The stack, onion, and mesh

James

23 Dec 2024 • 5 min read

There's a stack, an onion, and a mesh, when it comes to the space.

The developmental stack is a personal journey built from an array of spaces, spaces which span/bridge across an individual's journey from totally conventional to fully post-conventional. You can think of it as the "wake up, grow up, clean up, show up" progression. I bump into "the stack" when I talk with others who have been through it themselves and are called (by a kind of bodhisattva vow, going back "for the sake of all") in their "showing up" to smooth the path of growth for other pilgrims. I've learned to recognize the pattern now when someone has put the conceptual pieces together. I can spot it because it seems remarkably consistent, rhyming with Adult Development stages. Why spaces? Because everyone needs a space to be, to belong, and to be supported in growing at/on their current edge. You can't fit everyone into one space (other than as cultural exchange), but you can make an overlapping series of spaces. I've been "building a stack" and so have others, starting with wherever their current edge is and expanding where they're called to explore or serve.

The depth onion starts to show up in the desires of folks in the later stages of the developmental journey: to be with "the others" who are weird like them, to be seen and understood more than in conventional or transitional stages, to live more in the world (and often, live with others) they personally inhabit. An onion has a surface, layers, and a center location (that one can near, but is just more layers, not some different core material). Conventional world is outside the onion, and I guess by "transitional" I'm pointing at the first few layers on the inside, where people roam around accumulating their stack according to their inner-work needs. Self-awareness, emotional defusion, trauma processing, relational repatterning, spiritual deconstruction, rationality, embodiment, acceptance... you kinda gotta catch 'em all like Pokemon, and the order doesn't matter enough to make it a linear thing through a tube. Altogether they do add up to a "center of gravity" in AD terms, and it's when you stabilize most of yourself at post-conventional layers/depth (back to the onion here) then you no longer "belong" at the surface. Then there's a pull towards the core.

I don't actually think that pull is universal - presumably there are folks who meet some/most/all of their "need" to grow more fit to their environment, and then just stop contentedly. But in my view, once the negative/suffering/fear-based healing/fixing is accomplished, a new vista of positive growth opens up and is quite attractive to keep journeying into as an individual, especially since "the world" still has in it so much we care about re the potential future, and from a "post-healing" way of relating, a thriving life of service becomes possible.

Thriving activists and change-makers are those that have done the inner work to shift from fear-based to love-based service. You can work towards a wiser weller world, the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, and not get lost in the deficiency of contracted must-fix mindset. The existential okayness of radical acceptance releases the constriction and allows for even greater effectiveness (though switching from "negative fuel" to "positive fuel" can be a challenging no-mans-land transition) compared to conventional change efforts.

The onion is a sphere, and as you go down through the layers there's a convergence effect. Hmm, kind of like, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." There are developmental stages labeled "unitive" and "universal" and yes, the closer you get to the moon the more the pointing converges. The view of the stack converges, people start exploring cosmic oneness then nonduality and "neither twoness nor oneness". And, talking with those on missions of service, our theories-of-change seem to converge! The holistic, systems-aware, polarity-integrating, construct-aware, fractal transformation theory of change is, IMHO, something being rediscovered independently and ongoingly by those with eyes to see.

You can start from "God is love" and "all you need is love", to grab some cliches that are reductionist to the point of meaningless if not used as sazen, and from there more-or-less come to a pretty good picture of what a "more beautiful world" would look like. We're a long distance from it yet, but inner development and pocket culture creation and on-ramp construction and capacity building and institutional innovation all fall out of the holistic view. The happy servants build out supports for other stack-collectors, they dig deeper in the onion and try to connect with other diggers... and find difference again in what they focus their devotion on.

The mesh is the network topology within the space, describing the relations between all the concrete specific things in the space. The onion of the big-picture vision is very convergent and aligning for the space at large, but/and, the diversity of the details is vibrant and vital to the evolutionary-cooperative emergence of the possible paths to universal and lasting thriving. A mesh has no center and no sharp outer edges - only neighbors of your node, and farther-away nodes connected via multiple hops. It's not chaos or anarchy, but it's definitely not a hierarchy or centralized control organization. It's like a honeycomb, it's like a spiderweb, it's like a network graph diagram.

Unsupported claims now, but I'll say that the quality of the connections between nodes correlates with their "layer of the onion" depth and intensity. Ah wait, I haven't covered intensity of entanglement yet. But maybe that's mostly a side effect of rarity? It correlates with developmental depth, but intensity of commitment can vary across people and the inscrutable callings of their souls. Commitment to service, commitment to others, commitment to living in an interdependent and construct-aware culture can really "narrow the funnel" of potential partners. Finding the right people to commit to/with is a slow process. And, coming back to the mesh, you only want to very deeply entangle with your closest neighbors in the space! Diversity is strength but you don't want to marry/cohabitate across huge perspective/frame/culture gaps.

Drawing useful maps and boundaries around subgraphs in the mesh, that's still a useful thing to do, even in the absence of "real" boundaries. The fluid mode metasystematic operating of effective nodes in this space appears to be like a self-transforming (holding multiple identities that can seem paradoxical) organization - nodes which can come together to act like one organism, while still retaining their separateness. They can be a part of multiple alliances/associations while retaining autonomy and dedication to their specific mission.

Gatherings which bring together multiple nodes can establish and strengthen relational connections between them. Mergers in an "M&A" corporate sense don't compute, as "neither twoness nor oneness" is more true or more useful in an absolute sense. The world we're operating in is a fractal of scales, and we must climb up and down that ladder adroitly in order to leverage our developmental capabilities for more good and value and beauty. This reaches the edge of my understanding now, as we don't yet know patterns for doing this well nor do we have great examples already existent. Onward with building them!