Santa Claus, Jesus, Wilber, Kohut, and Piaget

observe the child who believes in santa.

how wonderful it is.

usually between 6 and 8 years old, as concrete operational cognition (piaget) is coming online, the child doubts santa. the appropriate parenting response is a) to support the illusion while it is enjoyed and b) to support the emergence of rational cause and effect awareness as it arises. in other words - thats right my child, santa is not really real.

though recognizing that santa is not real is a little disappointing, if the child has adequate resources (levine) has been appropriately mirrored through different age stages (kohut) they will be able to “tolerate the dissapointment” of another little step forward in growing up. for kohut it is the building of this tolerance that constitutes the development of what wilber calls the “self” line.

in addition, what is discovered in surrendering the illusion of santa - is something even better: your parents loved you so much that they created this really fun and magical illusion for you. it was them all along who bought, wrapped, hid the gifts they knew you would love and created the whole game for you!

real awareness of love and orientation in reality as it is is far more valuable and has more depth to it that the illusory fantasy. this is a touchstone of development and is true all the wa up the scale; we sacrifice illusion for reality at every step and it allows more and more awareness, truth, beauty and goodness to emerge. we are unable to surrender the illusion and embrace the reality of the next level when something has gone wrong in the process.

Jesus?

now around this same age, kids will probably question that other fantasy construct - the literal mythic god figure and perhaps the concretized archetype of, say, jesus who was born of a virgin and rose from the dead not unlike quetzalcoatl and dionysus before him.

it is incongruent with concrete operational cogniton to continue believing in magical explanations. this is a technical fact.

we use magical explanations when our minds canot yet see cause and effect. pre-operational children will use magical explanations for just about everything if asked because they do not yet have the cognitve capacity to understand cause and effect.

with cause and effect comes the nascent ability to reason.

with the development of concrete operations comes for the first time - the ability to put oneself (mentally) in anothers shoes.

rationality is thus the begining of genuine empathy and compasion. children in the preop world of magic and myth cannot actually experience compassion and empathy in a meaningful way.

as this cognitive capacity is strengthened we begin to be able to surrender the healthy and natural narcissism that has thus far characterized our very limited relationship to reality. (kohut)

the preoperational stage of cognition can also be called prerational.

at this stage we use magical explanations and interpret reality through narcissistic eyes. we are the center of the universe and all things are interpreted as having special meaning for us, we have a sense of omnipotence and immortailty and we idealize our authority figures intensely as being perfect and all-powerful.

conversely, at preoperations we tend to intermalize any negative experience of our authority figures and believe we must be at fault, because our idealization of the parent or authority figure is so great taht there is no rrom for the possibility of their imperfection or "bad-ness." when adults regress into childlike idealization of a spiritual teacher, especially one who claims to be perfect/enlightened, this dynamic often gets played out with disastrous consequences for the regressed devotee.

with the onset of concrete operations, we begin to let go of the narcissistic illusion that has allowed us to tolerate the difficulty of forming a self, we have enough ego-strength to let in the experience of others wothout being threatened by it. we begin to have empathy and basic compassion. we start to realize that we are not omnipotent and we have to accept our limitations and the conventional rules, limits and consequences that are being imposed on us. we surrender magical interpretations of reality more and more in the face of the powerful and accurate cause and effect and reason-based skills we are learning.

most of us adults understand this intuitively. when a child gets to be say 9 years old and still believes in santa, we think - something is going wrong here.

if the child is 12 and still thinks that superheroes are literally real, we become worried.

these are signs of prerational, preoperational cognition and that is not age appropriate, therefore there is some kind of pathology. it is intelligent and compassionate to address this and try and get the child some help.

of course there is always play and imagination - but we intuitively get the difference between play and imagination on the one hand and being literally convinced of something unreal on the other.

in fact, knowing the difference between symbolic representations and literal reality could, in extremis, be said to be the difference between sanity and mental illness.

now in the realm of religion/spirituality, when the concrete operational child says - i don’t think i really believe in god anymore, we often have a different reaction than we did with santa.

because most parents are caught in a version of the pre/trans fallacy they encourage or even insist that the child maintain certain magical and prerational beliefs - and then call that religion or spirituality.

instead of allowing the natural developmental process to refute the prerational level of the spiritual line (wilber) and because they themselves have not integrated rationality with spirituality in such a way that genuine transrational spiritual levels might emerge and be differentiated from prerational narcissistic magical fantasy, the parents unwittingly stunt the spiritual growth of the child.

The Not So Fantastic Four

later on for the vast majority of people, one of four things happens:

1) they grown up and have serious zealous irrational faith in religion even though they may be very reasonable in other ways - all of the need for meaning, spirituality, morality, ecstasy, redemption, consolation, etc gets put inot the basket of mythic religious belief.

2) they grow up not questioning religion but "letting sleeping dogs lie" and playing along with or paying lipservice to religious ideas and the “existence of god” as something important for reasons they can’t really articulate and try not to think about. the spiritual line is basically deactivated and the cognitive line is not permited to interact with the religious material.

3) they grow up and rebel completely against religious belief and use rationality to the exclusion of the spiritual and often emotional lines. pure science and rigid reason dominate.

4) they grow up and romanticize the regression into magical and narcissisic interpretations of reality as being spirituality itself. rationality is the enemy of authentic spirituality for these folks and it is a big taboo to think critically about mythic and magical material. everything non-rational, from literal belief in mythic gods and godesses, to angels, spirit guides, channeled aliens, shamans who can take the shape of animals, the universe organizing itself to provide a parking space because you were a good boy or girl in the energy you were putting out there, the world being a divine school in which you learn eactly the lesons you need before reincarnating or going to the source (because there really is no such thing as death) - this is all seen as deeply spiritual, meaningful and in contrast (and reaction against)  to the “negative” interpretations of the harsh world we live in and the realities of suffering and scientific method and even psychology.

A Solution for 21st Century Spirituality

the fifth option i am suggesting in response to the PROBLEM of the pre/trans fallacy lies in:

a) cognitive development - so as to stabilize healthy concrete operations and formal operations (piaget observed from voluminous research that less than 35% of adults in industrialized countries stabilized at formal operations!)
b) psychological/shadow work - processing the painful feelings and events that keep us from developing higher and deeper stages and keep us enamoured of the regressive defenses.
c) inquiry-based spiritual practice that is able to see the prerational material for what it is and be fearless in it’s discernment and compassion

so what is (formop) formal operations?

well, it is the stage that comes after (conop) concrete operations.

at formal operations we learn to think more abstractly, symbolically.

for the conop child who has not been indoctrinated, religion is just a bunch of slly nonsense, because it makes no sense. this is healthy and should be supported unless we intend to create the kind of religious confusion that we see all around us.

for the formop child, religion might begin to be interesting as a metaphor. mythology and poetry might begin to be available to their nascent interpretive intelligence. this is the breeding ground for adavnced intellectual and artistic pursuits, as well as transrational spirituality.

unfortunately it is usually incompletely supported and integrated, and we end up with one of the above "not so fantastic four" options.

in terms of developmental psychology i think this is properly understood as a developmental pathology - and it is extremely widespread and responsible for untold suffering and carnage on the planet.

formop usually comes in between 10 and 12. you cant teach a child algebra or anything but very literal poetry before this. they just dont have the software running. some never will. most (over 65%) will not fully install it and make the transition to the new operating system.

NOW if we do not have strongly developed formop we cannot healthily develop any of the higher stages that wilber and others have postulated.

INSTEAD, if we attempt ot have a spiritual lfe, we will end up with some mix of regressive mythic and magic preoperational belief managed by a very confused and incongruous conop cognition that is commited to the magic and mythic material being literaly real and has confused it’s thin grasp on formop metaphor with nonsensical mystification and ends up associating that feeling with “spirituality” - because, after all, if it doesnt make rational sense, but it gives you that narcissistic  glowy feeling that everything is perfect and you are "taken care of",  it must be a higher truth.

from this confused perspective, the more cognitive dissonance the better, the more disscoiated from critical thinking and hard reality the better, the more suggestive of the fantasy world of childhood magic, superhero archetypes and all good idealized enlightened authority figures the better.

this is the new age green meme regressive narcissistic magical pathology that wilber describes and that i started this thread to discuss. this is in part the explanaton for the religious insanity that causes so much destruction and cruelty on the planet in the name of a literal mythic god.

the question remains: how do we differentiate pre and trans? this is one attempt at an answer.

for me this is not only intellectually compelling but deeply rooted in compassion and love of the truth, beauty and goodness that emerges as more and more of us take the real journey up the developmental spiral.