On one level, you could say there’s essentially no difference. Both constitute a belief in something highly subjective that produces positive emotions such as wonder, awe and excitement. Believing in Santa Claus can motivate you to be a good person and so can a gratitude practice. Both of them require your faith and in return, have the potential to be deeply meaningful.
But wait, there’s a huge difference. With Santa Claus, we are asked to put our faith in the existence of some magical dude in a flying sled pulled by reindeer, which is ridiculous. With gratitude, we are asked to put our faith in the power of our own thoughts, which is totally legit. Right?
Well, a gratitude practice may seem legit to an adult who is into self development. But to a teenager, it can seem completely ridiculous. They don’t want their friends riding in mom’s car because of her embarrassing gratitude sticky notes all over the dashboard! Oh, and oops, my inner six year old just got upset when I called Santa ridiculous. Sorry about that, little guy.
In our modern, rationalistic culture which largely views success in terms of our ability to predict and control outcomes, we understandably place a high value on objectivity. Our capacity to reason effectively depends on it and we learn to be skeptical of anything that is based in subjectivity.
This value system is an evolutionary step forward from the ethnocentric thinking that preceded it. It’s the foundation of what makes science possible and it helps us to ground our thinking in facts instead of automatically believing everything we are told. Great progress in humanity’s mastery of the exterior world has become possible as a result of this evolutionary leap. In Integral Theory, this shift in values occurs at the transition from Amber to the Orange stage of development.
And, there’s a catch. Two misunderstandings can happen at this transition from Amber to Orange. First, we can become polarized in our values by glorifying the objective and coming to see the subjective as an enemy, instead of recognizing the wisdom that both have their place. Second, we can mistakenly conclude that the entire realm of the interior (emotion, thought, intent, etc.) is nothing but subjective and imaginary, while concluding that the entire realm of the exterior (concrete, physical phenomenon) is the only thing that is objective and real.
The combination of these two misunderstandings can result in a devastating, wholesale rejection of the interior realm as untrustworthy and even insignificant. Alternatively, it can lead to a dysfunctional compartmentalization where the interior realm applies only to family, relationships, and maybe the arts but not achievement, business or anything of “real value”.
The degree of harm caused by these shadows of rationalism are evident at scale as our culture embraces, normalizes and lives according to an increasingly singular Orange perspective. Consider the the crisis of dramatically rising youth suicide rates, America’s obsession with prescription medication and the opioid overdose crisis, or the crisis of climate change connected to the widespread association of happiness with consumption.
Certainly, we should look for science-based solutions to the problem of climate change such as technology to reduce emissions and so on. But in our disregard of the significance of the interior realm, we tend to overlook the ways in which the epistemic distortions perpetuated by our culture might in fact be at the root of the problem.
What if not everything in the exterior realm is immune to subjectivity, and what if some aspects of the interior are in fact objective?
For an example of how subjectivity applies to the exterior realm, consider the optical illusion above. Which direction is she spinning? Can you get her to change direction?
For another example, consider the research which has emerged in quantum physics, revealing that the nature of reality itself, at least at the quantum level, appears to have been proven to be subjective. Inseparable from the presence of the observer.
As for the interior realm of thought, emotion and intention, subjectivity is apparent. But in what ways can the interior realm be objective? If your child was feeling terrified at night because he thought there was a boogeyman under his bed, that doesn’t mean there is actually a boogeyman under his bed. Yet, he really did think so and he experienced real terror along with real physiological symptoms. It is objectively true that he had that experience, even though the content of what he was believing that caused his reaction was subjective.
Yet another example of the objective interior: We can observe the differences between cultures in different parts of the world and just how profound yet consistent those differences are. Clearly, whatever it is that makes a culture the way it is has something real to it or it wouldn’t be so consistently observable within the culture. It is not a physical object that you can see and touch, yet two independent observers can confer that they have indeed observed the same thing.
Here are some more examples of phenomena that suggest our interior capacities are far more intelligent and connected to objective reality than we might think:
- Consider the placebo effect.
- Consider the growing evidence supporting the effectiveness of mind-body interventions for various health conditions.
- Consider the phenomena of limbic resonance.
- Consider that feeling you get when you walk into a room and somehow you can tell right away that a heated argument just happened there.
- Consider the research showing that a mother’s breast milk changes in response to her baby’s needs.
- Consider those people with a highly developed intuitive ability. Consider the accounts of astral travel, remote viewing, and other forms of clairvoyance.
We once assumed that the Earth was the center of the universe and that everything rotated around us, right? Well, what if today, we are assuming that the exterior is the one and only epistemic center of objective reality that everything else revolves around, when in fact it is only one aspect of a deeper underlying reality that also has other expressions and ways of being observed? Furthermore, what if subjectivity is an essential aspect of reality that we couldn’t exist without? What if the emotion of gratitude was the key to solving climate change?
I have a feeling that Santa Claus might approve. He does live on the North Pole, after all.
