The second of two posts on natural spirituality. Part One is here.
In Part One I made a claim with someone else’s evidence.
Lisa Miller’s thirty years of brain imaging suggest that the capacity for transcendent perception is not a gift given to a few. It is an organ. Four circuits, the same four in every tradition studied and in people with no tradition at all. Roughly one-third innate, two-thirds cultivated. Standard equipment in every human skull.
And spirituality, she finds, is innate — while religion is inherited. The organ is universal. The container is a gift from our parents and grandparents.
If that is true, it has consequences I have been circling for two years. It means this faculty is not a private matter that belongs at home. It means it is sitting, unnamed and unused, in every organization on earth.
But before I can make that case I have to deal with the man whose work I have been leaning on hardest, because on this exact point I think he was wrong. And then I want to show you where his own book says so.
Arguing with Maslow, using Maslow
Anyone who reads me knows I lean on late Maslow. Not the textbook pyramid — the final work. Metamotivation. Being-values. Theory Z. The recognition that above self-actualization sits something else, and that some people are drawn forward by values transcending their own benefit.
I have always had one quarrel with him.
Maslow made transcendence sound like a private club. He divided self-actualizers into the merely healthy and the transcenders, and the transcenders read as a tiny, gifted remnant. Percentages get quoted. A fraction of one percent.
It reads as an aristocracy of the soul. And if that is true, then everything I have argued about the telic rung applies to almost nobody, and I should find another line of work.
So I went back to the source. And I found that Maslow had already answered the objection — in the very lecture that gave The Farther Reaches of Human Nature its title.
He tells you outright that he never sampled a population. He selected.
He pulled the most creative and talented specimens he could find, and he had a name for the method: growing tip statistics, borrowed from botany, because the growing tip is where the cells are dividing. He describes his subjects, without embarrassment, as the best part of the top one percent.
That is not epidemiology. It is not a claim about how transcendence is distributed across humanity.
It is a description of where he pointed the telescope.
And then he says the thing that has been sitting there unread for sixty years. These people show what the whole species can be like if you let them grow, if the conditions are good, and if you get out of their way.
His own analogy is the four-minute mile. When he was a boy it was humanly impossible. Then somebody did it — and in doing it, lifted the ceiling for every baby born afterward. The Olympic gold medalist, he writes, represents the limits of human potential in that event for every newborn on earth.
The one percent was never a distribution of capacity.
It was a demonstration ceiling.
Two more places he undercuts himself
There are two sentences in Theory Z that I think are the most important in the essay, and both cut against the elitist reading.
The first. Maslow admits, almost in passing, that he found significant transcendent experience not only in healthy self-actualizers but in people who were not healthy and had not self-actualized.
Read that against his own hierarchy and it does not fit. You are not supposed to reach the top floor without climbing the stairs. He noticed the anomaly, recorded it honestly, and moved on.
Lisa Miller spent thirty years on that anomaly.
The man with bipolar disorder holding the cadence of the prayers in a hospital kitchen — that is Maslow’s footnote with a research program behind it. Transcendent awareness does not wait for you to get well, or get funded, or get promoted.
It is not the reward for climbing. It is the equipment you were issued.
The second. In his list of what distinguishes transcenders, Maslow observes that they resolve the elitism problem inherent in his own theory. And they resolve it by finding it easy to sacralize everybody.
By Maslow’s own criteria, then, a transcendence that produces an elite is not mature transcendence. It is a way station.
So let me restate my quarrel. I am not arguing against Maslow. I am arguing against what the textbooks did to him — which is what they did to the rest of Theory Z. They cropped it, flattened it, and hung the pyramid on the wall.
Here is the whole thing in one sentence.
Maslow treated transcendence as a rung. Miller shows it is an organ.
Rungs are reached by a few. Organs are standard equipment.
Which makes it your problem
Notice what this does not do. It does not dissolve my ladder.
The ladder describes work and its economics — algorithmic, heuristic, telic. The telic rung is still a rung, and most people are not standing on it yet.
But the capacity to stand there is in every skull in your building.
Which means the gap between the two is not a talent problem.
It is a leadership problem. It is yours.
Why we have no words for it
I have argued that naming is governance. What you cannot name, you cannot fund, reward, or protect — and it quietly atrophies.
Our managerial language is fluent in output, throughput, utilization and headcount. It is nearly silent on the layer that now matters most.
Part One named the reason: forty years of institutional silence, because nobody knew where the line fell between naming a human reality and imposing a belief. Silence became the professional norm, and then the norm became the vocabulary.
But here is the finding that ought to end the argument about whether this belongs at work.
Maslow reports that he found approximately as many transcenders among businessmen, industrialists, managers, educators and political people as among the professionally religious.
Any minister, he notes drily, will talk transcendence whether or not he has the faintest idea what it feels like. Meanwhile the industrialists conceal theirs, under a mask of toughness and realism.
And then the detail that should get every executive’s attention. Their metamotivations were not repressed but merely suppressed — and he found it easy to break through with direct questions.
Not absent. Suppressed.
Which means recoverable, and cheaply.
The most spiritually serious people I have ever worked with were engineers. They had no permission to say so at work, so they said it in the parking lot, or at two in the morning on a bad deployment, or never.
Every organization I have led was carrying more of this capacity than its dashboards could see.
Two kinds of thinking, and only one of them is for sale
This is where a philosophical point becomes an operating one.
Miller distinguishes two kinds of reasoning we all possess.
Achieving awareness strategizes, plans, researches, executes. We are trained in it relentlessly — she notes that the first object placed on her first-grade desk was a planner. It pays the rent.
Awakened awareness is receptive rather than instrumental. It asks what life is showing us now.
Achieving awareness rolls out the plan. Awakened awareness sets the North Star.
I have been calling these the heuristic and the telic rungs for three years. Miller found the circuitry.
And here is the thing. The machines are extraordinary achieving-awareness engines, and they possess no awakened awareness whatsoever.
Not a little. None.
What the machine does not have
When I look at Miller’s three circuits, I understand something about the top rung that I did not understand before.
The bonding network requires having been held.
The ventral shift requires a life that can show you something.
The dissolving boundary requires having a boundary — a body, an ending, people you will lose.
I have written that these systems are trained on shadows: on representations of lived experience rather than experience itself. I will not overclaim what neuroscience proves here, and I want to be honest that this is a convergence rather than a proof.
But it tells me what the why-making faculty is built out of. It is built out of attachment, mortality and embodiment.
The three things the machine does not have.
An enterprise running on achieving awareness alone — with a hundredfold increase in achieving capacity and no faculty for direction — is precisely Maslow’s test pilot from the opening of Part One.
Record time. Lost.
The business case, stated plainly
I want to say this without any of the vocabulary of the spirit, so that it can be evaluated on its own terms.
As AI drives the cost of the lower rungs toward zero, the scarce input becomes the faculty that supplies direction.
That faculty is universal. It is currently suppressed rather than absent. It is cheap to recover — Maslow found a direct question sufficient. And it is strongly associated with the resilience and wellbeing of the people who hold it.
Wholeness, wellness and commonality are not benefits programs.
They are the cultivation of your only remaining competitive advantage.
Minister of wholistic leadership
Which brings me to the strange title I gave myself when I stepped out of the CEO chair, and to a second one I have started using.
Chief In-Spiritor. Inspirare — to breathe into. Not to instruct. Not to command.
But when people ask what I actually do now, I have begun saying something more direct. I am a minister of wholistic leadership.
The spelling is deliberate. The word underneath it is wholeness — Laloux’s second breakthrough, the invitation to bring the entire person to the work instead of the professional mask.
That is the ministry. Not doctrine. Wholeness.
And I am claiming the family trade, not a credential. My father was ordained; I was not. What he did in that memory-care unit was not instruction and not command. It was presence and breath. He had no metrics to hit, no audience to impress, and no memory in the room to hold what he said.
Something responded anyway.
There is a moment in Miller’s account that I recognized immediately. A patient about to be transferred upstate asked Miller to pray with her. Different traditions — Miller Jewish, the woman Catholic. Miller did not know how to pray in that woman’s way.
But she knew how to be with her.
They prayed side by side, each in their own idiom, and what Miller observed arriving was peace.
That is the job description. Not supplying the belief. Holding the space.
Call it humanistic, universalist, secular, non-doctrinal — the label will do half your work and cost you half your audience, so choose carefully. The practice does not care what we call it.
Four things it actually involves
Quiet the room. Circuit one. Most leaders never do this. They fill every hour with measurable activity and then wonder why nobody has had an original thought since the reorg. Presence is not the destination, but it is the door — and if you never open the door, nothing else here is available to you.
Make it safe to not know. The most spiritually significant sentence available in a workplace is I do not know what this is for. In most organizations it is career-limiting. In yours it should be where the useful conversation starts.
Change the question. Not what do we want and how do we get it — which is what a scarcity-trained nervous system asks when a powerful new tool arrives, and which reliably produces a subtraction plan. Ask instead what is being shown to you. Out loud, with your people in the room, because they are the ones holding the map.
That is a ventral shift performed at organizational scale. I have watched it produce billion-euro answers that no strategy deck contained.
Expand the words. Presence. Discernment. Care. Compassion. Love — yes, love, and stop being embarrassed. Norwegian gave me several words for it and English gave me one, and I have felt that poverty in rooms full of people I had worked beside for a decade.
Three guardrails, because this idea is easy to abuse
I would be committing malpractice of my own if I made this case without naming how it goes wrong.
Meaning is not compensation. The oldest abuse in the book is invoking purpose while paying below market, calling the company a family, and extracting devotion in place of wages.
If you are in-spiriting the language while the Time Dividend goes unpaid and your people are exhausted, you are not a steward. You are running a nicer-sounding extraction. At Agile Six we paid above our competitors, charged less by outcome, and were more profitable — and I say that not to boast but because the numbers are the only thing keeping this argument honest.
Never doctrinal. I will not name a sacred word in a room where I control someone’s paycheck, and neither should you. The capacity is universal; the container is theirs. Miller’s entire scientific contribution is the line between those two things, and a leader who blurs it deserves whatever follows.
The exit must be free. A leader holding both spiritual authority and your livelihood is a dangerous arrangement, and the danger does not evaporate because his intentions are good.
Mine were good. That was never sufficient.
Participation has to be genuinely optional, with no career cost for declining. Otherwise you have built a soft-edged coercion and given it a beautiful name.
Standard equipment
The four circuits are in every skull in your building.
Not the top one percent. Not the founders and the artists and the occasionally saintly. Everyone.
One-third innate — which means two-thirds cultivable, which means someone is either cultivating it or letting it atrophy. In most organizations we have been doing the second thing for a century, without knowing there was a name for what we were losing.
Huxley squinted at the texts and told us the core was one thing. We filed it under mysticism.
Maslow saw the growing tip and told us plainly that it showed what the species could become if we let it grow, if conditions were good, and if we got out of the way. We cropped him into a pyramid.
Miller went and found the circuits. We filed it under wellness.
Meanwhile the machines are climbing. They have taken the algorithmic rung, they are most of the way up the heuristic one, and they possess exactly none of the equipment that generates a direction worth taking.
The rung above is not a metaphor and it is not a consolation prize. It has an anatomy. It is protective against the despair that is killing our children. And it is distributed to everyone you employ.
I could not keep the container. I have never stopped wanting what it carried — for my kids, for my friends, and now, unmistakably, for the people I work with and the enterprises I advise.
For a long time I thought that made me a hypocrite, or at best a man with an unresolved problem. I have come to think it makes me a fairly ordinary product of a forty-year silence. That there are a great many of us. And that the silence is the thing to break.
I’m lost, but I’m making record time.
Sixty years old, that joke. I have heard a version of it in every strategy meeting I have sat in since 2023.
We have the equipment to stop being lost. It came standard.
Turn the lights on.
Sources: Abraham Maslow, “The Farther Reaches of Human Nature” (1967 lecture, Esalen / First Unitarian Church, San Francisco) and “Theory Z” (1969), both collected in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (Viking, 1971). Hidden Brain, “Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain,” Parts 1 and 2, with Lisa Miller (2026). Lisa Miller, The Awakened Brain. Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend. Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations.
Related: In-Spiriting the Firm · From CEO to CI-S · I Could Have Been Your Adam, Part One · Leaders: Start Seeing AI Clearly
