Agency in Life

(The Hierarchy of Agency: 1)

The framework of a hierarchy of agency is deeply useful for experiencing and understanding ourselves, our world, and even God. It provides context for our values and for why we find meaning in the many ways of transcending ourselves. We will begin our study of this framework by exploring agency itself.

We experience agency primarily as the power to choose. This presupposes having the freedom of options, a field of choices open to us, and having the effective capacity to choose among those options. There are many levels of this power of choice. Our usual sense of agency is fragmented among our own competing needs and urges, desires and habits, which create an ongoing inner drama or carnival that masks our greater possibilities. Our body self wants one thing, our feeling self another, and our mind self a third. Whichever part is momentarily the strongest or loudest wins and chooses for us. This is a deeply unsatisfactory way to live. Thus, the first major personal step up the ladder of agency occurs when we integrate all the separate mini-agents within us into one agent, namely us, our Self, our I. This is a big step in our spiritual transformation, a step that appears intermittently at first.

Why is such personal integration desirable and positive? First, we become more ourselves, our whole self. Each of our partial selves agrees to devote its measure of freedom, its will, its agency to cooperating with our other constituent selves to create a stronger, broader agent that is our singular Self, thereby bringing our body, heart, and mind into an integrated whole that is who we are. Before that, we are a loosely-bound collection of self-important mini-selves, living an inwardly disjointed life. After personal integration, we can act from and for the whole of ourselves. Our self-efficacy, our cognized ability to take action, reaches a whole new level, a step up the hierarchy of agency.

Importantly, such integration cannot happen by top-down force. The imposition of self-discipline can be useful in revealing to us the degree of our inner fragmentation, by producing the energy that enables us to see ourselves clearly. However, force or discipline tends to entrench our mini-I’s in seeking to preserve their separate existence. That separateness, however, proves illusory. The actual integration comes through our partial selves being attracted toward the truth of non-separateness and accepting to live a larger life by joining the whole that we become. In this next level of the hierarchy of agency, we become a complete and inwardly unified human.

Unexpectedly, by becoming fully ourselves, we start to notice that our individuality, while unique and fully us, does not feel as separate from other people as we formerly felt. We find ourselves occupying the same inner space as other people. To be ourselves, we no longer need to assert ourselves as being separate from others. We find the I and the Thou indistinguishable in that inner, essential space. Our separate bodies and separate personalities persist, yet beneath all that, an essential sameness welcomes us.

This non-separateness among people makes itself felt in a marriage, in family, in teams, in neighborhoods, in organizations, in places of worship, in cities and nations, and in our common humanity. All such groupings can be seen as greater wholes, as greater levels of agency, beyond personal individuality. The individuals within these groupings cooperate with each other to serve and become the whole.

As this newly revealed truth seeps into our being, we also find that all living things occupy that same inner space, that same essential reality. By allowing ourselves to enter that fully, we become Life itself in this yet further level in the hierarchy of agency, the agency of Life on this planet.

We started exploring this hierarchy of agency with our various selves arising from our body. To begin to see how the whole universe is tied into one transcendent Reality, we next look at the levels of agency leading up to Life.

For this week, look into your own agency, whether fragmented, unified, or transcending yourself.

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