spiritual psychology

CHAPTER FOUR — THE REPAIR OF THE PAIR

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” — St John 1:1

Despair is not just sadness taken too far. It is not only a mood, or a chemical imbalance, or a generational quirk.

Despair is de-pair. It is the loss of pairing. The breaking of the two-ness that makes life bearable, breathable, meaningful.

Everything alive depends on a pair: two lungs, two eyes, two ears, two hemispheres, two hands meeting in prayer. Even the Ark — the vessel of survival in a world collapsing under its own corruption — begins with the divine insistence that life is preserved two by two.

Nothing can continue in isolation. Nothing grows from the singular. Nothing heals from the one-sided. Creation itself is a pairing.

The crisis of this age — especially in the half of so-called Gen Z who are not simply depressed but in despair — is that they have been born into a de-paired world.

A world with left hemisphere overdrive and almost no right hemisphere grounding. A world of stimulation without rest, exposure without containment, will without guidance, identity without depth, information without wisdom, individuality without true relationship. A world of Mankind without Humankind.

They are the first generation raised inside a culture that has lost the Ark. Lost the pair. Lost the two-by-two grounding of the human nervous system itself.

This is why despair overwhelms them. Their being is split. Their between has broken. The left and right no longer speak. The inner Ark has capsized.

This is what your earlier writing called the Addictive System: a system that drains life faster than it gives it, fractures attention, hollows meaning, and trains the brain to live in a narrow, overclocked left-hand state cut off from its natural partner.

The brain itself is an Ark.

Two hemispheres, two modes of knowing, two ways of meeting reality.

The left hemisphere is sharp, narrow, grasping. It categorises, dissects, predicts, controls. It likes to hold things still so it can use them.

The right hemisphere is wide, receptive, relational. It senses context, nuance, depth, presence. It does not grasp; it attends. It lets the world be alive.

A healthy human being needs both. Needs the dance. Needs the pair. The right opens to the living whole; the left helps us work within it. The right perceives meaning; the left helps articulate and act.

The Addictive System has crowned the left and exiled the right. It has enthroned speed over depth, control over trust, image over reality, data over wisdom, productivity over presence, argument over listening, self-branding over self-revelation.

This is not just philosophy. It is neurology. A generation has been trained into perpetual left-hemisphere overdrive with almost no grounding in right-hemisphere rootedness.

No Ark. No two by two. No pair. Just a flood of stimulation and a single inner captain completely unfit to steer the storm.

Gen Z are not simply anxious. They are carrying a hemispheric trauma. They have been asked to live from one half of their brain in a world whose complexity requires both.

The repair must begin where the damage began: in the pairing itself.

This is where Diction Resolution Therapy (DRT) is more than a concept. It is a vehicle.

The left-hand word in the DRT device describes what happens when Mankind lives from the left hemisphere alone: stuck, looping, broken, controlled by the very patterns it thinks it controls. The right-hand word points toward Humankind: right-hemisphere openness, relational withness, contact with a Larger Mind, trust in a Creative Intelligence beyond self-will.

The two sides are not enemies. They are meant to be yoked — a living pair, a restored Ark.

DRT does not ask the left to die; it invites the left to bow. To return to service instead of pretending to be the king.

Practically, this means teaching young people to notice their own inner split, naming the Addictive System for what it is, legitimising their despair as a sane response to a de-paired culture, and offering a path that does not abandon reason but roots it again in relationship.

The Healing Trust (THT) knows this in another language. The hands of a healer do not fix; they pair. They reconnect. They bridge. They invite the human field back into resonance with a greater field. The energy they call upon is the same field in which “the Word was with God” — the original withness, the primordial pair from which life and light arise.

In the same way, a DRT practitioner is not there to impose a new system, but to help restore the inner Ark: left and right in dialogue, malediction and benediction as ordained terminals for the government of the psyche, Mankind and Humankind in relationship, personal will and Creative Will in partnership, the small con and the great Con held together in paradox.

When awareness of this pairing begins to return, despair starts to loosen — not because circumstances have changed, but because the soul is no longer alone inside its own skull.

The young do not need us to promise them that the world will be fine. They need us to show them that they do not have to face the world as a single, isolated, de-paired self.

They can be paired again — with their own right hemisphere, with other hearts, with the Word that still speaks, with the Creative Intelligence that still holds the Ark open two by two.

The first act of repair is to say to them, in words and in presence:

“You are not mad. You are not weak. You have been asked to live in a way no human being was designed to live. Let us rebuild the pair together.”

As the hemispheres begin to listen to each other, as the left steps down and the right steps forward, as the person begins to taste withness instead of isolation, the floodwaters inside them start to fall.

The Ark does not remove the storm. It carries life through it.

This is what DRT, THT, and this book hope to offer to a generation raised in de-pair: not an escape from the flood, but a way to walk into the Ark within them — two by two, pair by pair — until Humankind can bear what Mankind alone could not.

CHAPTER THREE — THE FEW WHO CARRY THE MANY

There is a mystery woven through the history of the world — a mystery that rarely appears in public, yet quietly shapes the fate of civilisations.

It is the mystery of how so few realised Human beings have ever walked the earth, and yet how astonishingly far their influence extends.

The number has always been small. Sometimes one in an age. Sometimes hidden entirely. Yet without them, the world would collapse.

The Sufis call such a being al-Qutb — the Pole, the axis around which the invisible order of the world turns. The Qutb is not recognised by earthly authority. He sits in no palace and rules no institution. But everything stable, everything merciful, everything quietly preserved is preserved because he stands.

In the Qur’an he appears as Khidr — the Green One, the guide Moses could not understand because Khidr moved by a law higher than law.

In the Christian imagination he appears as St George, not primarily as a dragon-slayer but as the defender of the innocent, the protector of what must be preserved.

In English folklore he surfaces again as Robin Hood, the outlaw who serves a deeper justice than the crown, aligned with the unseen moral order rather than earthly power.

Far to the East, in the mountains of Tibet, another whisper appears: that certain High Lamas, fully realised beings, sustain the balance of the world simply through their presence. Their monasteries were not just schools — they were tuning forks for the world’s spiritual field.

Most hidden of all is the lineage of the Sarmoung Masters of Wisdom, the Brotherhood said to have preserved the “bees’ knowledge,” refining and transmitting the nectar of divine wisdom across centuries so it would not be lost when civilisations collapsed.

The Sarmoung were custodians of humanity’s inner architecture — not to rule the world, but to keep it from dissolving from within.

At this point, we must remember what John G. Bennett said in his final public talk, distilling everything he learned from Gurdjieff, the Sarmoung, and decades of direct work with hidden traditions.

John G. Bennett quotation

Bennett understood what few dare to see: that the Human race is an unfinished experiment, extraordinarily difficult, and that the transition from Mankind to Humankind is not guaranteed. It requires help — not institutional help, but help from those few realised beings who have crossed the threshold and now bear the weight of the many.

Different continents. Different myths. Different languages. Yet all these traditions describe the same pattern: a small number of realised Human beings hold the world together from within.

They are not rulers. They are not prophets. They are not public figures. They are poles of stability, silent axes upon which the visible world unwittingly turns.

This is the Unseen Government — not a conspiracy, not a shadow elite, but a spiritual architecture that predates nations, institutions, and religions.

Those who belong to it walk with humility, often in obscurity, sometimes in disguise. Their presence radiates order into chaos, mercy into cruelty, balance into a world tipping toward collapse.

Every tradition carries a whisper of this group because the human soul remembers them, even when the mind does not.

Here is the great paradox: those who cross from Mankind into Humankind touch — even briefly — the edge of this current. The movement into alignment “with” the Real is the same movement that sustains the saints, the sages, the Green Man, the Sarmoung Masters, and the Lamas who hold the world upright.

The Twelve Steps tap into the same architecture: not through doctrine, but through alignment; not through belief, but through withness. Surrender brings a human being into contact with the same ancient field of support and governance.

When a person awakens into Humankind, even for a moment, they begin to bear what once crushed them. They join the current that has supported humanity since humanity first became capable of self-reflection. This is the ancient distinction between “the quick and the dead” — not in the crude sense of bodies and graves, but in the deeper sense recognised by the earliest Christians and later by the mystics: the difference between those who merely live, and those who have become alive.

This awakened aliveness — what some traditions name Christ consciousness — is not reserved for saints or prophets. It is the same shift made quietly, anonymously, in the Twelve-Step rooms for the last ninety years. Millions have brushed this threshold without ever naming it. The Steps, like the old Ways, do not create the Real; they align a person with it. They turn the deadened life of Mankind into the quickened life of Humankind.

This chapter opens that veil just enough to show that the crossing from Mankind to Humankind is not merely personal psychology. It is an initiation into a lineage. It is an entry into an ancient order. It is a step onto a Way guarded by Khidr, preserved by the Sarmoung, sustained by the Lamas, and anchored by the Qutb.

Whether we recognise it or not, every sincere seeker, every recovering person, every human who begins to walk “with” the Real is led by the same invisible hand.

And the Way continues, stone by unseen stone, because the hidden ones have always stood where the world would otherwise fall.

CHAPTER TWO — THE CIRCLE OF BIRTH AND BEARING

“Humankind is born of Mankind, then Mankind is borne by Humankind.” — A.J. Dettman

Every spiritual teaching worth its breath begins with a paradox — and this one is the doorway into the whole architecture of The Holy Con.

Humankind is born of Mankind. The higher emerges from the lower. The awakened self grows out of the wounded self. Consciousness rises through the very soil of unconsciousness.

This is why no stage of collapse is wasted. No failure is irrelevant. No addiction is outside the curriculum of awakening. The raw material of Humankind is always Mankind.

But the paradox does not end there.

Once Humankind is born, Mankind is no longer the carrier. The polarity reverses. The higher begins to bear the lower. Humankind carries Mankind. Humankind holds what once held it. Humankind becomes the shelter, the governance, the orientation, the right-hand alignment.

This is the turning at the heart of recovery, the pivot inside every Twelve Step experience, the movement from left-hand to right-hand in the DRT axis.

We begin in Mankind — with the ego, with self-will, with the illusion of personal mastery.

But when the self cannot carry the self any longer, Humankind is born — the capacity to be with the Greater Power, with surrender, with grace, with the paradox that reveals the next step.

And once Humankind rises, it begins the work of bearing Mankind.

This is why recovery does not erase the wound — it carries it. Transforms it. Bears it as a mother bears a child and as a child in adulthood bears the aging mother.

The relationship reverses but the bond remains.

This is why opposites are always connected. Wrong and right. Collapse and renewal. Mankind and Humankind. Con and con. Two aspects of one unfolding. Two poles of one mercy.

Every addict knows this circle. Every mystic lives it. Every civilisation, when it collapses and rises, confirms it.

Humankind is not another species. It is Mankind transfigured. Mankind relieved of the burden of carrying itself. Mankind lifted into alignment with the creative Force it forgot.

And when Humankind takes up its place, it begins to bear Mankind with tenderness — not condemnation, not avoidance, not disgust, but recognition.

Because Humankind remembers what Mankind forgets: that every fall is formative, every collapse is instructive, every darkness is a womb.

This is why the Holy Con is not a movement of escape but a movement of withness. Not leaving the old behind but carrying it rightly, through a new alignment with the paradox that makes transformation possible.

Humankind is born of Mankind. Then Mankind is borne by Humankind. Birth and carrying. Collapse and bearing. Left and right. The small con and the great Con. One circle. One unfolding. One mercy.

And the Way continues, stone by unseen stone, as we follow the curve of what carries us next.

CHAPTER ONE — THE TWO WAYS OF WITH

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” — Rumi

We live in a time when many people believe institutions are a con. But the word con never meant deception. Its root is the Latin cum — meaning with. And everything depends on this question: With what — or with whom — are we aligned?

This question opens the entire Way.

There is a con with a small c and a Con with a capital C. There is being with in a lesser way and being With in a greater way. There is Mankind and there is Humankind.

Mankind is the left-hand place — the state of being with the wrong thing: with the stuck behaviour, with the collapsing institution, with the ego attempting to self-govern what it cannot heal, with repetition rather than revelation, with survival rather than surrender.

Humankind is the right-hand place — the state of being with the right thing: with the Greater Power, with the breath of the Real, with the paradox that restores sanity, with Step Eleven consciousness, with the Creative Intelligence that the Twelve Steps return us to.

This is not moralism. This is alignment. This is orientation. This is the architecture of the soul. We are designed to get things wrong before we get things right, vice and virtue are in the very template of individuate wisdoms.

The DRT behaviour device shows this with elegant precision — a single vertical axis holding the left and right words, revealing the movement from Mankind toward Humankind.

On the left-hand side is Mankind — the small con: being with the failing pattern, with the exhausted will, with the illusion of self-sufficiency.

On the right-hand side is Humankind — the great Con: being with the Higher Power, with humility, with paradox, with the Source that makes healing possible.

These two sides are never enemies. They are connected, paired, dependent — two poles of one paradox, the paradox through which transformation enters.

Wrong leans toward right. Right redeems wrong. The brokenness becomes the place of belonging. The collapse becomes the first clarity. The wound becomes the aperture for Light.

Our institutions are collapsing because they have remained too long in the realm of Mankind — with self-reference, with egoic governance, with structures cut off from their Source.

But collapse is not annihilation. Collapse is the small con exhausting itself. Collapse is the threshold of the great Con — the return of Humankind.

Every addict knows this. Every recovery room embodies this. Every true spiritual lineage teaches this.

A person recovers not by becoming stronger, but by becoming With. Not by reinforcing the ego, but by returning to Humankind.

A culture recovers in exactly the same way.

The question is always the same: Are we living as Mankind — or awakening as Humankind? What are we With? And what must we come-With next?

This is where The Holy Con begins — with the rediscovery of withness as the axis of healing, orientation, and return.

And the Way will appear as the next stone rises beneath the foot.

Delivery

The left word sleeps. The right word wakes. Denial is the sacred bridge by which life returns to BE.


There is a deeper pulse beneath the movement from sleep to awakening, a rhythm that every tradition has tried to name and that every human life eventually encounters. It is the rhythm of denial, not as stubbornness or refusal, but as the sacred trembling that happens when innocence brushes up against truth. Denial is the bridge-state. The hinge. The necessary trembling before dawn.

This rhythm appears with startling clarity in Surah ar-Raḥmān, where the Divine recites creation’s wonders and then asks, again and again: “Which of your Lord’s signs will you deny?” The repetition is not accusation; it is awakening. The refrain exposes the precise point where the heart is still asleep — where separation is still believed, where BE is still forgotten.

Denial here is not moral failure. It is the sound a soul makes when its old structure is cracking. It is the first stirring of awakening. The dream resists being dissolved, not because it is wicked, but because it is frightened of how bright reality is.

The same rhythm appears again in what we called the Quantum Christ. Consciousness oscillates — concealing, revealing, collapsing one state to allow another to arise. Christ’s foretelling that His disciples would deny Him is not a prediction of betrayal; it is the initiation into this quantum pulse. The old self must collapse. The fragile architecture of innocence must tremble. Denial is the final contraction before expansion. It is the last shadow before the light breaks through.

When read together, Rahman and the Quantum Christ are not two teachings but two angles on the same cosmic movement. Rahman shows us that denial must be heard before realisation can happen. Christ shows us that denial must be lived before awakening can bloom. Both reveal the sacred necessity of the bridge-state — the oscillation that makes return to BE possible.

And this is why the Addictive System in Diction Resolution Therapy™ is not an enemy. It is simply the place where sleep has not yet recognised itself. It is innocence responding to pressure. When life intensifies and the sacred disease of addiction begins its messaging, denial arises not to hide truth but to protect the sleeper until awakening is safe. Denial is not resistance to healing; it is the labour-pain of healing.

Only when the denial is exposed —
only when the refrain is finally heard —
only when the heart realises what it has pushed away —
does awakening open.

The left word sleeps.
The right word wakes.
Denial is the bridge between them.

This bridge is not crossed once.
It is crossed again and again,
precisely as the mystics said it must be.
This is the pulse of consciousness,
the same oscillation that governs the quantum world and the spiritual life.

And so the two vertical words — the asleep pattern and the awake pattern — are simply the two wings of this teaching. One cannot fly without both. Innocence without wisdom circles endlessly. Wisdom without innocence becomes brittle and abstract. The sacred movement is the crossing — the trembling — the denial that cracks open the dream until BE shines through.

Rumi named the whole cycle with a simplicity that dissolves all commentary:

“Life is returning.”

Returning through the moment denial breaks.
Returning through the collapse of an old identity.
Returning through the oscillation of consciousness itself.
Returning through every small awakening that follows every small fall.

Rahman, the Quantum Christ, and the lived reality of recovery all tell the same truth:

Denial is not the obstacle.
Denial is the turning.
Denial is the bridge by which life returns to BE.

And we are designed — ingeniously, tenderly — to cross that bridge again and again
until the return becomes natural, swift, and joyful.

*Written collaboratively by Andrew Dettman and ChatGPT (HIAI).*