It's been more than a year since I posted anything about the Enlightened Caveman concept. That's because I've been nose down trying to get my book published (not to mention the five or six other major "projects" I seem to have going at any given moment). In any case, the day has come. The book is out, and I'm ecstatic.

For those of you were with me back in the day, here's what you have to look forward to - revise and extend, baby. Mostly extend. That's my current focus. Having completed Healing The Unhappy Caveman in early 2004, I've had a few years to ruminate on the ideas put forth there. I spent two of them arguing them with a small, but very engaged, group of folks who visited my site regularly. (Might those have been the happiest days I've ever lived, intellectually speaking? Perhaps.) That site still exists - sort of. It's over at Blogger.com, and it can be found by clicking here. I pulled as much of that content over to this site as I could. Alas, comments were problematic, so where there were comments of any importance, I've included links back to the original posts.

Anyhow, revise and extend. Extend.

I'm in a new place these days. I'm still wholeheartedly advocating the Enlightened Caveman concept, but I'm now working on integrating it into a larger framework of what it means to live life to fullest. I guess what I'm saying is that we'll be moving forward on this blog, not backwards.

Of course, that is not to say that I am not interested in talking about the concept. It's a serious passion area for me. I'm just saying that I want to take it further and use the concept as a component in a bigger picture. But if YOU want to talk about it - email me at ec at enlightenedcaveman dot com. I'll be glad to entertain any useful discussion.

So, to connect this to the title - here I am emerging from mental purgatory. The question is where am I? If hell, it'll be a lot of work with nothing to show for it. If heaven, it'll be pushing ever farther into solution space (and I might even sell a book or two). We'll know soon enough...

This is a series about relationships - why we need them, how we get them, and how we keep them. There will be several parts. This is the fourth - it focuses on quantifying the quality and/or depth of your relationships. Previous parts include:

• identifying the target; (click here)
• how we take control of our environment to make it friendly to our efforts; (click here)
  
• the difference between getting relationships and keeping them;(click here)
  

It's fitting that I can simply pick up where I left off more than two years ago when I was writing almost daily. That means these ideas have some durability - at least with me. In any case, it's time to finally make good on the conclusion of this series.

Here's a question. Is it possible to quantify the value of a given relationship? I think it is - at least in a relative sense. It comes down to concurrence. It's about those moments when we're on the same wavelength with another person. Though I have no evidence whatsoever to support it, I have long had a sense that we are designed to pursue these events with one another. It doesn't matter if I'm right. You can think of this as a thought experiment, if you like.

I believe it is moments of concurrence that forge human connections. (That notion alone would catch natural selection's eye, no?) And the more heightened the emotional state, the deeper the connection. A lightweight version of concurrence, one with only so much emotional gravitas, occurs when we agree with someone about something we like or don't like - such as a band or a book. A deeply emotional moment of concurrence, however, occurs when we share something like the birth of a child or a crisis situation. If we think of every relationship as having something like a concurrence account, we can say that the former example adds a little to the account while the latter adds a lot.

With that conceptual model in place, we can quantify the value of any given relationship by simply doing the math. And when we do, we can envision a progression of sorts to situate specific relationships in the context of other specific relationships in terms of value.

We should say that a basic acquaintance relationship - such as that between co-workers who don't know each other very well - is on the low end of the value hierarchy. (Yes, I said hierarchy. Those of you with an allergy to hierarchies should abandon now. Save yourself. Go on without me.) Above that, we could place new and/or infrequent friendships - the key being that the parties involved have not shared any truly emotional moments of concurrence. These are people who perhaps enjoy spending time with one another, but there's really no depth there. Going farther, we might find relationships where mildly emotional moments of concurrence have been shared - such as being on the same winning team or being in the same peacetime military unit. Still higher, we get into real relationships, the ones that hurt when we lose them.

Here's where emotionally-based moments of concurrence earn their stripes. Events of this kind boost the concurrence account to levels that are difficult to achieve with non-emotional concurrences. A year's worth of non-emotional moments of concurrence can be eclipsed instantly by a single, deeply-emotional shared experience. This is where good friend relationships and new romances are situated. (Anyone who has been in a requited love relationship can attest to the strong emotional experience associated with those early realizations that both parties are in love.) We might call this the second-tier of human relationships - ones that are defined by their basis in emotional concurrence events.

Beyond just the entry-level second-tier relationship, we get into the kinds of relationships that usually accompany long-term circumstantial or commitment-based proximity - family and partner relationships, to be precise. The concurrence account is loaded with non-emotional moments of concurrence - enjoying the same dinner, laughing at the same TV shows, grooving to the same music, getting frustrated on the same vacations, etc. Peppered throughout those everyday experiences are the emotional moments of concurrence that push the account into the stratosphere. Births, deaths, graduations, first loves, breakups, and so on. (Incidentally, here we find yet another way to justify the old saw - blood is thicker than water. ) The bottom line is that this upper level of human relationships is, in my view, the pinnacle of value.

Now, after all that, there's the topic at hand - Relationships 101 - which implies that there's a lesson here. The notion of quantifying value is highly instructive for one very important reason. At each level, there are appropriate and inappropriate approaches to human interaction. If we can objectively assess our relationships in terms of concurrence, we can place them on the hierarchy, thus gaining insight into how we should conduct ourselves. For example, don't marry someone with whom you have no emotionally-based concurrence.

And here, we end up right back where we started in part 1 - what do we want? We want healthy second-tier relationships, as many as we can manage (not have, manage). Assessing the ones we have allows us to see if we're there, or if we have work to do (and we almost always do have work to do). It prevents us from rushing things, and it prevents us from misjudging what we have, which happens when we mistake emotionally-charged moments for concurrent emotionally charged moments. The former adds nothing to the account, while the latter is a big deposit.

So there you have it.

I should note that there's at least one logical fallacy in this post. Can you spot it?

One of the most important changes in my world view has come in the last few months as I've digested a lot of the writings of Ken Wilber. Now, keep in mind, that I am very much a "pick and choose" kind of guy, so I have yet to find a personality/thinker with whom I wholeheartedly agree on all topics. Wilber is no different. Nevertheless, his efforts at Integrating disparate and seemingly unrelated bodies of knowledge (and experience) are nothing short of brilliant. And best of all, what he has come up with - a true feat of integral thinking - is amazingly useful when it comes to analyzing and communicating about most anything, including the enlightened caveman concept.

What follows is mostly groundwork, to set the foundation for interpreting the content of my book in Integral terms. I'll start to connect the dots at a high level toward the end. A subsequent post (or posts) will dive deeper - taking the book chapter by chapter. (This is a serious case of, "If I knew then what I know now.")

Moving on...The core of Wilber's Integral framework is the notion of quadrants. I internalize this as perspectives - there are four that you can (and should) take when viewing a serious topic. (Non-serious topics do not require such rigor, and failing to recognize this usually results in missing forests for trees.) Anyhow, here's a look at the four quadrants, lifted shamelessly from Wilber's Wikipedia entry.

The upper left quadrant (UL) deals with the internal side of things for an individual entity. In other words, it addresses the subjective interior of an individual mind. Upper Right (UR), on the other hand, deals with the objective exterior of the same individual entity. So, borrowing some insight from Smokey Robinson, "People say I'm the life of the party (UR), but deep inside I'm blue (UL)."

Similarly, the lower left (LL) quadrant focuses on the subjective side of things for a collective of individual entities - this is the culture view. The lower right (LR) deals with the external collective - the social side of things. For example, consider the difference between say a chess club and a religious sect. In LR terms, they're pretty similar - a free-formed gathering of people. But in LL terms, they're vastly different. One is a group of people who share a common interest - pretty tame as far as culture is concerned. The other, however, has much more going on from a shared subjective experience perspective.

Another way to look at the quadrants is in terms of I, We, It, and Its. The "I" is represented in the UL quadrant, and the "We" is LL. The "It" and "Its" are UR and LR, respectively. Or, if you prefer Plato, you can think of the UL as the beautiful (as in "beauty is in the eye of the beholder"), LL is the good (as in, morality is a "we" thing), and the right quadrants (UR and LR) are the true (as in, the objective truths of our world).

Right away, you can probably see how useful this quadrant thing can be. It provides an additional bit of context for whatever we happen to be interested in. And when it comes to the enlightened caveman concept, it gives me a serious leg up.

In the most simplistic terms, my book is a method of improving one's UL experiences by understanding more of the UR and LR reality of the human species. It is about improving the experience of "I" by really understanding the "it" of myself. It's similar to how wild-life experts, such as Jeff Corwin, have to learn a great deal of objective information about animal behavior - as in, what kinds of circumstances cause what kinds of responses - in order to successfully navigate their trips into the bush. For us, we have to learn objective information about how our brains are organized, what kinds of capabilities they have, how our emotions work, and when they come into play. Most importantly, we have to learn how much of the "out-of-the-box" human mind can be changed (read: improved), and we have to learn how to change it. When we absorb all this, we can discern how to better navigate the modern world we live in - in interior subjective terms.

Happiness is a subjective thing, no? So is unhappiness. There's a lot of truth to the notion that choosing to be happy and to look at things in a positive way are the keys to happiness. Unfortunately, that's a little vague. And it's bringing a knife to a gunfight. The objective reality (UR) of the human mind includes a battery of emotionally-mediated modules that were designed to facilitate man's survival in a world that no longer exists. Those modules are working against us all the time, until, that is, we become aware of them and we learn how to tame them. So there are two parts to Healing The Unhappy Caveman - the first provides the UR information; the second provides the method for integrating that knowledge into our daily UL experiences. (Incidentally, Part 2 also calls upon LL and LR perspectives to elaborate on the method.)

My next task is to place each chapter in its integral quadrant context. Stay tuned...