Stage-2: Provide Personalized Mentoring

Accepting Social Blocks

Any illumination that is truly new and different will never be fully or easily grasped in its details and implications. After all, it took the originator so much time, concentration and effort, and there is still so much to learn. Meanwhile wider society is indifferent, rejecting, sceptical or at best keeping its distance. So a great deal of courage may be required of early followers.

Writing and lecturing on the doctrine leads the originator(s) to meet a variety of people who are interested, and some will even be intrigued or captured by charisma. However, most people are dismissive and uninterested. There is no financial benefit and, especially in the case of academics, reputation may be harmed.

Still a few curious people seeking to share the illumination and gain a clearer understanding may gather around the originator and form a small band of early followers and potential adherents.

Following the originator, soon referred to as the «founder», is an energizing experience. This is because any powerful articulation of ideas that touch on human existence or social life tends to invigorate and inspire. A founder who is charismatic offers enlightenment and is typically pleased to form an inner circle and receive slavish admiration. Even so, having discussions one-on-one and in small working groups or seminars helps develop the ideas and find applications.

Example: Stratified Systems Theory

Elliot Jaques saw that all work in organisations was naturally stratified and that the time span of discretion for tasks determined personal capability at work and led to requisite management structures. He had developed these ideas with Wilfred Brown during research at Glacier Metal in the 1950s and 60s and published several accounts. In 1967, Jaques founded the Brunel Institute of Organisation and Social Sciences (BIOSS) within the School of Social Sciences at Brunel University (UK). He created and got funding for research programs, so giving him small groups of committed researchers working directly with his insights and actively testing them in practice. Considerable public controversy developed over the correctness and value of these ideas with many vehemently opposed to their application in the health service and social services. Using small groups and his own consultancy research, Jaques hammered out the fundamentals of a full-fledged doctrine and finally published this as A General Theory of Bureaucracy (1976).

As understanding and excitement grows, this inner circle develops an urge to spread the word. They realize that emotional forces need to be brought to bear to forward the ideas, and this depends on personalized engagement.

Overcoming Personal Blocks

The founder and fellow adherents soon realize from their own experience that anything in the human realm that is truly fundamental shapes personal identity. That means the ideas cannot be accessed or adopted automatically and easily by others just by reading. Even willing individuals who actively and deliberately seek to be initiated into the fundamental realization have a hard time.

Any outsider or newcomer naturally experiences urges to make the novel doctrine more comfortable, more adapted to their personal habitual ways of thinking, and more conforming to cultural biases. The founder must counter and overcome these tendencies. He realizes that progress is not a matter of “winning” or "making" converts. The task is to educate and develop willing participants as human beings so that they naturally become fellow believers.

Example: Origins of Christianity

Jesus was a charismatic Jewish teacher who attracted followers, especially a small group known as the 12 apostles. The apostles were the founding group who spoke to many, not only about what happened to Jesus, but what he stood for. According to the Acts of the Apostles, the Jerusalem church began with 120 believers, all Jewish. From about 70AD to 100AD, the gospels were written down and these created eventually a divergence between Jews and Christians. Although all Jesus' ideas can be traced back to the Old Testament, Jesus had offered the world a new realization of fundamentals that ultimately became a New Testament and evolved into Christian doctrine.

Early adherents know from their own experience that the desired awareness requires a degree of personal development with all the accompanying emotional issues and need for support. This leads them to offer personal guidance or mentoring to willing others to spread the word effectively and without distortion.

The mentoring process often results in additional or unusual examples being presented to the founder's inner circle for clarification and explanation in terms of the original illumination. The flexibility of thought that enabled the breakthrough typically continues resulting in clarifications, extensions, and adjustments for the nascent doctrine.

Possible Outcomes

Established Roles

Various terms are in use for the roles that result in this Stage: adherents become adepts or teachers or mentors or gurus or guides. The applicants become students or candidates or acolytes or novices or disciples or initiates. The terms in use for the process vary according to the nature of the realization.
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• Initiation. To emphasize a rite of passage and ultimately conformity to a new way of thinking and functioning.

• Mentoring. To emphasize sharing knowledge and skills based on personal experience of issues, difficulties and solutions.

• Counselling. To emphasize listening and giving emotional support and advice in handling situations.

• Instructing & Training. To emphasize that there is a specific body of knowledge to be learned and accepted.

• Supervision. To emphasize watching over the initiate’s practices so as to helpfully identify and correct errors as they emerge.

A major factor in the spread of mentoring will be the social relevance of the realization. Is it something that makes an immediate difference in social life? Can the knowledge be monetized as a service? Are there social roles and employment opportunities? While the founder typically sees the widest possible use, access to diverse social situations to prove the value of a new doctrine is not easy.

Stay at Stage-2

If insufficient numbers of individuals come forward for mentoring, then the ideas in the illumination will not spread and, indeed, may never develop further. However, a committed originator can continue to extend realizations and may press on with just a tiny band of followers.

Some accounts of fundamental truths serve as the basis for a movement, despite the doctrine itself never properly taking off.

Example: Aestheticism

In the late 19th Century, views emerged that socio-political or didactic themes in literature, music, fine art missed the point. Beauty was the essence of art. Such ideas were emerging in the 18th Century, but the accounts of Oscar Wilde and Water Pater set the scene for aestheticism, a doctrine-driven movement. The slogan arose: «Art for Art’s Sake» or « L’art pour l’art ». As artists and writers gathered under this banner, the movement took off in the final decades of the 19th Century. It fizzled out when early 20th Century artists challenged notions of beauty.

Schools of thought that remain at this level can produce additional accounts that gradually extend and develop the doctrine. This is more likely with abstruse doctrines.

Example: Frankfurt School

The essential insight of the Frankfurt School was that explanation of the social world required a multi-disciplinary integration of social sciences using Freudian, Marxist and Hegelian premises. In the 1930’s, this coalesced as “critical theory” under the leadership of Max Horkeimer, a philosopher, who became director of the Institute. The group included intellectuals like Erich Fromm, a psychoanalyst, Theodore Adorno, a sociologist and musicologist, and Herbert Marcuse, a philosopher. They saw that the dominant ideology in society misrepresents how human relations occur in the real world and that this affects researchers and colours their work. The Institute moved to Geneva in 1933 and then New York in 1935 to escape the Nazis and their anti-semitic and anti-intellectual threats, before finally returning to Germany in 1953. A series of book-length accounts have been produced by theoreticians of the School.

Transition to Stage-3

Once the realization is genuinely achieved, any adherent feels an ownership of the ideas and an ability to pass them on to others. If the doctrine is personal or directly applicable, the number of adherents is likely to steadily grow as the first generation who are effectively mentored go on themselves to mentor others.

As the initial adherents band together in some fashion and gain confidence, they naturally desire to attract more colleagues, gain more attention and become better understood and respected in their social milieu. But spreading the word to wider society requires a different approach to anything attempted to date.

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So the next step is:

• Gain more adherents through systematic dissemination of the ideas.

Originally posted: 7-Sep-2022. Last updated: 20-Mar-2023.