Chapter 5: Developing Uniqueness

“Identity is that which enables a being to act as itself and not merely as a function of external forces.” — J. G. Bennett, The Dramatic Universe, Vol. II

“Individuality is not given; it has to be created.” — P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous

While the idea of creating unique value is nothing new, how often do we stop to reflect on what it really means to be “unique”? We may put on our Marketing Cap and try to figure out how a new product or service can appear as unique. We can analyze the market for gaps and position ourselves as doing something no one else is doing. This is Business 101.

The challenge is that AI can do this type of clever market analysis, too. In fact, it is getting quite good at it. It is also getting better, fast, at generating solutions to the problems it uncovers through this process. This raises a couple of key questions:

• What capacity do we have as human beings—or what capacity must we develop—to discover a deeper form of uniqueness, beyond simply reacting to market opportunities?
• How might this be the key to growing into new value-adding roles in an AI-integrated world?

The opening quotes in this chapter illustrate two key premises we’ll explore here, related to what makes us unique as individuals, teams, organizations, and communities. They seem contradictory at first glance:

• We are born unique—we have by nature a unique essence which is one-of-a-kind and cannot be taken away from us.
• This unique essence must be developed. It is like a seed that requires fertile soil, water, and sunlight.

Take a moment to reflect on these premises as you bring to mind a specific system that is meaningful for you. This could be your team or organization, your community, or a specific place. To what degree do you understand the unique essence of this system? To what degree has this uniqueness been developed? Hold these questions lightly for the moment, but let them resonate.

3 stages of human development

A 3-stage process of development is illustrated in the Fourth Way tradition we are exploring, which will help us in our work here:

Stage One: We are born with a unique essence. This is true for us as individuals, but also true for organizations, communities, industries, and so on. We might think of it as a unique pattern of potential—the seed that is being called to evolve into only what it can become.

Stage Two: We develop a “personality” through our lived experience. This includes everything that we accumulate through our lives: our knowledge, our stories, our beliefs, and so on. This personality covers up our essence in a way that is necessary for it to evolve. In other words, essence requires lived experience to be developed.

Stage Three: We learn to discern essence from personality, making personality passive in a way that enables essence to emerge as the activating force in our lives. It is this key shift that allows us to begin to create truly unique value, grounded in not only our own uniqueness but also in the unique potential of the systems that we are working to serve.

Another important idea put forward in this tradition is that for the vast majority of us, we are largely stuck in Stage Two. Our uniqueness remains covered up by the “personality” we have developed through our experience. As a result, our unique essence remains undeveloped.    

Gurdjieff writes of this in In Search of Being:

“Essence represents the true nature, the truth in man, whereas personality is false. But in proportion as personality develops, essence gradually manifests itself more rarely and feebly. It is very common for a person’s essence to stop growing at an early age and develop no further. As a result one will often find a grown-up person, even someone intellectual and, in its accepted meaning, highly ‘educated,’ who has the essence of a five- or six-year-old child. This means that everything we see in this person is in reality ‘not his own.’”

As leaders, we can reflect on both the degree to which this is true for us personally, as well as how it reflects the current state of our people and our places. What is the relationship between our inherent uniqueness and our “personality,” or the product of our experience? 

Uniqueness and non-displaceability

How does making this shift to the third stage of development, where we learn to discern and develop our unique essence, relate to our goal of evolving our unique value-adding roles in an AI-integrated world?

One observation is that most of us have been developed within systems that are designed to build up and reinforce personality. You can reflect on the degree this is true for you. As I think back on my own experience, I can see how my schooling and training were preparing me mostly to serve in a functional role: programming me with the skills, knowledge, beliefs, and so on, that I would need to “perform effectively.” I learned the rules of the game and how to play it.

Yet, at the same time, I can also see how I became increasingly disconnected from my own unique essence over time. My “performance” was conducted from behind different masks, for different contexts, which I learned to wear convincingly. At work. At home. In certain social situations. While this produced a certain kind of internal tension, it also led to a relatively good outcome. It led to having a beautiful family, running my own business, and keeping food on the table.

Yet, at this moment in history, we have an uncomfortable fact to face. AI is already quite good at “performing” in this way. It is also improving at breakneck speed. It can put on a mask and pretend to be whatever you need it to be. It can learn the rules and play the game. Arguably, if not already better than we can, soon better.

In other words, AI excels in the domain of personality. It accumulates knowledge. It optimizes patterned performance. It analyzes through categorization.

What AI can’t do is perceive the uniqueness of a living being or living system. It cannot see past the categories it was programmed with. Arguably, this requires a level of consciousness that AI does not possess. Whether or not AI might become conscious in this way, which is a subject of much debate, what light does this shine on our emerging roles as human beings in navigating this process? What does this reveal about the work we are being called to now?

Discerning and developing uniqueness as a process of making meaning

One of the biggest unanswered questions around AI’s potential impact on value-adding work is: how will people find meaning if AI displaces us in our current roles, which are primary sources of meaning for many of us?

I’ll suggest that the answer is in the question. In other words, our work becomes about making meaning. If essence is what makes us uniquely capable of creating value, then meaning is the lived process through which unique essence becomes active.

The author of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, John Vervaeke, said of meaning in a recent interview:

“Meaning isn’t something you simply find or impose on life; it’s about mattering — the way your life connects you to yourself, the world, and others in ways that genuinely matter to you.”

Take a moment to reflect on what matters most to you in your life. Don’t rush past this. Take your time. How does it relate to how your life connects you to yourself, to the world, and to others?

How does this relate to the concept of value, and how we are being called to create unique value? First, what do we mean by value?

In The Dramatic Universe, Vol. I, Bennett writes:

“Values are associated with interest, and interest depends upon potentiality and the ability to adjust the actual and the potential to one another.”

This gives us some insight into our core premise in this book: that what may ultimately separate us as human beings from our machines is the capacity to realize and actualize potential. From this perspective, we see that our ability to have an interest and to value is what enables this capacity. Yet, as Bennett writes, values alone neither create true meaning nor actualized potential:

“We may use the word meaning to designate that which reconciles fact and value… We must recognize also that this interpretation of the word ‘meaning’ implies that values in the absence of fact mean nothing. A world of pure value must collapse into a dream of unfulfilled potentialities, just as a world of unrelated fact could only be a dead world.”

Bennett highlights the importance of staying grounded in what we’ll refer to as the facts of existence. This is what separates this way of thinking from many others, which may make us feel good and “in touch” with our values, but don’t translate into unique value-adding capacity. To do that, we must be willing to face the facts of our current conditions, within the unique places we inhabit. We must be able to hold our values together with the reality of current conditions, and work to reconcile the creative tension between them.

There is also another dimension to this idea of value. Bennett adds:

“Always and in everything there is a need to reconcile not only fact and value but one level of values with another. In the domain of fact there is incoherence; in that of values there is a conflict of loyalties. The discovery of meanings on each scale and every level is the task of the understanding.”

This points to what we can refer to as a hierarchy of values. Bennett’s “conflict of loyalties” is something of an internal wrestling match between different sides of ourselves, or different aspects of essence and personality.

For example, when we are leading from personality, we may highly value what the world has taught us to value: status, admiration, wealth, power, and so on. As we engage in this Work and learn to lead from unique essence, this hierarchy of values begins to transform—it rearranges itself as our essence becomes activated and personality becomes “passive.” In other words, our programmed values lose their power and fall down the list as our deeper, inherent values rise toward the top of the hierarchy.

This helps us to see that the work ahead of us is not simply about projecting our existing values, but to develop them—to learn to source our highest values from what makes us uniquely who we are, rather than who we have been programmed to be.

Core practice: embodied imaging of unique potential

Here we’ll aim to slow down and put this into practice, remembering that the real gain to be found here is not in simply accumulating new ideas but in doing the work ourselves. Take a deep breath and create some space before working through the following short exercise.

Before we jump in, I’ll provide a quick disclaimer. While this practice of embodied imaging of unique potential is fundamental to this work, it is also challenging, especially at first. Most of us tend to look for quick and easy answers (a common pattern of personality in the modern world, where the shared belief is: move faster or be left behind).

This practice has much to do with loosening the grip of this tendency, allowing us to open up to the potential that it has prevented us from seeing for so long. This will require practice, patience, and persistence. It is not a one-time exercise, but rather a continuous practice that will require slowing down—challenging the common belief that what is needed most now is speed and knowledge.

Now, bring to mind a specific person for whom you feel some sense of responsibility to help grow and develop. This might be a child, a sibling, a friend, a colleague, an employee, or someone else. Choose someone you have known for some time, who you feel you know well.

Now, create an image in your mind of this person in their specific place. Choose a place that is meaningful to them—a place that is calling on them to develop in their role. For example, this may be a home, a workplace, or a community.  Try to embody their experience in this place. To the best of your ability, step into their shoes and become them. As this person, how are you thinking? How are you feeling? What are you sensing?

Try to get a feel for what is most meaningful for this individual and how it relates to this specific place. What matters most for them?

Try to image a future state where whatever matters most to this person is more fully actualized in this place. What light does this shine on this person’s unique value-adding role there? How are they being called to contribute toward moving in this meaningful direction?

Continue trying to embody this person’s experience in this place, imaging the potential there. The art of this practice is in how we hold the questions when there is no clear answer. It reveals to us what we don’t yet understand, and the work we have in front of us to develop our understanding. Keep this in mind, allowing yourself the space to not fully understand.

Next, reflect on what is required as a minimum for this person to continue to move toward this potential future state. For example, what enables them to show up and keep operations running? What internal factors are restraining their ability to do so? What basic internal state do they need to maintain to create a strong foundation in reality?

Now we’ll consider their capacity for realizing and actualizing this potential. What will enable them to see the potential within this place, and “hear” what value they are being called to uniquely contribute? What new capabilities will need to be developed?

To effectively contribute in this way, this person will also need to have an understanding of how things work in this specific place, of what this place is and what makes it unique. To what degree do they have a sense of this? To what degree do they understand how it operates as a whole, and how its role is evolving within larger systems? How are they participating in this place in order to better understand this?

How does this participation nourish an essence-to-essence connection in this place? How is their work in this place becoming more meaningful as they reconcile the creative tension between the “facts on the ground” and their own values?

To reiterate, this exercise may produce more questions than immediate answers. The questions become guiding lights in our work. It is a continuous practice, a process of unfolding insight and understanding, whereby we continually re-orient ourselves as new levels of understanding emerge.

To be clear, the series of questions in this exercise was not random. There was a specific framework behind them, designed to help you develop your understanding of a specific whole, which included this person in their place, as well as your own evolving value-adding role in this living system. We’ll take a closer look at this next.

The pentad as a vehicle for imaging potential

The exercise above was designed around Bennett’s 5-term pentad framework, which is about uniqueness, significance, and potentiality. This builds on our work in the previous chapter with the tetrad, or 4-term framework, which focused on designing value-adding activity. Our journey deepens to consider who we are in this process and what makes the value we create unique.

While Bennett and those inspired by his work have used many variations of the pentad framework, we’ll introduce a specific version for our purposes here: