All Spirit, No Ground. All Ground, No Meaning.

Most accounts of personal growth assume a single line, along which we are further on or further back. Psychosynthesis works with two. It calls them the two dimensions of growth: self-realisation and self-actualisation. One is the line most of us are pointed along early: making something, building a life that holds, being someone in the world.

What that line is supposed to look like is not the same for everyone. The version handed to many men runs through work, money, status and capability. The version handed to many women runs through being pleasing, accommodating, needed, and not too much. For anyone growing up as a minority in a place, it often runs through fitting in and belonging, and through the daily labour of being read correctly: living a life while also watching how it lands. Different scripts, the same line. And for a good many people it was never an encouragement at all. It was a requirement with consequences attached, and no other version was on offer.

The other line is the one that gives all of that its weight: meaning, purpose, a pull towards something larger, some contact with who we are underneath the roles. The two are independent. Both can be moving, neither has to be, and distance travelled on one says little about the other.

Which is why two people who sound like opposites often turn out to have the same thing going on. Someone with a serious spiritual or religious life, a practice of their own or a faith community with a role in it, whose devotion and insight are real, and for whom work, money, the body and relationships do not come together as fully as they would wish. And someone who has built a great deal, perhaps reached that long-cherished goal, and finds it does not carry the meaning or the gratification they expected of it. One line moving, the other still, for long enough that the stillness stopped being noticeable.

Some of us go the other way entirely, and on purpose. Refusing the script we were handed is a real move, and often a reach towards something more genuinely our own. It can be exactly that. It can also mean the first line goes untended for years, while a great deal of energy goes into not being what we were told to be.

Which raises the question this piece is about. Is it possible for both lines to move at once, and how do we tend to one without diminishing the other? It is possible, though not usually by the route that first suggests itself.

The Two Dimensions of Growth: Two Directions, Not One Ladder

Firman and Vargiu, in Psychosynthesis: Dimensions of Growth (1977), building on Roberto Assagioli‘s work, describe human unfolding along two lines that are related but genuinely distinct.

Self-actualisation is the horizontal one. Making something of a life in the world, in a body, with other people. Work, money, capability, ordinary competence.

Self-realisation is the vertical one. Meaning, purpose, the pull towards something larger, the sense of a Self beneath the personality.

The two dimensions of growth. After Vargiu (1977), as set out in Firman and Gila, Psychosynthesis: A Psychology of the Spirit, p183.

Everyone sits somewhere across the two dimensions of growth, and most of us lean by temperament. The leaning is not the problem, and hardly anyone is at a corner of it. What is common is something slower: one line kept going because it was the one that worked, and the other went quiet without anyone deciding.

The See-Saw Assumption: Why the Two Dimensions of Growth Are Not a Trade-Off

When we do notice, the instinct is usually to reach for the opposite: leave the job, leave the practice, go and look for the thing that has been missing.

Underneath that move is an assumption worth noticing: that the two lines are ends of one beam, where more of one means less of the other. On a beam, the only available move is to shift weight from one side to the other. In a plane, which is what the model describes, there is another move available. The line that has not been growing can grow, without the other one having to give anything up.

It is an appealing move. It feels decisive, and it produces change quickly. What it can struggle to produce is a different position, because it travels along the axis we were already thinking in. Swapping poles and adding a dimension are not the same thing, and they can be difficult to tell apart from the inside.

Three ways up the two dimensions of growth. The straight orange line is the intention. The white one is the reality.

Straight up the vertical is all spirit and no ground. Straight along the horizontal is all ground and no meaning. The diagonal is not a compromise between the two. It is what becomes possible when neither one is running the show.

One End: All Spirit, No Ground

Psychosynthesis calls this a crisis of duality, one of the ways the two dimensions of growth come apart, and I can describe it from the inside. What I could see, once I had the picture in front of me, was how completely I had embraced the higher and more noble aspects of my character, and how thoroughly I had shunned the base personal self and the body for any frailty, or any all too human characteristic.

What followed was fairly predictable. More judgement. Shame. Guilt. A survival personality that took refuge either in romanticising the past or in idealising the future, which is an attachment to unlived potential rather than a life.

“Often in these cases there can also be a sense of condemnation, spite and repulsion for the ordinary flesh-and-blood world…” - Piero Ferrucci, What We May Be, p162

Repulsion is the right word for it. Not indifference to the ordinary world, but something nearer to disgust at it, and at myself for being made of the same stuff.

Why the Present Keeps Eluding Us

Living fully, unashamedly, boldly in the present can elude us. Avoiding difficult feelings, we get stuck in our head, which shows how interconnected mind, body and feelings actually are, and we lean further towards the transpersonal.

To all intents and purposes that is spiritual bypassing. It supports only a partial self to function. I identified as someone with a strong call to spirit, and gave no real weight to my in-body, practical, worldly development.

Another way of putting it. I was self-realising, and needed to strengthen self-actualisation in order to be congruent. Wholeness has to include all of it, not part.

The Other End: All Ground, No Meaning

The reverse imbalance across the two dimensions of growth is less discussed and just as common, and people rarely bring it to therapy under that name. They come with something that looks like depression, or a marriage going quiet, or a sense of going through the motions.

Often what has happened is that the vertical line stopped moving a long time ago. Everything went into the horizontal: the work, the house, the standard, the competence. It works. And at some point it stops meaning much, which is a strange and lonely thing to admit when by every visible measure things are going well.

Psychosynthesis has a name for this, a crisis of meaning, and treats it as a developmental event rather than a malfunction. Something is asking for the other dimension. The mistake at that point is to reach straight for the opposite extreme, to jettison the life and go looking for the sacred, because that swing is the same error running the other way. Both ends are reaching for something real, and reaching for it along one line only.

What the Presentable Self Was Hiding

Lurking behind the presentable, worthy, heavily censored “I” lie the real, deeper, darker feelings. Vulnerability, shame, fear, disappointment, hurt, anger. Dismissed, and judged as wrong, they barely get a chance to be seen or heard. Wholeness would have to involve them.

“We are not unified… Several subpersonalities are continually scuffling; impulses, desires, principles, aspirations are engaged in an unceasing struggle.” - Assagioli, 1967, cited in Ferrucci, What We May Be, p31

So the personality becomes split, wanting integration, wanting synthesis, while we go on blaming ourselves for feeling depressed or for achieving less than stellar things. Still identified with a long outworn survival personality, we compensate for feelings of lack with notions of grandeur.

The Instruction Is Not to Pick a Side

Assagioli was clear about what the work asks of us, and it is not what most people assume it to be.

“The essential requirement, as previously mentioned, is to avoid identifying oneself with either of the two opposite poles, and to control, transmute, and direct their energies from a higher center of awareness and power.” - Roberto Assagioli, The Balancing and Synthesis of the Opposites, Psychosynthesis Research Foundation, 1972

It sounds at first like a recommendation to balance the two dimensions of growth. It is something else. Assagioli is speaking about identification rather than position, and the two come apart more often than we might assume.

Someone can live strongly on one line and hold it lightly, knowing what it is. Someone else can look well balanced and be thoroughly identified with being so, which is its own bind and a quieter one. Position is where we stand. Identification is whether we can see it from anywhere else.

Which is why the instruction is not to pick a side, or to split the difference, but to find some vantage point, from which both lines become things we have rather than things we are.

Moving on Both Dimensions of Growth: Looking Up, and Bringing Down

Freed from that identification, the self can look up towards the transpersonal Self and align with purpose and meaning, and at the same time bring those qualities down, so that the personality can actually manifest and embody them in the practical world.

That is the diagonal, and it spirals rather than climbing in a straight line. Crisis of duality and crisis of meaning become less prominent along it. They do not disappear. They stop being the whole weather.

A Wound to Bear and a Gift to Give

Personal therapy makes the compensatory survival personality visible, along with its subpersonalities and the payoffs they carry, and puts us back in touch with the will to choose, and to experience, the more complete and soulful Self that is trying to emerge.

Drawing on the immanent Self through bifocal vision, we can begin to appreciate that there is both “a wound to bear and a gift to give” (Zweig and Wolf, Romancing the Shadow, 1997, p45), and that giving both of them full expression is what brings the fertile soil of our “Being and Becoming in the same breath” (Whitmore, Psychosynthesis Counselling in Action, 2000, p.xii) into fruition.

It was not until I understood how to grapple with some of these forces, and to redress their lack of integration, that I began to become more congruent. More whole. More able, as Assagioli puts it, to do this:

“to synthesize these sub-personalities into a larger organic whole without repressing any of the useful traits.” - Assagioli, 1965, cited in Firman, 1996, p23

Without repressing any of the useful traits is the part that matters, because nothing is thrown away.

More willing to take risks, having freed the will from the personality, the personality starts to live in service of the Self rather than fighting it or competing with it. That draining internal resistance goes. There turns out to be a great deal of energy to it, and more fluidity to our lives, once it stops.

Less identified, and as if arriving home, we finally have a chance at becoming whole.

A Word About the Word Transpersonal

The term does a certain amount of damage, because it sounds as though the aim were to get beyond the personal, or to become more spiritual. It is not quite that. Transpersonal therapy asks for no particular belief and works perfectly well with people who hold none. What the prefix points to is that the personal is included rather than left behind. The word was coined by Maslow and his colleagues for a psychology reaching beyond humanistic concerns, which meant adding a dimension rather than vacating one. The spiritual dimension is taken as part of a whole person, alongside the body, the history, the relationships and the work, rather than as a separate track running somewhere above them.

Nor is the direction of travel only upwards. A good deal of the work goes the other way, bringing whatever is found back down into ordinary life, where it has to survive the rent, the commute and the conversation we keep not having.

And further down again, gently and in its own time, to where we learnt it was not safe to be fully ourselves. That is usually where the line stopped moving in the first place, and a transpersonal approach to healing trauma follows that further down than there is room for here.

Some people do become more spiritual through this work. Others become rather less so, and find they had been using it for something else. Neither is the aim. The aim is to be more fully here, in all of life’s realms, with more of ourselves available.

The Two Dimensions of Growth in the Therapy Room

I should say where I stand. Forty years of practice and community leadership sit behind my clinical training, alongside a career in the arts, and the tradition I practise in puts a high value on daily life and on what actually shows up in it rather than on a parallel world where none of that counts. So I know the vertical line from the inside, including the way a spiritual reading of a difficulty can arrive faster than the difficulty does.

Less abstract than the model suggests, and slower. Often it begins with noticing which line has stopped moving, and roughly when. That tends not to be much of a mystery once it has been said out loud, though saying it out loud can take a while.

In time we might look at what the leaning has been protecting. Underneath a strongly transpersonal life there is often a primal wound, and a set of feelings that were judged unacceptable early on. Underneath a strongly material one there is frequently the same thing wearing different clothes. None of that gets opened before it is wanted, and for some people that is a long way in.

Some of the work is on ego strength, because loosening a hold on one pole only feels safe when there is enough of a self to stand somewhere else. Some of it is with the inner critic, which tends to have a great deal to say about all of it.

The aim across the two dimensions of growth is not really balance, which can become another ideal to measure ourselves against. It is to be a little less identified and a little more available, more able to live in the ordinary middle of a life, and to visit the heights and the depths by choice rather than by compulsion.

Travelling that white line on the diagram, with all its natural twists and turns, is what a life actually feels like from the inside. It is to embody the fullness of our potential, and to live with more aliveness, feeling, congruence and presence.

Becoming whole, we finally have a chance of arriving home. Nowhere is that more beautifully put than in the words of Emily Dickinson.

I many times thought peace had come,
When peace was far away;
As wrecked men deem they sight the land
At centre of the sea,
And struggle slacker, but to prove,
As hopelessly as I,
How many the fictitious shores
Before the harbor lie. - Emily Dickinson, The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson, p74

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to be religious or have a practice for this to apply?
No. The same split shows up in people with no spiritual life at all, usually from the other end, as a capable life that has quietly stopped meaning anything.

I am in a faith community. Will that be understood?
Yes. Forty years of practice and community leadership sit behind my training, so I know from the inside what it is to hold a role in a community, and how much that role can end up carrying.

Is a crisis of meaning the same as depression?
They overlap and can look identical from outside. Psychosynthesis treats a crisis of meaning as a developmental event rather than a malfunction, which changes what the work is. That distinction is worth making carefully rather than assuming either way.

Do I have to give anything up to do this work?
No. The aim is to stop being identified with either pole, not to abandon one. Practice and ambition both tend to improve once they are no longer carrying work they were never meant to do.