{"id":1481,"date":"2026-07-28T07:51:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T14:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/betterplaces.blog\/?p=1481"},"modified":"2026-07-27T20:08:02","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T03:08:02","slug":"rescuing-the-baby-part-one-the-certainty-i-could-not-find","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/betterplaces.blog\/?p=1481","title":{"rendered":"Rescuing the Baby, Part One: The Certainty I Could Not Find"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>The first of two posts on natural spirituality, and why I think it belongs in the work we do.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In 1967, Abraham Maslow stood in a Unitarian church in San Francisco and told a joke on his own colleagues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He had been trying, without success, to get the faculty of his School of Social Work to discuss one question with some depth: what is the good society?\u00a0His\u00a0colleagues offered some responses: Everyone in such a society worked hard. Everyone was getting more capable, more expert, more efficient.\u00a0But every time Maslow raised the question of what all that competence was\u00a0<em>for<\/em>, they changed the subject<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It reminded him, he said, of the test pilot who radioed in: <em>I&#8217;m lost, but I&#8217;m making record time.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Hold onto that joke. I will come back to it in Part Two, because I think it describes almost every enterprise I am watching right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But I have to start somewhere more personal, because I have been carrying this particular problem for about forty years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Two Ministers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My father was a pastor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Not for most of his life. He spent decades in industry, exhausted at the end of each day, and did his theology degree in the margins. Early mornings. Late nights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The scraps of time other men gave to their children were often spent in books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">His formal calling arrived late. He was ordained inside a memory-care unit where he was himself a resident \u2014 blind, going deaf, having moved in to be with my mother as she disappeared into vascular dementia. He stayed after she died, to care for his first and last flock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They called him Pastor Jim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We attended several of Pastor Jim&#8217;s sermons and they never let us down. He preached from a wheelchair, his body ravaged by rheumatoid arthritis. He had been blinded by complications of the same disease, so he recited the Bible from memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Most of his congregants were worse off than he was. But they would perk up and remember the old hymns with joy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He was breathing something into that room. The effects were undeniable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I grew up in the church. I felt the calling many times. I experienced what I can only describe as nirvana on many occasions in worship. And I once studied for the ministry myself \u2014 two years of Bible college.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But I could not dedicate my life to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I could not get to certainty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Somewhere along the way I had absorbed, without ever examining it, the idea that this vocation required total confidence in a set of propositions. That you had to <em>know<\/em>, without remainder, every detail, for the rest of your life, or you were a fraud in the pulpit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I could not get there. So I traded the pulpit for a keyboard and built companies instead of congregations.  But I think my style is very much like my father&#8217;s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Over the years, I turned back to faith when it served me. Prayers through cancer journeys. Fellowship when lonely. A Bible at the ready.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But my convictions stayed unsteady.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Recently, It Got Worse<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This year, I seriously studied church history. Not devotionally. As history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I found doctrine after doctrine whose introductions are hard to explain except as instruments for controlling and manipulating populations. Not everything. But enough, at moments consequential enough, that I could not un-see it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I read much of it travelling down the Rhine, looking at churches that had been Catholic, then Protestant, then bombed, then rebuilt \u2014 and asking myself how so many saints could be such cruel people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My conviction did not survive that journey intact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">And Yet<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Here is the observation I have never been able to argue away, and I have tried.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My religious and spiritual friends are often more resilient than my secular friends. Often happier. More grounded. Less thrown by reversals, quicker to recover, more available to other people in a crisis. Dare I say it, they seem happier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This is not a controlled study. It is thirty years of watching the same people through job losses, diagnoses and funerals. Something in their lives is load-bearing that is not always load-bearing in mine, and I have watched it hold weight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I have spent my adult life in an awkward position. Unable to affirm the container. Unable to deny that the container was delivering something real.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I will not deny the genuinely transcendent experiences I have had in worship. Something there is real. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It is just not unique to my denomination. Or even to my faith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What I have done instead is rediscover it by squinting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Squinting Out the Details<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I found my way back through the humanists \u2014 through writing, mostly, and through the long tradition of people who went looking for what the traditions hold in common rather than what separates them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My favorite author, Aldous Huxley, gave that tradition its modern name. His 1945 anthology <em>The Perennial Philosophy<\/em> set the mystical texts of many traditions side by side to show that beneath the doctrines and rituals and institutions \u2014 which genuinely and irreconcilably differ \u2014 the contemplatives at the heart of each were reporting the same thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Huxley&#8217;s method was to squint. Hold the traditions up together, let the specific dogmas blur, and see what stays sharp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">His novel <em>Island<\/em> is the applied version, and my favorite of his books. Not a dystopia but a blueprint \u2014 a society deliberately organized around what human beings need in order to unfold. The reason I named my current project The Archipelago is that <em>Island<\/em> ends badly. Pala is isolated, and isolation is fatal. One island cannot survive the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Many, connected, might.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So that is where I have been standing. A man who lost his certainty but never stopped wanting out of the isolation. Who kept the conviction that something real was being transmitted. Who learned to find it by squinting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What I have wanted, though I never had a phrase for it, is to rescue the baby from the bathwater. To be connected without prescribing the details, defending a doctrine, or professing a certainty I do not have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Over the last few years that instinct has hardened into something I would now defend. Spirituality is a neglected universal component of the human being. Religion aside \u2014 or religion secondary \u2014 it needs a voice in our families, our businesses and our politics, because without it we cannot be whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I have been arguing for that voice for a while. But I have also been hiding behind the word <em>transcendence<\/em>, because it is vague enough to be permitted in a work culture, and because it lets me shelter this piece of our commonality from the divisiveness of religion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Then a friend sent me a podcast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What a Psychologist Found in a Hospital Kitchen<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It is called <em>Hidden Brain<\/em>. Shankar Vedantam interviewing a psychologist at Columbia named Lisa Miller. Two episodes. Listen to both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Miller began her career on an inpatient psychiatric unit in Manhattan, treating severe suffering with the tools of the time. Those tools were silent on spirituality. It was considered outside the medical frame \u2014 airy, unmeasurable, not really knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Then the Jewish holidays arrived, and the unit had made no provision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The patient who objected was a man known for being explosive. Told there would be nothing for Yom Kippur, he threw a chair and walked out. Miller, who is not a rabbi, got permission and held an informal service in the back kitchen, under fluorescent lights, with her grandmother&#8217;s weathered prayer book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Four patients came. They had dressed for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And the man who had thrown the chair was the one holding the cadence of the prayers, swaying, carrying the room. He was not chaotic. He was the spiritual leader in that kitchen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Miller told a supervisor what had happened. He was a good man and he meant well, and what he said was: never tell anyone you did that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">She spent the next thirty years answering him with data. Take a study design the field already trusts. Use the standard measures. Then add exactly one variable: <em>how important is your spiritual life to you?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Four Circuits<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Here is what the brain imaging shows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Four circuits are involved in transcendent perception, and they are the same four in every tradition studied \u2014 Hindu, Jain, Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, Christian \u2014 and in people who call themselves spiritual but not religious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>One: the mind goes quiet.<\/strong> The mental racket that spins round and round stops. This is what mindfulness does. It is also where every corporate wellness program I have ever seen stops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But presence is not transcendence. Presence is the threshold. It is the door, not the room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Three circuits sit on the other side of that door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Two: you feel held.<\/strong> The same circuitry that came online when we were infants in someone&#8217;s arms. Whatever a person&#8217;s sacred word is, the felt content is the same. <em>I am not carrying this by myself.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Three: attention opens.<\/strong> The narrow, anxious attention that asks <em>what do I want, how do I get it, am I about to be fired<\/em> gives way to a wider aperture. The question becomes <em>what is life showing me now?<\/em> This is the moment people describe as guidance \u2014 the door they had been walking past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Four: the boundary softens.<\/strong> The hard line between yourself and everything else relaxes. Distinct, and also part of one whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Miller&#8217;s summary is four words: <strong>loved, held, guided, and never alone.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That is what I want for my children. For my friends. For the people I work with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And here is the sentence that stopped me cold. This is not a belief. It is a <em>perception<\/em>. It runs on dedicated circuitry, the way vision and hearing do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Huxley squinted at the texts in 1945 and concluded the traditions were describing one country. Miller put people from every tradition in a scanner and found they were using one set of circuits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Two completely different instruments, sixty-five years apart, pointing at the same claim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Split That Changes Everything<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Drawing on twin studies, Miller separates two things we habitually collapse into one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Spirituality is innate.<\/strong> Roughly one-third heritable, two-thirds shaped by environment. The capacity is standard equipment in every human brain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Religion is inherited.<\/strong> Almost entirely transmitted by environment. Miller&#8217;s phrase for it is generous and exact: religion is a gift of our parents and grandparents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sit with that asymmetry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The organ is universal. The container is a gift.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Measuring the Wrong Thing<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I left the ministry because I could not achieve certainty about a set of propositions. I assumed that meant I had not really been called.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But I have friends who did accept the calling, and deep down I doubt they felt any more certain than I did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The circuits do not run on propositions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Whatever I could not affirm, I never lost the organ. Nobody does. What I lost was a container \u2014 and containers are inherited, and mine had accumulated material I could not carry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I offer that because if you are one of the very large number of people who left a tradition and privately concluded there was something wrong with you, the science says otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You did not fail a test of faith. You declined a test of assent, which was measuring something else entirely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What This Does and Does Not Say About Depression<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Miller&#8217;s group published an eight-year study in <em>JAMA Psychiatry<\/em>. People who sustained a strong personal spiritual life showed a thicker cortex across the regions of what she calls the awakened brain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Those are the same regions that show up thin in people with recurrent major depression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Her image is that spirituality and depression are two sides of one coin. And I suspect a great many parents have intuited this and brought their children to church on exactly that instinct, without ever being able to defend it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The protective associations are large. In adolescents, a strong personal spiritual life is associated with roughly 80 percent lower onset of addiction. Where spirituality is <em>shared<\/em> \u2014 in a congregation, a minyan, a sangha, a fellowship of friends or family \u2014 the association with completed suicide is roughly 82 percent protective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Suicide now rivals auto accidents as a leading cause of death among young people. Miller&#8217;s question is the obvious one. If this came in a bottle from the pharmacy, which parent would decline it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Let me be careful here, because this is where enthusiasm does real damage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I am not going to tell you it is a cure, and I would ask you not to repeat it that way on my behalf. These are associations and buffers, not treatment trials. Nobody should read a blog post and stop taking their medication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But notice that the honest version is the more damning one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We have had a large, replicated protective factor sitting in the top psychiatric journals for thirty years, and we built a standard of care that leaves it out. Not because it failed peer review. Because the paradigm had nowhere to put it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When Miller presented the addiction finding at grand rounds, people walked out. Not angry. Mostly confused. <em>What does that have to do with mental health?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Blindness is rarely a knowledge problem. It is almost always a capacity problem \u2014 an inability to see what does not fit the model you already have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What I Gave My Children Instead<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I took my kids to church. I want to be accurate about that, because it would be easier to tell you I withheld the whole thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I did not. We attended on and off regularly for years. They were raised around it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I just never went all in. And they could certainly tell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was maintaining a social relationship with a church while privately hoping somebody else in the building would do the testifying. A youth pastor. A grandparent. Anyone with a conviction I could not manufacture. I brought my children to the well and stood back from it, and I told myself that was integrity \u2014 I would not sell them something I could not vouch for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Maybe it was. Or maybe standing in the middle was the cowardly option. I have never settled that question and I am not going to settle it here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But here is what I have to admit about the transmission, because Miller&#8217;s numbers make it hard to avoid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They did not only inherit my attendance. They inherited my conclusions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Children read their parents. Mine overheard the skepticism. They overheard the angst about specific doctrines, which was real and which I made little effort to hide. They watched me participate in a form I would not endorse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And they never once heard about the nirvana.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That is what has been sitting on me since I listened to those episodes. I have had genuinely transcendent experiences in worship. I described them earlier in this post. I have almost certainly never described them to my own children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I gave them a complete inventory of what I could not believe, and almost nothing of what I had actually experienced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Somewhere deep down I knew they would be happier if they bought the story. I just would not be the one to sell it. So I let the question sit, and let them draw inferences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Two-thirds are environmentally formed. That is the number that will not leave me alone. I tried to outsource that portion and clearly failed.  I am not sure I regret that honesty, but I regret the lack of intention and discussion.  Because I bought parts of the story, I could at least have shared those parts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Miller is specific about the mechanism, and attendance is not it. It is the ten thousand small exchanges. Whether anyone in the house reflects out loud. Whether a child ever sees a parent moved by something they cannot explain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My children got the building. What they did not get was me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They are grown now, so I cannot rerun it. But the organ does not expire, and the conversation is still available \u2014 and I know exactly what I owe them, which is the half I never said out loud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That will be an awkward dinner. I intend to have it anyway.  Because I want them to find their spiritual side and be happy and whole. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Same Mistake, at Scale<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I do not think that pattern is unusual, and I do not think it stays in the family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Ambivalence transmits. More reliably than conviction, and far more reliably than absence \u2014 because people are extremely good at reading what you actually mean, and they will believe the tell over the statement every time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">An organization reads its leader the way a child reads a parent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You can hold the all-hands. You can put the purpose on the wall, recite it on schedule, and maintain a perfectly respectable social relationship with your own stated values. If you are privately embarrassed by them, everyone will know by the second quarter. Not from anything you said, but from the unsaid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For twenty-five years I ran that experiment on a household of four.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A leader runs it for hundreds of people who never got a vote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We have run it collectively, too. Rather than risk the fight over whose container is correct, we abandoned the subject entirely \u2014 in the clinic, the classroom, the boardroom, the public square. I was told that it is improper to discuss religion or politics. Miller&#8217;s word for it is glacial: something like a forty-year ice age on spiritual discourse in public life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Not a conspiracy. A stalemate. Nobody knows where the line falls between naming a human reality and imposing a belief, so we say nothing at all. Forty years of institutional silence about the faculty most protective against despair, during the exact decades when despair became a leading cause of death among the young.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That is the cost of our comfort. It came due one quiet afternoon at a time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">A Test That Does Not Require Agreement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Miller offers a replacement for the whole argument, and it is the most useful thing in either episode. When someone objects that terrible things have been done in the name of religion, she does not defend the tradition. She asks whether the practice is consistent with <em>natural spirituality.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Is it loving? Does it guide? Is it inclusive?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A functional test, not a doctrinal one. Any tradition can pass it. Any tradition can fail it. It moves the question from &#8216;which&#8217;\u00a0to\u00a0&#8216;whether&#8217; \u2014 the only move ever available to people who have to work together on Monday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Why This Cannot Wait<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Every week I talk with leaders building their organizations as efficiently as they know how. Optimizing. Shipping. Hitting their numbers. And when I ask what all that competence is <em>for<\/em>, they change the subject exactly the way Maslow&#8217;s colleagues did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think we are losing people. Not to incompetence but to emptiness. Not to failure, but to a kind of success that fills nothing. It may not be bad leadership, but a lack of leadership. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That is Part Two&#8217;s argument. But you do not need it to start. It is fine for now to squint. It is fine to doubt. What is no longer fine is denying that the appetite is there \u2014 calling it naive, or private, or out of bounds for serious conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The capacity is already in your building. Already in your house. Already in you. It has been there the whole time, unnamed, and unnamed things quietly atrophy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My father had no budget, no metrics, no institutional permission and no functioning eyes. He had a wheelchair and a room full of people who could not remember his name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He did the work anyway, in the last room of his life, and something in that room woke up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Something in me woke up too. It just took me another decade to notice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Whatever you are leading, you have more to work with than he did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Rescue the baby. Name what you see. Have conversations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Sources:<\/strong> Hidden Brain, &#8220;Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain,&#8221; Parts 1 and 2, with Lisa Miller (2026). Lisa Miller, <em>The Awakened Brain<\/em>. K.S. Kendler et al., <em>American Journal of Psychiatry<\/em> 154:3 (1997). Aldous Huxley, <em>The Perennial Philosophy<\/em> (1945) and <em>Island<\/em> (1962).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>In Part Two: why Maslow told us this capacity belonged to a gifted few, why his own book says otherwise, and what happens to the argument when the machines take every rung below it. Plus, the second title I have started using, and the three ways this idea gets abused along with some proposed guardrails.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Related: <a href=\"https:\/\/betterplaces.blog\/?p=1447\">Leaders: Start Seeing AI Clearly<\/a> \u00b7 <a href=\"https:\/\/betterplaces.blog\/?p=1342\">From CEO to CI-S<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>If these themes resonate with you, I have explored them at length in my books, including the questions of meaning, work, and what it takes to build organizations that let people flourish. You can find them at robertrasmussen.me, and I would be honored if you read them.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p> Religion aside or secondary, it needs a voice in our society, and I have tried hard to advocate for a new language to invite it into our collectives, into our businesses, and into our politics.  <a href=\"https:\/\/betterplaces.blog\/?p=1481\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Rescuing the Baby, Part One: The Certainty I Could Not Find<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":238892274,"featured_media":1485,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pf3Jag-nT","jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/betterplaces.blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/better-places-6a67c5cb216e9.png?fit=1024%2C1024&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/betterplaces.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/betterplaces.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/betterplaces.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/betterplaces.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/238892274"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/betterplaces.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1481"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/betterplaces.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1522,"href":"https:\/\/betterplaces.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1481\/revisions\/1522"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/betterplaces.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/betterplaces.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/betterplaces.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/betterplaces.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}