By Gordon Wheeler

Introduction: On Modeling Human Capacities

A version of this article appeared in British Gestalt Journal; Vol. 15, No.2 , 2006

Mapping human capacities, noticing patterns and generating assumptions about how we and other people are motivated and work, has to be nearly as old as those capacities themselves. This activity of course can be implicit or explicit; oftentimes we know a person’s motivations and assumptive set (or our own) inferentially, by observing how he or she or we ourselves behave. We can already see the clear beginnings of this capacity in our closest primate relatives, the bonobos and the chimps, when they engage in social problem-solving, manipulation, and deception (as for example when the “beta” male chimp hides his erection from the “alpha,” who would otherwise intervene in the “beta’s” courtship overture; “beta” may even draw “alpha’s” attention to a sexual overture being made by another male entirely — and then carry on with his own plans while “alpha” rushes off to intervene over there. See e.g. de Waal, 19 ). Plainly these social primates carry quite sophisticated assumptions, even without syntactical language, about the way their conspecifics organize their own behavior in terms of their own motivations, and even how their fellow troop members will interpret them, and act accordingly — all at a level far beyond simple signal/response “instinctive” patterning. The most fundamentally defining human capacity of all, the complex attitude we might express verbally as “I see you seeing me (seeing you)” has deep evolutionary roots, and is at least prepotently inborn.

From these deep roots, and the ongoing human necessity for complex social organization in order to deal with the demands of our social/physical environment, it is only a step to begin to devise educational programs to support and cultivate (or punish and inhibit) particular specific abilities over others, both for the young and as lifetime programs of social reward or penalty. And since human environments and demands differ greatly (unlike those of our primate relations), these programs, which are both implicit and explicit, will differ as well — so as to cultivate the kind of person likely to thrive, and to help the society survive and thrive, in that particular kind of environment (see Erikson, 1950, for the classic treatment of this subject).

Somewhere inside and underlying these educational programs are the deep values of the society, what philosopher Charles Taylor (1993) calls the “hypergoods” of the social system, those qualities which are understood to make up the right kind of life, a life worth living — and the kind of person who is equipped to lead it. If lavish generosity is a hypergood, as in potlatch societies, then figures exhibiting this quality will be praised and honored, held up as examples to the young, recalled in song and story. If physical courage and aggressiveness are primary deep values (as opposed to, say, artistic grace, or peacemaking skills), then those are the celebratory or cautionary tales that will be told to the young and others — and society will find a way to tolerate the greater social conflict that will likely result, and so on.

Every society necessarily has such curricula (again, formally or organically, in stories and social practices). In each case the educational program (explicitly or implictly) will rest on the kind of values that are thought in that society to be necessary to a full life — or to life at all. When conditions shift, then the cautionary tales and other curricula that carry the values of that society will need to shift as well — or that society will languish or die. Plainly something like this is going on today at a global level: the deep values and life curricula that have dominated human society increasingly through at least the modern period — values of individualist self-assertion and self-reliance, disembodied rationalism, materialism and spiritual disenchantment, conquest and competition, exploitation of nature and other human beings — have brought us to some crisis point at a world level, and now threaten to destroy the planet (at least as a hospitable habitation for human civilization). As Einstein famously remarked, the kind of thinking that got us into the problem is not the kind of thinking that will get us out. Something has to shift, and that shift has to entail a revaluation of values, and of the social curricula that brought us to where we are now.

In the discussion below we will take up two such new curricula for discussion and comparison: Malcolm Parlett’s Five Abilities Model, articulated out of a lifetime of practice, teaching, and study of these issues; and the Curriculum for the Human Potential, developed over the same post-War period at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California (and in related institutes and writings of the “human potential movement”). Both of these programs, that is, developed in the same historical period (roughly the last third of the 20th Century), in a world shadowed by nuclear menace and clouded by the growing awareness of the genocidal nature of human history and our human pattern of wanton destruction of our own environment — all of which now seems poised to be turned against ourselves.

Our goal in comparing these two systems will be not so much an exhaustive treatment of either one (each is intentionally a “soft categorical” model, open-ended and broadly thematic in tone), but rather to use each to shed a critical light on the other, and then both to suggest particular cultural inferences and agenda for the 21st Century.

“Creative Abilities and the Art of Living Well”

Over the past decade Malcolm Parlett (2000, 2003; also unpubl. ms) has been engaged in delineating a broad categorical map or model of important human abilities, based on cataloguing them under five overarching thematic headings: Responding, Interrelating, Self-recognizing, Embodying, and Experimenting . In various contexts he has referred to these themes as capacities, abilities, “meta-compentencies,” “dimensions of creative adjustment,” “key abilities,” “essential skill sets,” and “varieties of human strength,” and related them to “a way to be in the world,” offering them as a curriculum of “ways of living,” and as the “art of living well.” In his discussions of the model Parlett recurs again and again to the image of the artist and artistic criteria of grace, ease, and style. He also relates the model explicitly to the Gestalt therapy tradition, characterizing these dimensions and this model as an analysis of “creative adjustment” and as close to the “heart and central purpose of Gestalt therapy,” a modality Parlett has been centrally involved in studying, teaching, shaping through his own writings, and also living for a number of decades.

To get a feel for what Parlett means by these broad headings, let us listen to him in his own words (unpubl ms):

A broad thematic category to be sure, and one which already contains or implies the other four categories (especially Interrelating, Self-recognizing, and less directly Embodying and Experimenting). Indeed, all the categories are themselves interrelated and mutually entailing in this way, as we will see below in discussion. Continuing now with Parlett’s own discursive comments, now on Interrelating (ibid):

We exist always in relation — to other humans, to our families of origin, to institutions of the state, and to the natural world. Interrelating touches every part of our life and occupies much of our attention… (A)pproaches and courses offering relevant skills and experience…include the following: mediation training, relationship counseling, parent education, conflict resolution, assertiveness training, sex education, personal trauma and bereavement counseling… and…numerous others (four hundred different psychotherapy approaches)…

…the networks of relationships we belong to provide a “holding framework,” giving us a sense of “place” in community with others… The need to belong is an urgent one…(and confirms our status as interconnected human beings)… To affiliate to be welcome in a community of some kind, to have one’s existence validated by others, to have some intimate space, are essential features of being human. We are not designed to be alone…

The development of this skill set includes both particular communications skills (themselves extensively based on self-recognizing and embodying, as a base for giving voice and listening actively), and then the integration of these practices into the kind of mobilization of support systems mentioned in the section on Responding (again, the Abilities are mutually overlapping and mutually interdependent). Going on now with Self-Recognizing (Parlett, 19 ):

Self-recognising is a general ability that, in Gestalt terms, accomodates many varieties of “being aware.” It includes “having an accurate self-image,” and “knowing one’s process”… Realising the value of greater awareness is another dimension of self-recognising… beginning with “awareness” and moving to “becoming aware of one’s awareness process” and continuing up to having a profound “phenomenological attitude” where, in the terms used here, a degree of self-recognizing is present all the time.

(It is) the hallmark of a conscious, learning, self-aware human being…

At the same time, Self-recognising will be a thin process indeed without some robust development of the next Ability, Embodying:

…all of life is lived in, through, and with the participation of the whole body, an idea that is basic to the holistic philosophy of Gestalt therapy. To be embodied is to be living with one’s whole being, not as a talking head… (ibid)

With embodying, as the ability becomes more prominent and obvious, so is there more value placed on… the potential pleasure and heightened engagement with others that can arise through physical contact… trusting the body to provide feeling states and sensations that add to one’s “social knowing” and orientation… having a richer, more varied, more fulfilling “emotional diet”… (and) knowing when to, and being able to, vary the clarity of the “body boundary” from closed (for protection) to open (for unguarded expression) (Parlett, 19 ).

Again, these excerpted comments, like Parlett’s exposition of the Five Abilities Model in general, are offfered not as a specific course curriculum, much less as separated or separable “faculties” (in both senses of that term), but rather to give a flavor of a model which is itself intentionally impressionistic, meant to point us first to areas of development that must be taken up and attended to, for any kind of full human living. The thrust of the model — and we will return to this point in the comparison below — is not to dictate any particular course of training or therapy, so much as to give us a kind of grand organizing checklist for the various curricula we may develop for various purposes: the effective message is that no one of these areas can be neglected, if healthy, creative living is the aim.

And finally (Parlett, unpubl ms):

Experimenting recognises that knowledge is always provisional, as are organisational and social forms of all kinds. These “frozen formulas”… can be thawed out and reworked… To experiment is part of being “fully alive”… Its sign (is)… an attitude of being inquisitive, curious, and taking pleasure in finding things out… (T)he ability is the hallmark of an open as opposed to a closed mind…

Seeing something in (a) new way, or “reframing” a set of data, can be as much experimenting as doing something overt in a new fashion.

Here the accent is not so much on new behavior per se, but on an attitude, the recognition Parlett talks about above. Again, like Goodman (eg 1994) and Rank (193 ) before him, Parlett’s readiest reference point is the artist — by implication at least, working creatively in the medium of living.Nor is it any accident that artists as a group are often thought to be characterized by high levels of at least four of the five Abilities — Responding, Self-Recognizing, Embodying, and Experimenting. (At the same time, at least as a stereotype this class are not often associated with high levels of Interrelating in an interpersonal sense). Plainly Parlett would elevate social artistry to the status of a fully creative art, and an essential capacity for full human living and being. Plainly as well, what he is seeking here is a program for analysis and education that responds (to use his category) to the state of the world today by supporting development of a kind of person who is far more socially skilled, more sensitively and complexly integrated with self and other, and more able to think and judge complexly and critically, than our society has typically celebrated, supported, or developed.

Esalen and the Curriculum for the Human Potential

Turning to the development of the Human Potential Curriculum at Esalen (and elsewhere) over the past four or five decades, we find a model with quite a different developmental history. Where Parlett’s model is the direct product of one person’s deep reflection and synthesizing insight, based on a lifetime of research and practice, CHP (as we will call it here for convenience) is a curriculum and a set of training principles that have simply grown, organically, in the course of many years of experiment (including both decades of community life and some 15,000 courses and other programs) since Esalen’s founding in 1962. The “curriculum,” rather than being set prescriptively, is something that has developed emergently out of a broad set of concerns, attitudes, experiments and values held and led by a diverse, shifting group of teachers and leaders over that time. It is in retrospect that we can speak and write of a coherent “Curriculum for the Human Potential,” and make analyses and comparisons with other models or curricula here (see Wheeler, 2005, 2006, for discussions of this development).

At the same time, the idea of such a curriculum was implicitly contained in the underlying project of Esalen from its founding. It was the explicit intention of the two founders, Michael Murphy and Richard Price, two young Stanford graduates and grad school dropouts (from Stanford and Harvard), to create a space “for everything excluded from the Academy.” The phrase itself, “human potential,” derives both from Aldous Huxley, who urged the two young seekers to go forward with their project (Huxley spoke of “human potentialities” (Huxley, 19 ) and from writer and longtime Esalen leader George Leonard (19 ), who shortened and popularized the term.

As I’ve written elsewhere, this category, “everything excluded” from sanctioned university study in 1962, was a compendious list indeed, in an world which included virtually no useful social discourse or practice at all in areas like lifelong education, personal growth and development (as distinguished from pathology), vivid embodiment and lifelong cultivation of the body, erotic practices and experimental sexuality, Asian religious studies and spiritual study and practice, indigenous and shamanic spiritual studies, holistic medicine, the very notions of health and wellness, creative conflict resolution, citizen-to-citizen and “NGO”diplomacy and direct social action, somatic studies and professional practices, consciousness studies and the exploration of altered states, the intersect of physics with philosophy and consciousness studies, ecological concerns, or experiential education itself (a once-vibrant aspect of “progressive education,” which, with Dewey, had receded into decline). To come up with this list is to name only some of the areas that were absent or only marginally present in the mainstream culture of the times, but are all familiar, indeed essential features of our world today. What is significant here for our curriculum and model discussion is that each of these areas (along with a number of others) is one which Esalen itself played a significant role, at least, in articulating, incubating, elaborating, promoting, and putting on the mainstream cultural map Many other groups and organizations were crucially and variously involved, of course, but to a surprising extent, considering that Esalen is a small, remote campus which houses only around 130 students at a time (some 15,000 in a year, which in the course of 40+ years does add up to a significant number, with a high proportion of writers, artists, and “cultural creatives” among them), in a number of these cultural initiatives a scholarly consensus agree that Esalen’s role has been and continues to be pivotal. (for discussion see e.g. Kripal & Shuck, 200 ; also Kripal, 2007 in press).

Again, the aim in this discussion is not to explore this history or these topics in any depth, but rather to sketch the development of the model for comparative purposes. Continuing with with brief overview, over the course of these dozens of years and some thousands of programs, a pattern of themes, amounting to an emergent curriculum, soon became visible. To a large extent, this curriculum as a whole was dictated by the original terms of the mission of the Institute: to offer a forum for “everything excluded” from traditional universities and research institutions of the time. Then too, the program was marked by the characteristic attitudes of the times, and of the assumptions underlying the new pedagogy of “experiential education:” intimacy, interaction, experimentalism, optimism, a sense of openness to unlimited possibility, holism, and an accent on “the human,” meaning life as lived, here and now.

With this spirit of holism, in opposition to the fragmentation of academic training then and now, and building on experiential, exploratory methods and forms, the core curriculum of the movement had soon organized itself “organically” into five coherent basic areas or “faculties,” again in the dual sense of that word. One sense is “faculty” meaning a facility, a capacity or dimension of skill or experience; and the other is “faculty” in its sense of meaning a “department of studies,” as in the “faculties” of a university. This duality of usage is relevant here: the whole point of experiential education as a movment was that those two senses of the word had become separated in academic studies, and must be reintegrated with each other, as related aspects of human inquiry and experience.

Taken together, those faculties, which may be regarded as the natural dimensions or aspects of human experience and the conditions of human conscious life comprise the Human Potential Curriculum. These are the five faculties of the Curriculum, in the order they are often found:

1) “mind” — the cognitive realm: This is of course the faculty of the Curriculum which most resembles mainstream traditional education. The differences here have to do first with the particular topics concentrated on, which are generally those currently excluded from traditional academic institutions (particularly consciousness studies, in the early days of the Curriculum). And second are the particular differences of method introduced by the Curriculum: in place of the passive, expert-model learning that still characterizes much traditional education, we find an emphasis on participatory learning, active experiment, affective involvement, personal experience, and interpersonal enactment.

2) “body” — the somatic system: To us today, with our more sophisticated scientific picture of the brain/body system and the distribution of “intelligence” (in the sense of regulatory nervous system processing) throughout the body, the degree to which “mind” and “body” were treated as separate systems just a generation ago, may seem astonishingly naive. It is worth reminding ourselves that holistic health is still an “edge” topic in our cultures, scientifically recognized and supported today, but still not a fully integral part of mainstream life.

Along with this recognition of the indivisibility of the “mind/body” system came as well a renewed celebration of embodiment and the life of the body “for its own sake.” Topics such as expressive movement, touch therapies, the “inner world” of sport, and a new valorization of the erotic dimension of life (long marginalized or even demonized in the puritanical cultures of the West) are expressions of this dimension of the Curriculum.

3) “heart”– the life of the emotions: Again, in today’s age of cognitive neuropsychology, PET scans and other tools for brain imaging and “real time” neuropsychological study, we have the empirical evidence to back up the counter-cultural insight of several generations ago that cognition was inseparable from emotion, and indeed importantly governed and steered by emotional factors and reactions. The old idea that feelings and emotional reactions had no place in the learning process is no longer tenable. Memory formation and retrieval, motivation, and the possibilities for individual or societal change, we now understand, are all dependent on affective processes in the “mammalian brain,” and cannot be meaningfully or usefully separated from those processes.

This dimension of the Human Potential Curriculum has been the domain of radical and transformative psychotherapy, as well as the study of the interactions among emotional dynamics and the other dimensions of the Curriculum, discussed below. In particular this faculty or area of study has been both the inspiration and the result of the collapsing of the old separation between “psychotherapy” and “lifelong personal growth and development.” Again, the transformational insight here has been that human development and transformative, empowering change do not come to a standstill in early adulthood. Rather those deep changes are (or can be) ongoing throughout life. Most importantly for the Curriculum is the insistence that the meaning, quality, and social impact of an individual life are directly related to the ongoing cultivation of this human faculty on a lifelong basis.

4) “spirit” — the transpersonal dimension: In mainstream culture in the West, after the “scientizing” of philosophy and social institutions that characterized the whole industrial era, the dimension of “spirit” was not so much marginalized as insulated within cultural life — officially somewhere at the center of life, but institutionalized into mainstream religious structures, and kept somewhere safely separate from the worlds of science and business — and from the other dimensions of the Curriculum.

It has been a central part of the CHP agenda to put spiritual exploration and spiritual experience back into the center of human life in a holistic way. Characteristically for the action-oriented flavor of the human potential movement, the answer of the Curriculum to the mid-century malaise of Existentialism in the West was more experiential than theoretical/systematic. That is, to a mood of meaninglessness or existential despair about purpose or place in the cosmos, the Curriculum’s answer tended to be: Wake up, pay attention to your body and your feeling states, engage with your world and those around you, and explore consciousness through meditative practices (as well as psychotropics and other means such as tantric and shamanic practices). In other words, rather than trying to answer a dilemma or dead-end in Western philosophy with purely verbal or cognitive/ philosophical tools, the Curriculum insisted that the problems in one domain (in this case, the domain of “mind”) cannot be usefully addressed, without drawing on the other dimensions. Again, the Curriculum is holistic in a real way.

5) “the social” — the domain of relationship, community, and political engagement: Here we come to what we might call the “shadow” dimension of the Curriculum — always there in practice, yet slower to come into focus and clear discourse in the extreme individualistic ideology of the mid-20th-Century Western world. The entire spirit of the Western liberalizing bourgeois tradition of the past half-millennium in the West, after all, had been based on the glorification and exploration of the individual, in opposition to the oppressive social and political tyrannies of church, state, and society. Both the articulation of psychological interiority and the advance of human rights in the West were fruits of this individualistic thrust and legacy.

What was sometimes lost in this emphasis — or at best taken for granted — was and is the inherent social relatedness of our human natures. By mid-20th Century in the West, again, that very relatedness could sometimes look like our most dangerous enemy, in a Western world that had somehow produced Nazi and Communist tyrannies, both of which glorified the communal over the individual (indeed, in retrospect we may regard all the fascisms and fundamentalisms of the 20th and early 21st Century as reaction formations to the dislocations and alienations of that extreme individualistic ideology) . Thus this faculty of the Curriculum often tended to get left out of the discourse. “Holistic” education itself was often summarized as addressing “mind, body, heart, and spirit” — period. At times the entire world of social relatedness, all the way from deep personal intimacy to community life to macro-politics, was assumed to have been squeezed into the realm of “heart,” or “compassion.” At other times this entire dimension of irreducible, inseparable human experience was simply left out of the discussion altogether.

And yet it was always central to the Curriculum in its enactment. Holistic or experiential education, to state the obvious, has always taken place in groups: the learning community was at the heart of the movement, one of the three main inspirational sources discussed at the outset of this essay. Group dynamics and group process have always been both basic tools and also productive outcomes of the Curriculum. Progressive political activism as well has been a prime characteristic of experiential education. And yet in discussion, the “holistic” picture of human nature that the Curriculum was founded to express and explore, could often seem “monadic,” in the sense of being made up of a universe of utterly separate selves, floating around in a world of separate self-exploration and self-expression.

Today, as we feel more acutely the social and personal costs of the loss of meaningful community in mainstream life, we can see more clearly the social and personal costs of marginalizing this dimension of the Curriculum. We will return to this topic briefly below in the conclusion to this essay, when we talk more about the animating urgency beneath both Parlett’s Five Abilities Curriculum and CHP.

The Human Potential Curriculum in Holistic Perspective

Applying the tenets and methods of the Curriculum to our examination of CHP itself, let us step back and look at this the model of experiential education itself in a holistic perspective. One way to do this (in a move very characteristic of the Curriculum) is to “switch brain hemispheres,” from left to right, by making use of an image as a counterpoint to a linear verbal discussion. Consider this diagram (below, following page), which represents these five dimensions of the Human Potential Curriculum as points on a single star diagram, both contained in a circle and also interrelated with all the other points:

Organizing these dimensions in this way gives us more than a list: it also gives us an opportunity to see something of their interactions, their synergies, and the holistic implications of the Curriculum as a whole. Drawing on both Vedic and Native American traditional terminologies, the five faculties of the Curriculum here are termed “spirit body,” “mental body,” “emotional body,” “relational body,” and “physical body.” Labeling them in this way emphasizes the holistic meaning of the human potential perspective: they are all inseparable components of a single human body or self. When we take up contact and relationship with our world and the others in it, all of these dimensions are implicated. When one or more dimensions are marginalized, denied, or otherwise underdeveloped, the whole person suffers. And his/her effectiveness in the world, and capacity for full human living and personal evolution, suffer as well. This is the meaning of holism, and the meaning and use of the Curriculum itself, and of this model.

Notes of connection between and among the points on the circle are just that — notes. That is, these are not the only possible labels to put on those lines. We might for example put the label “ethics” on the line from emotional to relational body. Or we might put the term “group dynamics” or even “psychotherapy” on that same line. The point here is not to fix permanent or “correct” labels — but rather to use the diagram to support or force examination the interaction of these various dimensions, and to focus on what would be missing from the whole, if any of the dimensional points were removed or obscured.

Likewise for the spaces or triangles within the pentagram. The largest triangles we might conceive as practices — sustained disciplines of the whole person, aiming primarily at the coordinated development of three points. Thus a practice like sport or dance may often involve both the physical and the relational (in coordination with a partner or a team). If this coordinated discipline is then practiced with a transcendant or transpersonal focus (the spirit body), then that triangle is “lifted out” for focus and consideration. If the same discipline is practiced with focus on the emotional body, then expressive dance or therapeutic sport might be the nature of the practice.

Again, the diagram serves to help us “play” with the ideas and implications (remembering that “play learning,” as one of the central insights and tenets of the progressive education movement and early childhood learning studies, is one of the inherited focal themes of the human potential movement itself, and of this Curriculum.

The Curriculum for the Human Potential and Parlett’s Five Abilities Model

Outlining the two models together in this way enables us to say a number of things, about either or both of them, that emerge more clearly from the comparison:

1. To begin with, we can note that each model is multi-dimensional in its intent and application: each is at one and the same time analytic, evaluative, prescriptive, hortatory, heuristic, diagnostic, and interventionist. Either model can be used to analyze a system, evaluate a program, discriminate an intervention, “diagnose” an individual or social group, train other practitioners and intervenors, and so forth.
2. By the same token, both models, not just the CHP, are holistic, again in both intent and effect. That is, the purpose of articulating each model in the first place is to generate a “sine qua non” kind of list: without all five of the dimensions outlined in each model, the program, system, or person under attention would have to be considered not only incomplete, but limited in needed capacity.
3. Although the two models are different (partly overlapping, partly divergent), they are not for that reason contradictory. Rather, they are “different ways to slice the apple,” thus potentially revealing or emphasizing different dimensions of human functioning and human flourishing. What each of them helps us to see, or may obscure, will be considered below.
4. This last term, flourishing, is important to both models: both are very much concerned not just with describing “the nature of the beast,” a la Freud or Skinner, say, but with active development goals of full living, creative capacity, deep satisfaction, and human growth.
5. Growth itself may be regarded as personal/individual, social/institutional, and/or evolutionary in the sense of human species capacities, as in the idea of an expansion or complexification of consciousness itself. While both models seem agnostic on this last, larger point, it is worth noting that Esalen (while emphatically ecumenical as to particular spiritual schools or traditions) was very much founded out of the inspiritation of the tradition and lineage of Sri Aurobindo (1990), whose teachings emphasized the evolution of consciousness in the world, paralleling or informing an evolution of consciousness in the universe. An implication of this model would be that work and growth that take place on an individual or interpersonal level in “this world” would also impact a larger and perhaps universal field in some direct way. This notion, which is suggested or contained in many meditative disciplines, does seem to permeate many of the programs and offerings at Esalen (a clear example would be the morphogenetic field studies of Rupert Sheldrake [e.g., 19 ], who has often taught at Esalen and has many followers among the wider Esalen community).Parlett’s model is not directly addressed to this question, but the perspective is suggested, at least, both in his references here and in his other writings on field theory and field effects (as well as by his critical interest in the “constellations” work of Bert Hellinger and his associates [see e.g. Gunn, 2006]).
6. Both models are thematic as opposed to operational. As curricula, each is concerned with being sure that its complete list of broad “faculties” is addressed and supported in some way, as opposed to being concerned with any particular course of study within that faculty. Esalen for instance has long been known for an implicit insistence that embodiment, body awareness, and embodied expression are essential to full human development, and that the absence of cultivation of embodiment leads directly to diminished creativity, effectiveness, and full satisfaction in living. But at no time has Esalen offered a specific sequence or prescribed course for the individual student to follow in realizing that dimension of the CHP.Likewise with the Five Abilities Model: it is easy to imagine a training course or other sequence based directly on the model; but the model itself would not necessarily privilege one such course over another, as long as each one covered the five basic themes. Various applications of the Model would then tend to be evaluated in relation to the respective developmental needs of their target populations, at least as seen by the trainers or intervenors.
7. This means that both models lend themselves very much to individualization, both person by person and situation or group by group (or by situational need). In either system, if a given individual is deficient in, say, embodiment or experimentalism (Parlett), or spiritual or emotional development (CHP), then remedial efforts could be directed straight to those areas for those particular students.With that said, in different ways some at least of the features of each model would seem to be mutually limiting (or mutually supportive, of course) of each other. Self-awareness and embodied awareness, for example, are deeply overlapping; and I’ve argued at length elsewhere (e.g., 1995, 2000) that intimate self-knowing and intimate knowing of the other are likewise mutually limiting (or mutually facilitative, as the case may be). And the same could be said for various other pairings within each model (emotion/compassion and spirituality, for instance, or Responding and Experimenting. For that matter, all of Parlett’s categories may well be regarded as dimensions of Responding).
8. Thus even with those capacities for individuation/remediation, each model does revert in the end to its basic holism of message and intent. Good functioning and creative growth mean an active, vital use of all these dimensions, in both models. In a real sense, each model would insist that none of the capacity or study areas can be regarded as fully engaged until all are fully engaged. One or another may lead or lag behind, but all must be developed, for any to be fully alive and available.For example we cannot imagine a very robust development of Embodiment without considerable corresponding development of Responding, Self-Recognizing, and so on — and vice versa (at best the result would be a kind of robotic athleticism, as with some professional athletes; even just as embodiment, this remains constricted and constrictive). An example of the same kind of problem in CHP would be in the social dimension, where repeatedly social and political reform movements have broken down for want of holistic personal development (emotional, interpersonal, spiritual) in their leaders.We can say then of both models that their terms exhibit what Aristotle called anacoluthia, or radical incompleteness, in the sense of mutual entailment (i.e., none of the dimensions can be regarded as fully developed until all are fully developed). Each informs the others, and each depends on the others. The CHP diagram is intended to represent this interdependence and reciprocal effect visually, by looking along the lines that join each dimension of the Curriculum to all the others. For the Five Abilities we might imagine a chart, with the Abilities ranged in order along both axes. This would yield twenty-five cells or windows of their intersection. We could then use the chart to consider the Responding dimension of Interrelating, say (or the Interrelating dimension of say Experimenting, as when we use relational support to frame or cushion our experimental risktaking — or conversely make use of Experimenting in support of Interrelating); and so on for the other twenty-two cells (including each Ability’s relation to itself).
9. Aristotle made this point, the mutual entailment of qualities, in relation to what he called the “virtues” (Goodness, Truth, Courage, Wisdom, and so forth). Courage without Wisdom, say, would be not courage but recklessness; without Goodness it might be no more than raw force or cruelty. The Buddhists have often made the same point with regard to Judgment and Compassion, each being necessary for the right exercise of the other. Raising it here reminds us to consider that the Five Abilities Model in particular is a model of virtues, and to consider Parlett’s Model specifically as a curriculum for the inculcation of virtue.
10. Classically (again, in Aristotle), a virtue is both valued in itself, for its own sake (thus virtue is said to be “its own reward”) — and also valued instrumentally, as a step or tool for living the right sort of life, the sort of life that is implicitly privileged in the system under question (the Imitation of Christ, for example, or the life of a householder, a wandering saddhu, a warrior who identifies “self” with “tribe,” and so on). That life, and the qualities recognized as virtues under that system, are recursively implied in each other, by definition. That is, the values or virtues privileged by a given system, and the kind of person and life held up as worthwhile under that system, will contain and yield each other.In other words, every system of analysis implicitly contains its own ideal, as Erik Erikson remarked (1950), in an observation ahead of its time — and as we have been emphasizing here. What are the ideals of these two systems under comparison here? What kind of person and life does each hold up as worth developing and pursuing; and what deeper values lie behind that ideal?Looking at the Five Abilities model as a curriculum, the goal is plainly to support the development a person who could be described by adjectives such as: enlivened, awake, responsible, “in touch,” vital, experimental, creative, highly engaged with others and the world, both relationally and politically (ecological themes are strong in Parlett’s work, as is the theme of responsibility). More explicitly than the CHP, the Five Abilities model emphasizes social contact and social process as key development targets, and beneath that, as key values. The picture is clearly not only a lively, alert, socially skilled person, but more than that, an engaged citizen, equipped and motivated to participate in the political discourse and process of the times.

    The descriptive implications of the CHP are broadly overlapping with this list, with perhaps more emphasis on vividness of experience per se as a criterion in its own right, and certainly more explicit attention to spiritual practice and spiritual experience. The two models are quite similar in their insistence on attention to embodiment, for its own sake and in support of the other dimensions, as they are in lifting out political engagement and social action as inherently part of full, healthy human living and being (something which has most often been either neglected or else held somewhat apart in psychological models of diagnosis and training).

11. Not surprisingly, given the above adjectives, both models rely heavily on the premises and implications of the Gestalt model of psychology and psychotherapy. The grounding Gestalt assumptions of the person as the active, constructive agent in her own experiencing and living, the idea of energized contact/engagement as a self-establishing criterion and goal, and the holistic notion of full development of neglected dimensions of being as essential to that engagement — all these plainly function as background prerequisites and givens of both models.
12. A related fundamental Gestalt assumption implied, at least, in both models is the idea that these qualities or dimensions are not just capacities of the individual that may be developed or neglected: they are qualities of a social field. Parlett makes that idea more explicit (unpubl ms) in his discussion than does the CHP itself (though see also Wheeler, 2005, for discussion of inherent implications as well as some of the problematics of this theme in the human potential tradition).A human being fully engaged in Interrelating, say, or Embodying (or exercising the “heart body,” the “social body,” or the “mental body”) requires a social field of other likewise engaged human seekers and responders, for anything like a full development of the dimension. Thus the anacoluthia, or radical incompleteness and mutual entailment of each capacity (or faculty, or virtue) referred to above is true in multiple dimensions: not only does each require all the others for its realization, but each and all require a human community of fellow students, whose progress along these curricular paths will support, inform, vitalize, and also possibly constrain the development of each individual.To paraphrase the old catchphrase: it takes a human field, to realize one human being. And again, in implicit Aurobindian fashion, this field itself must be seen as evolving.
13. This last point brings out a background dimension of both models, which locates both of them clearly in a contemporary Western progressivist tradition and worldview. This is the dimension of time, which contextualizes the models and the activities envisioned under them. Unlike, say, the classical psychodynamic or behaviorist models (and in contradistinction to reductionistically relativistic “post-modern” traditions of the late 20th Century), which were all time-independent, there is a real sense in which both these curricula rest on a notion of creativity, growth, and thus progress — in theoretical possibility at least. If the individual is inseparable from the field, and if the field itself evolves, and develops new creative capacities that were never there before (for instance, a new capacity to organize holistically a single world community, without reliance on a split or projected enemy as the basis of that organization) — then the individual as well must be seen as capable of evolution.At one time there were no humans, to have and pose the challenges we face today. At one time there was no self-reflective consciousness — at least not in its present embodied form. New possibilities in the world are — well, possible. Progress itself may not be fated; but it is embraced as a possibility and even a goal, implicitly at least, in both these systems.
14. This brings us to a final point of connectedness between these two system’s, Parlett’s Five Abilities Model and Esalen’s Curriculum for the Human Potential. This connection is their shared sense of deep optimism, about the possibilities at least of the human future, behind and underneath the apprehension and alarm that have fueled the development of both systems (about which more below). This optimism is itself a legacy of the Western humanist tradition, flawed and often derided but still very much needed and very much alive today in its deep faiths and yearnings — despite the darkening political context of our world today.

Pitfalls and Omissions in the Two Models

With this much said about deep similarities as well as significant differences in the two models or curricula under discussion here, as well as what they may be used for and what they can help us see and do, what can we say now about omissions or blind spots in either or both of them, and/or about where either of them may obscure our vision and not support our or their own goals? What might each add to the other? There is an infinity of ways, we’ve already noted, to slice up the apple of human capacities and human functioning. What are dimensions that are not lifted up directly by these two models — particularly those dimensions which have figured large in some of the curricula and values systems of the past?

Love, we may notice, is not a primary dimensional capacity in either of these ways of organizing human abilities. It isn’t held up and developed as a curricular faculty; it doesn’t figure as an explicit criteria for evaluating other capacities or the curricula developed for them. We may argue that the notion of love is somehow contained in, say, the “heart body” (or the “spirit body” or the “social body”) of the CHP — or perhaps in the activation of the whole of the curriculum in some unarticulated way. Still, whole programs of study under this curriculum go on without direct evocation of the term. We may even argue (switching to Parlett’s model here) that the the very activation of attending/ responding is the act of love itself in some definitional way. Still, a capacity whose development has been the entire human life curriculum in some of the most revered teachers of the Western tradition (St. Francis and Jesus of Nazareth come to mind) somehow doesn’t rate a primary heading or direct discussion in its own terms, in either system.

Something similar might be said of belonging, which along with judgment functions as arguably the primary capacity value of the Mosaic tradition (and many other tribal traditions), another of our primary cultural sources. Parlett (unpubl ms) does devote some discussion to the need for and inescapability of belonging, though not to the capacity and its direct development — even though it would seem to be quite central to his emphasis on radical ecology, which surely rests most productively on the development of this sense of deep belonging (Parlett tends to rest his ecological vision rather on the capacity of Interrelating).

The notion of play likewise doesn’t figure visibly in either curriculum. This is perhaps surprising in view of the fact that creativity and play are strong themes in the Gestalt model which both these curricula draw on so directly (see e.g. Wheeler, 2003), as well as in the countercultural tradition of Esalen Institute itself, which certainly was grounded from the beginning in a certain 60’s insouciance, the ancient and honorable tradition of “epater la bourgeoisie,” the pleasures of shocking solemn and self-important authority. (Pleasure itself, thankfully, particularly embodied or erotic pleasure, does enter into the discussions of both curricula in a salutary way).

We could go on with this list of dimensions and features of human potentials that are not well brought to light by these particular lenses, these two ways of organizing our attention to human life. Duty and uprightness, pillars of the Confucian values system, for example, are not directly inculcated by either of these curricula (though arguably in a certain sense both qualities might be enhanced by the practices of these curricula). Nor is compassion, the bedrock attitude of Buddhism (though again, it belongs in some way to Interrelating, to the spirit body, the heart, etc).

Finally for this discussion is the Greek value or metavalue of arrete, which is virtue or excellence itself. While not directly discussed as a separate faculty or principle, the idea of excellence, in the sense of fullness or intensity of development as a goal in itself, does permeate the values of the Curriculum for the Human Potential — and, if in a less clearly pronounced way, the Five Abilities Model as well. This is significant in that it points up the way in which both these curricula place strong emphasis on the exercise of this-worldly values and practices, in contrast to the long Christian era which has been, along with the Greek, our other chief cultural source in the modern West. To that extent then both these models in different ways may be seen as curricula for the recovery, in part, of sometimes-marginalized values and virtues of the classic Greek tradition: particularly excellence itself in this sense, balance, the cultivation of all parts of the self (including the body), a celebration of pleasure, a strong emphasis on social citizenry, and a concentration on this world as the arena of development — all of them (except perhaps the last) qualities which have tended to be neglected in contemporary Western society.

Conclusions: the Models in Juxtaposition

Finally, what perspective may we gain by using each model as a standard or a lens to turn on the other? Looking at the Five Abilities Model in the light of the CHP, we may be struck first of all by the absence of emphasis on spiritual themes in Parlett’s articulation. The discourse is that of a deep social humanism, more wholly this-worldly and secular than the CHP, which lifts out the spiritual dimension explicitly as key to development of the whole person. In place of a discourse of deep spirituality, what we find (at least in Parlett’s amplifying discussions) is a discourse of deep ecology — which is arguably the spirituality of contemporary secular progressivism. At the same time, this ecological emphasis does not seem completely integrated into the headings or categories themselves (again, Parlett tends to add it in as an amplification to Interrelating, by way of including relationship with the physical environment as a sort of extension of relationship in the social sense).

Is this lack of attention to spiritual experience and capacity a flaw or lacuna in the model? This of course depends on your point of view — which is to say, on the “hypergoods” you are privileging as you picture what kind of life is worthwhile and important to live (and what kind is essential to cultivate, for the welfare and even survival of the society concerned, and the world as a whole).

The other way around, using the Five Abilities Model as a lens on the Human Potential Curriculum, what emerges as absent or problematic? Overall, it is clear that at least potentially, the CHP could be looked at and used (and has been used) quite individualistically, in a limiting sense. True, the social dimension is posited here as a basic aspect of the self, and not as something held apart or added onto an already defined individual. But in practice we know that deep social capacity and political engagement have often been left out, in the familiar “human potential” litany of “heart-mind-body-spirit.” And as already mentioned, political and social causes can also be approached and pursued quite individualistically — social action goals without a deep sense of the personhood of other people, or our deep belongingness with them.

And indeed, neither of these two models articulates strongly the human dimension of deep belonging, which is arguably the key to our hopes of navigating our way through the mounting challenges of the world in the 21st Century, toward survival and possibly even thriving as a global society and a global species. What we identify with — as not just ours but as ourselves — we attend to, care for, nurture, protect. No human being, short of heavy damage or desperation, fouls his/her own nest, or intentionally harms his/her own children; if this were not the case, then the self-destruction as a species that threatens us today would have taken place long ago. In the same way, murder is an offense in every known society — but, killing of people outside the identified group, outside the boundary of deep belonging, doesn’t count as murder. Plainly if we are to “grow” the new capacity of nurturing and protecting humanity and the world as a whole, we will have to learn to expand that boundary of deep identification, so that all the world is my home or nest, all the human children in some sense my children, part of my tribe, part of me. Both these models, in my view, in ways that are partly similar, partly different, fall short of a full development of this crucial dynamic theme; both still carry with them the traces and trappings of an assumed individualistic outlook which is the ideological heritage of our civilization and our times.

Parlett’s system comes closer to transcending this limitation, in that his model, if not directly operational, is at least a process model, and his explication of Interrelating does make some attempt at resting on relationality as a given of human being, not an added-on or detachable skill. This is not surprising in a writer who is particularly known for his development of field theory and field thinking. In my own writings, both on the Human Potential Curriculum (cited here) and elsewhere, I have likewise emphasized relationality as preceding and yielding — not secondary to — the individual person or self-process, and criticized the Gestalt tradition and other schools where they have failed to bring out (or have actively contradicted) this field truth (which is the true ground of our Gestalt approach). And certainly in writing about the CHP I’ve been an insistent voice for not dropping the fifth term, “social body,” from the litany (but note that it is the fifth term, and often held apart). The necessity of this insistence may indicate not just the characteristic solipsism of individualistic culture, even in its countercultural form, but may point to a deeper problematic in this way of chopping up and listing human capacities in the first place, in either of these two systems.

Perhaps both these models are intermediary, on the way to a more radical descriptive/ prescriptive model of human abilities that begins by asserting our belongingness as the ground of our being and doing, and putting that at the center of the system — and only then goes on from there to elaborate our capacities and needs as inflections, articulations, and complexifications of this core quality. In other words: a Gestalt model — but a Gestalt model more radical than some of our inherited traditions in the field, where we keep having to come around and cleanse our discourse (and ourselves) of recurrent reifications of process inflections (like figure/ground, organism/environment, self/other, me/you, contact/resistance, I/thou…). In my own work and my own living, I rely on practices I call “spiritual” to support this grounding — then of course only to lose that grounding, not always but recurrently, in the processes of words, acts, thinking, and just daily life.

Deep conversation is itself a spiritual practice, when it is grounded in this sense of deep belonging, this kind of awareness of shared being, which holds differences as living inflections of a shared creative source. In the Gestalt conversation, and in the larger world of social activism and educational/developmental curricula in general, we are all indebted to Malcolm Parlett for his years of deep, stimulating reflection and teaching on these issues, which at root are all the most urgent and difficult of our times (or any times). We are indebted to him as well for his creative achievement in synthesizing this approach to dealing with those challenges, and to offering it to us for ongoing conversation in this sense. It is a measure of the scope of his creation that it stands up vigorously to detailed comparison here with a Curriculum which is itself a shared emergent product growing out of work at Esalen of some of the most gifted writers and teachers of the past generation — names like Gregory Bateson, Erik Erikson, Fritz Perls, Ida Rolf, Aldous Huxley, Rupert Sheldrake, Virginia Satir, George Leonard, Michael Murphy, Alan Watts, Abraham Maslow, Stuart Kauffman, Sam Keen, and scores of others, just to name a handful of those past and present who have been more deeply involved than just teaching a guest workshop at the Institute. Malcolm Parlett’s voice belongs in that stimulating company, past and present, of teachers who are also seekers, working creatively in different ways to offer new approaches and answers to the accelerating world crisis.

Again paraphrasing Einstein, the consciousness that got us into the crisis of the world today, is not the consciousness that will get us through it. The transformation of consciousness which is the excruciating, ecstatic cusp of evolution of the human family today requires new curricula for its support and realization. Both these Curricula are themselves works in progress, evolving and still open to creative evolution (Parlett is in his prime as a writer teacher [at Esalen, among many other places], and the Five Abilities Model is being taken up by other teachers and thinkers for ongoing development; meanwhile the Curriculum for the Human Potential is in a process of intentional revision and refocusing at Esalen, and only beginning to be written up). May their interaction, at Esalen, in print and many other exchanges, like all supported contact, lead to new creative developments beyond the limits of what we can see now.

Gordon Wheeler, Big Sur California, 2006

NOTES: For the ideas in this discussion I am indebted first of all to Malcolm Parlett, for many stimulating interchanges, and also to the teachers, students, and community of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, which has generously offered space for my work over the past decade; and also to the members of the Gestalt/philosophy Study Group (Sally Denham-Vaughn, Mark Fairfield, Lynne Jacobs, Lillian Norton, Rudy Schmidt-Peritz, Frank Staemmler, and Carol Swanson, as well as Parlett himself). Parts of the discussion here of the CHP appeared in a different form in Wheeler (2005b).

Note that Serge Ginger has developed a somewhat different model of a five-point star diagram of human dimensions, with somewhat different categorical headings (Ginger, 2003). Ginger’s model rests interestingly on two “feet:” “the body” and “the world” (by which he means to include a spiritual grounding; Ginger, personal communication, 2006).

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