: a sustainable world of abundance, empowerment, and expanded creativity, free of suffering, poverty, hierarchy, power, and control. And our mission: the development and implementation of new theoretical and pedagogical paradigms capable of shifting our thinking, raising our individual and collective consciousness, and ushering in what psychologist Abraham Maslow referred to as Eupsychia, or the good society.

Mike

Initially, the thing was premised on the startling experiences I had. Since I was trained as a scholar. You can read a bit about my experiences here in my article "Connection 100—An Auto-Ethnography of My (Mystical) Connection Experiences" The experiences were transformative. I recognized the fact immediately that if enough people could be induced to have these experiences, we could easily transform, even save, the planet.

Upon inception, the goal of Lightning Path was to create a "fast path" towards what I came to call Connection Experience but others would refer to as mystical or peak experience.  Since then, the goal of the LP has evolved not just solely as a path towards better connection, but towards a Human Development Framework. As defined in the SpiritWiki,  a Human Development Framework (HDF) is a framework devoted to understanding the human species, supporting Human Development and actuating full Human Potential. The goal of such a framework is to help create what Abraham Maslow called Eupsychia, or the Good Society.

I've done a lot of writing over the years on this. It has been a challenge not only because the scope of this thing is huge, but also because it requires a new theoretical language, new frameworks, and new ways of understanding that are not only carefully integrated, logical, consistent, and complete, but free of (we might say emancipated from) status quo understandings. That’s a big challenge, particularly when you also have to make this accessible to all.

I’m not going to claim to have accomplished this. Really, any successful move in this direction is a collective effort more than a one-person show. I am confident in saying, however, that I have built a solid theoretical foundation upon which we can build and empirical and practical structure. Right now things are a bit scattered. My goal on these forums is to start piecing it together into a coherent framework from which we can develop, ground, and spread the new paradigm.

Tucker, J. B. (2005). Life before life: A scientific investigation of children’s memories of previous lives. St. Martin’s Press.

Stevenson’s successor at the University of Virginia offers a readable synthesis of more than forty years of case research for a general audience. Tucker presents representative cases in detail—including American cases, which undermine the objection that the phenomenon occurs only in reincarnation-believing cultures—and summarizes the database’s recurring patterns: the young age of onset, the high proportion of cases involving violent death, the fading of memories by middle childhood, and the concordance of birthmarks with verified wounds. The book’s distinctive contribution is theoretical: Tucker engages materialist objections directly and argues that the accumulated data are best accommodated within a framework in which consciousness can exist independently of the brain, sketching parallels with the nonlocal character of quantum phenomena. Life before life thus functions as the contemporary bridge between the case literature and the philosophy-of-mind debates treated in the final section of this bibliography.

Download PDF or EPUB

When you ask this question you basically get one of two answers.

1. Humans are intrinsically bad. They are violent, greedy, sinful, awful, fallen angels/greedy apes.

2. Human are intrinsically good. They are altruistic, loving, compassionate, caring and good.

Everybody is familiar with the first answer because that's basically the answer you are taught in church and school. Humans are violent apes. Humans are inherently sinful. Humans are bad little children who can’t listen and behave and are in need of constant tutelage and correction. Humans like to be powerful and in control. There's lots of iterations.

Many people are familiar the second answer. This answer is taught by mystics like Jesus philosophers like Aristotle, authors, and musicians who suggest that deep inside we are good, possibly glorious, maybe even divine.

This might seem like an easy question to answer, but it's not. It is difficult and can be confusing. That’s because if you look you will find lots of evidence for both sides. There's lots of examples of people acting incredibly vile and disgusting and lots of examples of people acting with compassion and love, even to the point of self-sacrifice.

It's confusing, right?

Not really. It's only confusing if you ignore the half of the evidence that doesn't fit your side. If you don't ignore evidence, the answer is right there. Are humans good or bad? The answer is both. They can be incredibly evil and vile but also incredibly wonderful, even divine. Satanic and angelic.

The question at this point becomes what determines which side? What determines whether we act good or bad?

Based on evidence we have an answer to that question as well and the answer is, it depends. What does it depend on? It's not genetics if that's what you think. Rather, it depends entirely on your environment and, more specifically, the environment as provided by your relations (your mom, dad, siblings, community, teachers, etc.). As soon as you are born you are born into an environment provided to you by all your relations. That environment has a powerful influence on your development.  

If you have a good environment you grow up up loving, compassionate, empowered, calm and connected. You express yourself and your talents. You are a fully functioning human being. OTOH if you have a bad environment, you grow up the opposite; desperate, greedy, aggressive, defensive, mentally and physically ill, dysfunction, and not expressing your full potential. 

Any serious discussion of utopia/Eupsychia/The Good Society must start with this basic truth of human nature which is that it is context dependent. That this is true doesn't negate the fact that there may be aspects of our humanity that we might call essential or natural, that we might have an essence of that genetics might play an influence. It is just to say environment is critical and we must start our discussions with that. 

In this chapter Fromm elaborates more on his "Being-Mode" of existence. 

• Being mode is experienced
• the "living human" cannot be described, only its persona (the mask) -> i don't buy this
• prerequisites for being-mode is independence, freedom, critical reason, being active "not in the sense of outward activity, of busyness, but of inner activity, the productive use of our human powers" (p. 88)
• give up the "crutch of property"

To be active means to give expression to one’s faculties, talents, to the wealth of human gifts with which—though in varying degrees—every human being
is endowed. It means to renew oneself, to grow, to flow out, to love, to transcend the prison of one’s isolated ego, to be
interested, to “list,” to give. (p. 88)

This is really a chapter on alignment and connection as central to healthy existence.

Fromm makes a distinction between alienated activity and non-alienated activity.

Alienated activity is activity that is (in LP terms, not aligned and not arising from connection). Fromm Uses the example of post-hypnotic suggestion to illustrate, the person is acting but not doing "what they want to do." Also illustrated with adaptations like "OCD", person being driven by unconscious motives, not doing what they want

Nonalienated activity is different: " I experience myself as the subject of my activity. Nonalienated activity is a process of giving birth to something, of producing something and remaining related to what I produce. This also implies that my activity is a manifestation of my powers, that I and my activity and the result of my activity are one. I call this nonalienated activity productive activity." (p. 91)

Productive Activity: basically, activity that arises as a consequence of your connection to spiritual ego, your alignment with your true self. "Productive activity denotes the state of inner activity....Productive persons....give birth tot heir own faculties and bring life to other persons and to things." (p. 92)

The difference between "mere busyness" and productive activity. 

Being as reality: From also distinguishes between being and appearing. In the former, words and behaviour are in alignment with character, spiritual ego, inner self, human nature, in the latter we put on a face, act and exist in the interests of another. 

"My behavior may partly reflect my being, but it is usually a mask that I have and that I wear for my own purposes. " (p. 97)

Fromm suggests traditional psychoanalysis as a way to uncover the things that have been repressed, I would say, as a consequence of Toxic Socialization

Fromm suggests the "normal" socially adapted citizen is a toxic blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, prejudices (p. 98). To that I would add maladaptive adaptations as well.

For Fromm, the normal person is not real, not authentic, not a "being," but sickness, passively existing as an unaligned and disconnected cog in the system.  From notes that we try to "organize" this jumble in a way that makes sense, but it makes no sense. It's a "false map" that obscures the fact that "What is repressed in the knowledge of reality, the knowledge of what is true....If we ask,l then: What is unconscious?the answer must be: Aside from irrational passions, almost the whole of knowledge of reality." (p. 98). We repress reality because we are afraid of it, because awareness of it "dangerous."

Examples,

• suppressing awareness of a partner's sexual abuse of children because to acknowledge it might lead to assault/abuse, complications with the law, the collapse of life as it is.
• suppressing awareness of your abusive parents and their behaviours because you need their love or support
• suppressing the awareness of climate change and its consequences because you want to travel and consume, and acknowledging it would make that travel and consumption guilt-ridden

From notes that we all have an innate capacity, a really well developed one at that, to perceive reality. It's not something we have to work on. It is something we have to recover

Fromm spends a lot of time discussing needs here, specifically our need to be good, to sacrifice, to be helpful. He points out that we all have this need and gives numerous examples from history and contemporary society where people are happiest when they are giving and not just receiving. 

On the LP we place this series of needs in the Alignment Needs category, since these needs represent the spiritual ego's desire to have an aligned vessel to operate.  

It is clear to me at this point that being-mode is synonymous with an individual who is living in an aligned and connected state. Such an individual would share some basic characteristics with other aligned and connected individuals (loving, compassionate, aware, will full, authentic, real, etc.) but would bring their own experiences and idiosyncrasies to their character.  

• we are biased, we see everything through a filter of ownership, property, increase of property, exploitation
• we emphasize consumption, not preservation, throw out the old, in with the new
• we treat ideas like property,
• that existence is deadness "In the having mode, there is no alive relationship between me and what I have. It and I have become things, and I have it, because I have the force to make it mine. But there is also a reverse relationship: it has me, because my sense of identity, i.e., of sanity, rests upon my having it (and as many things as possible). The having mode of existence is not established by an alive, productive process between subject and object; it makes things of both object and subject. The relationship is one of deadness, not aliveness." (p. 77-8).
• that we seek power over others.
• that society seeks to break our natural "tendency to grow in terms of their own nature..." (p. 78). This involves restriction of our "free, spontaneous expression... third for knowledge and truth, their wish for affection." (basically suppressing our drives to fulfill our needs). Undermining needs satisfaction and the drives which impel us to satisfy them causes rebellion, neurosis, psychosis, pathology,
• having-mode implies power over others. to increase our "having," we must control others (employees, slaves, etc.)
• suppression of needs and drives leads to a fruitless rebellion. Rebellious energies are sublimated (music, the sexual gaze, food, circuses, alcohol, etc.). Rebellion fruitless unless grounded in
• English language expresses ownership
• Note in the chapter Fromm distinguishes Toxic Having from Existential Having - this is 'having' that is required for existence, food, shelter, clothing, tools necessary to fulfill needs.Having food, shelters, clothing etc. are existential and not in conflict with being.

Download from the LP Repository or Internet Archive

In the having mode, one's relationship to the world is "one of possessing and owning, one in which to make everybody and everything, including , property" (p. 24). Possession extends beyond things to knowledge, people, ideas, feelings. Our identity becomes that which we eat (Wagyu beef),  what we buy (Mercedes-benz),  and what we consume (only the top brands, the brands with vibe, etc.). In this mode, we are merely a shell.

In the being-mode,  we are two things.

1. Being as aliveness: we are alive, engaged,   and connected; the mode  "in which one neither has anything nor craves to have something, but is joyous, employs one's faculties productively, is oned to the world" (pp. 18–19).
2. Being as essence: — from the Indo-European root es: "that which is authentic, consistent, true" (p. 24). To say something is refers to its true nature, not its deceptive surface. In LP terms, a fully functioning individual in being-mode is aligned, connected, and expressing their true essence, their essential beingness, that which you  really are. 

The goal of life is to be much, not to have much.

Download To Have or to Be.