ATP Articles
Article 5

A very brief history of 3 human potential discoveries
by Ted P. Attreides

Most people agree that the 'Human Potential' Movement begun in the early 1960's. Its basic claim was that human beings have unlimited or infinite potential. The goal then becomes to achieve this infinite potential through self-awareness, self-development, etc. In the last 40 years this movement has gone through three distinct phases or waves, of increasing complexity and maturity.

The first wave was the introduction in the 60s, of the initial 'human potential' movement. This was generally centered at the Esalen Institute in California, by spiritual pioneers Mike Murphy and Richard Price. Although this initial wave was not uniform everywhere, its distinguishing mark was that it tended to focus on the quick fix, the peak experience, the weekend workshop, the 'enlightenment' in seven-days seminar. It was a wild beginning; an explosion that was at the same time marvelous yet frightening, wonderful yet unbalanced, glorious yet warped.

Within a decade or so, the limitations of this quick fix approach started to become all too apparent, to many. Useful as it was for an initial wake-up, the peak experiences tended to fade rapidly, sometimes resulting in the individual being left in worse shape than before. So the goal of the 'peak experience' started to give away to the goal of a 'plateau experience.'

This begun the second wave of the 'human potential' movement. It was obvious by now that to engage in genuine transformation requires time, effort, work and will force -- in a word practice.

Eastern faiths had the most to offer in this respect, so people begun to take up actual transformative practices: perhaps Zen, or Yoga or Tantra or Meditation or even sustained psychotherapy. Thus the five day fix gave way to the five year practice.

Unfortunately those forms of otherwise commendable practice had an inbuilt limitation. They usually exercised only one line of development of the person, while neglecting all the others. So for example, one could take the spiritual line alone (i.e. meditation practice) to a very high level, but neglect the psychological and interpersonal lines. Thus the person would still be egoistic, or incapable of having a mature sexual relationship with an equal partner, or have addictions he or she cannot control.

In other words these approaches generally emphasized one line of development and followed it through to near perfection, only to find at the conclusion of this 5 to 7 year practice that the other lines of development were still immature, undeveloped or poorly evolved. Even worse, there was now the added difficulty of a very unbalanced constitution, which further confused the practitioner.

Thus the second wave of practice gave way to the third wave -- we presently find ourselves in now -- that is called complete or integral practice.

What sets this third wave apart from the previous waves is a new understanding of what a complete human being is. We now have a much more complete, integrated and all-inclusive Big Picture of the entire spectrum of human consciousness than at any other time in the history of our species.

This Big Picture comes courtesy of the so-called 'Human Consciousness Project'. This is a spectacular ongoing project, somewhat similar to the 'Human Genome Project', except its purpose is to map all the states, structures, types, levels, stages and waves of human consciousness, change and transformation, available to men and women. It involves hundreds of researchers from around the world, and includes a series of multi-disciplinary approaches that together provide the best picture of the entire range of human capacity and consciousness.

As an example -- related to our 'human potential' discussion, here -- with this Big Picture, we can now develop new and integrated practices that for possibly the first time in history include and exercise all the major capacities and dimensions of a human being: physical, emotional, mental, social, cultural, and spiritual.

The ultimate conclusion of this more sophisticated approach is that the more aspects of our being we simultaneously exercise, the Quicker, Easier and more likely becomes the prospect that positive human change and transformation will occur.

Although this third wave of integrated practice is in its infancy, it is growing at a dizzying speed. Ken Wilber author of over 18 books on integral thinking and philosophy says he expects to see an explosion of interest in these types of more comprehensive practices, in the next few years, simply because they are so much more effective in initiating transformation. And Tony Schwartz in his book, 'What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America' concurs. The overall conclusion of his book is that an integrated practice is now the most viable mode of human transformation.

Those interested in actually surfing the crest of this third wave have, here, an example of a very complete and integrated practice, called Accelerated Transformative Practice -- ATP. It is not the only integrated practice available; but it might well be the best one.