A Complete Faith

Surely, your'e not implying that there are incomplete faiths, right?! Do you seriously want to start a religious war?

Friends, bison, countryfolk,

In all seriousness, we need to take a hard look at religion as a sector and each faith in particular. Not because religious institutions are failing. They are. Not because religion (along with all sectors of society as I explored in Part 2 of Bison Medicine) is working at cross-purposes to our nation’s purpose, “All… Created Equal”. It is. Not because it’s easy to pick on religion. It is.

We need to take a hard look at religion, because if we get religion right, as I explored in Part 8 and Appendix F of Bison Medicine, we will heal and save the soul of our troubled nation. And we can do this in a swift, substantial, and sustainable way. The private sector [the last remaining functioning sector of society and where I’ve spent the majority of my efforts] is cowering and quickly becoming an appendage of a fascist regime. Although the private sector briefly flirted with courage in 2020 and 2021, it reversed course in 2022.

So I find myself staring at the abyss, humbled, begging for divine intervention, a spiritual transformation. And for that we need every religious institution to sit up, pay attention, take notes, and lead. Or get the hell out of the way.

Lest you think this is merely a critique from the cheap seats, I’ll briefly share my spiritual journey. I was raised and confirmed as a Catholic, but I found the faith dry, detached, and generally more a part of the problem than the solution.

In 2004, I had a spiritual breakthrough in India that opened me to the Divine in my life and all things. In 2012, when I completed my purpose journey, my spirituality transformed into a vocation, as Whitman and Jung also experienced and expounded upon. In 2016, the soul power of the bison came through me in a ceremony. In 2020, my purpose and the purpose of the United States merged. [For a more lengthy exploration of my inner journey, scroll to the end for a bonus article - Gen X Soulography.]

Although I only recently (2023) joined my Unitarian Universalist congregation, I have been a UU in heart, mind, and soul for a long time. I’ve been a spiritual journeyman for two decades, learning our world’s religious histories, engaging in their practices, diving deep into a few (Hinduism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, Lakota, and Kabbalah). I’ve also engaged with and trained in other psycho-spiritual practices, such as men’s, trauma, shadow, and purpose work, becoming certified as a Purpose Guide, writing books about purpose, and praying daily for the last decade.

I made the decision to join UU officially, because I spent the last few years studying the nature, nurture, and practice of community. During this time, I came to understand that the primary unit of human is community. So I decided it was time to live that truth. I’m learning a lot as a UU community member and now a Worship Associate. I delivered three calls to worship centered on our nation’s purpose (at the bottom of this page) and was invited to produce a service a couple weeks ago, where I delivered the homily on rites of passage needed to create the adults, leaders, elders, and ancestors a democracy requires (1:08-1:28).

Since joining this community, I’ve noticed a few things, and am developing a point of view as to what constitutes a complete faith.

Currently, I understand a complete faith as one that:

1. Provides a cosmologically coherent worldview,

2. Delivers a point of view on a healthy society and adult human, and meaningful rites of passage that are needed to help people fulfill their potential at each stage of child, adult, and elder development,

3. Nurtures soulful connection among members, and

4. Ensures that power flows and renews, that it does not stagnate or consolidate, through transparency, accountability, and a deliberately developmental culture of mentorship.

Unfortunately, none of the world’s religions do these well if at all. Not the big four (Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam), nor any of the less popular ones like Judaism, Zoroastrianism, or Unitarian Universalism. Let’s explore each element of a complete faith in greater detail.

1. Worldview

To be complete, a religion must offer a comprehensive worldview and origin story, with nothing left out. No tidbit of reality unaccounted for. No remainder after the computation. A remainder is what’s left over after bad theory. Specifically, it must be able to deal with the problem of evil by offering a point of view on its origin and nature, how to account for and heal all its expressions within each congregant and within the congregation. A complete faith not only has to explain everything without a remainder, but be dynamic enough to meet our evolving understanding of the world, such that future truths may easily be enfolded. The worldview and origin story must engage people at every stage of development and across the three worlds (see below). The worldview and origin story must be flexible enough to hold and be retold so that newer truths (such as the fact that we’re a matrilineal herd species temporarily oppressed within a patriarchy, or emergent future realities, such as contact with extraterrestrials, or artificial superintelligence arises) don’t break the narrative. The story must hold up against all challengers. For example, if a religion aspired to a relevant and comprehensive worldview in 2025, it would need to understand, embody, and address the issues explored in The Dawn of Everything, The Righteous Mind, Nature and the Human Soul, Before War, and Wetiko.

2. Meaningful Rites

Secondly, a complete faith provides a clear understanding of a healthy human, culture, and political-economy, grounded in its evolving worldview and origin story. This allows it to deliver effective rites of passage and transformative practices at every stage of life, and in each of the three worlds of human experience, upper (spirit), middle (body / society / political economy), and lower (soul). All current faiths (aside from indigenous ones) were developed after the emergence of patriarchy (4000BCE) and within and for the purposes of patriarchy. Most faiths deal only with the upper world, and usually only through sermons, prayer and singing, and middle world, through ethical precepts that were developed within and are in service to the patriarchy. And frequently, these precepts are given only lip service or are interpreted to edify the status quo and state power, and keep us all on the ego-centric wheel of stagnation and regret, as articulated by Bill Plotkin PhD, in Nature and the Human Soul.

While all big religions have well-developed bodies of mystical practice and sacred rites for keeping us off the ego-centric wheel and on the soul-centric wheel of development (e.g., Judaism’s Kabbalah, Islam’s Sufism, Christianity’s Gnosticism, and Hinduism’s Tantra), as these religions became appendages of state power, the liberating power of soul activation was willfully abandoned and persecuted, e.g., the Council of Nicea in 325CE. This is the realm of becoming, of healing childhood and ancestral traumas, of revealing soul purpose and virtues, such that a developmental adult can arise, partner, parent, lead, mentor, and elder in the middle world, on purpose, healed/ing, aligned/ing each area of their life wheel (health, home, love, family, community, vocation, finances, spirituality) with their soul’s purpose. So, a complete faith delivers sacred rites to move folks through the stages of soul-centric development.

It also provides powerful interventions to help folks get off the ego-centric wheel and to start turning the soul-centric wheel in their life.

3. Soulful Connection

Thirdly, a complete faith welcomes folks from all backgrounds, nurtures authentic connection among all members and at every stage of the member journey. To do so, it leverages the science of social learning and group dynamics to nurture a series of small group discussions that enable folks to go progressively deeper with one another. Group agreements, such as confidentiality and commitment, are proposed, agreed upon, and upheld. The gathering experience features self-awareness exercises, self-disclosure, reflection on new actions to take, accountability structures to support action taking, and the celebration of growth.

This connecting, authentic, vulnerable, courageous, and transformative experience builds over 4-6 gatherings ensuring that at the end of each series of gathering, folks are more connected to themselves, each other, and the community as a whole. In 2020, I co-authored a research study on this approach and featured it along with other best practices for authentic connection, transformative learning, and culture change in Purpose Work Nation.

4. Renewal

Lastly, it has to profess, embody, and ensure it is accountable to a set of values, such that each person who encounters the faith, becomes more whole, alive, engaged, fulfilled, impactful, and connected over time as they deepen and find their unique embodiment of the faith’s values. At each stage of the journey, from visitor to member to volunteer to committee member to committee leader to board member to chairman to intern minister to associate minister to lead minister to emeritus, key values and skills are developed such that each member becomes more themselves, more integral to the community, and a better mentor to others.

To do so, it thinks deeply about its values and adopts a deliberately development approach so that they may be understood and embodied to greater degrees as the journey unfolds. As folks stop growing at each stage, they are mentored forward into new roles and challenges. As lapses of integrity or violations of community values arise, there are graceful ways to surface these, and transform the underlying evil / shadow, to ensure everyone can grow and learn from them.

Collectively these elements shed light on personal and collective shadow and greatly minimize the likelihood that a faith will devolve into a cult of personality or become a corrupt appendage of wealth / the state. Collectively, these elements ensure that a faith produces the type of adults, leaders, elders, and ancestors a democracy requires.

With this in mind, how might you reform your faith? Or do you think it would be easier to start a new one? Please share this with the faith leaders in your life and LMK your thoughts in the comments.

Big bison luv,

Brandon

Some updates:

• Last week, I shared about my growing disenchantment with the Bay Area. This week, I feel disenchanted with white collar work as a whole. I am experiencing digital burn out. I have too many teams and projects, too many things to find and manage across too many platforms, calendars, messaging apps, folders, inboxes, etc. I’ve been zoomed out since the pandemic. Digital workflow stinks. There’s too much noise online. There’s too little attention for folks to put towards the most meaningful things - nature, relationships, purpose, healing, and revolution. I feel like Tommy Boy and want to jerk the wheel into a goddamn bridge embankment. I feel so much more focused and engaged with a paint brush or drill in my hands. I’m holding all this lightly. I’m just noticing the many tethers of modernity in my life loosening. And yet, I’m still getting booked for modernity stuff. I’ll be delivering s Purpose-Driven Culture workshop at the SHRM NorCal conference in Monterrey in October, and for Unstoppable Leaders in November.

• My friend, Atieno Bird, and I are launching a three-session book club on Before War in September. Stay tuned.

• I’m going to move a few essays from LinkedIn to Substack so that folks can find them regardless of whether they are on LinkedIn. When you see the notifications, just know they are archive essays not new ones. I’ll keep my Friday cadence on new essays.

Bonus article: A Gen X Soulography

In almost all of my previous Substacks, I’ve made reference to the terms developmental adult, soul initiation, or the soul-centric wheel of development, because that is the road for each of us and our nation. It’s not an easy path, but it is clear. This is the journey of becoming whole. We need communities of whole, healed, on purpose adults, people who are soul-activated, able to hold it down in times of chaos, and lead lives of service. This is the most important switch to flip on now. As our cities are militarized, critical thinking and activism are criminalized, and wetiko is elevated as virtue, we need to be the light in the darkness.

Def. adult (n): A human over the age of 30 that has completed an adulthood rite of passage, surrendered their smaller ego identity for their larger transcendent / soul identity, and is engaged in healing their trauma, integrating their ego parts around their soul’s identity, activating their soul’s craft, and is welcomed as an adult into a community of other adults.

I have devoted the last decade to making the soul journey more attractive and accessible. It’s why I do everything I do. It’s why I write books, give talks, facilitate purpose work, workshops and retreats, do men’s work, pray, rewrite our nation’s founding documents, and plan grand gestures like the National Pilgrimage.

So, I’d like to share my inner journey, my soulography, my journey into adulthood, because it is important that we know what this looks like from the perspective of someone alive and still stumbling through “the work” as they say. There are a couple other good soulographies to explore as well, such as that of Martín Prechtel in his book Secrets of the Talking Jaguar, Joanna Macy in her book, Widening Circles, and the soul-centric commentary on her journey by her friend, Bill Plotkin in his magnum opus, Nature and the Human Soul. Similarly, you can follow the journey of Carl Jung in his soulographies, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections and the Red Book/ Liber Novus, and the commentary that Bill Plotkin offers on Jung’s soul activation / ego development in Journey of Soul Initiation.

There’s a second reason why I need to lay all this out. In my post, One Direction, I summarily un-elected our politicians on moral and spiritual grounds, as most if not all of them are unadulted. Our nation’s purpose is to create all adults equally, so we should have an understanding of what the journey of adult creation looks like. It is something I get asked about quite frequently. People always want to know how and why I went from a toxic masculine poster child to someone obsessed with an ensouled, adulted life for all. For these reasons, I offer a sketch of my own Gen X soulography. But first we have to begin with the hamster wheel of ego-centric society in which we find ourselves. This is the life unlived, the default experience for just about everyone in modernity.

As I mentioned in the article above, I was raised in the Midwest in the 1980’s and 1990’s, a disembodied, atomized, hyperindividualist, mechanized, patriarchal, white supremacist, consumer, late stage capitalist society, designed to keep all of us on the ego-centric wheel of (un)development. That was the backdrop of my Stage 1 Obedience and Entitlement Training and Stage 2 Primary Socioeconomic Training. Up until the end of college, I didn’t ask many questions about our society and why we valued what we valued, elevated who we elevated, and diminished who we diminished. I mostly just accepted the white male future laid out for me by my upper middle class parents - study hard, play sports, get a good job, marry and impregnate some poor girl, imprison her in a soulless suburban home and sexless marriage, where the chores never end, the emotional labor is never compensated, and the pinnacle of her freedom is choosing what type of minivan she’ll spend her waking hours in. I’d coach Little League, flip hamburgers, mow the lawn, make partner, and die of a heart attack during a condo board meeting.

During highschool, I began testing the ego-centric cage. I tried to distance myself from my parents, saying mean things to them, dissenting in minor ways, cheating on tests, blowing off responsibilities, stealing hood ornaments, crashing cars, wrestling my dad to the ground, etc. That all ended when my brother died during my Freshman year of college. My Dad and I trauma bonded, and I became deeply conformist. I became his mini-me, a high-achieving, weight-lifting, hard-partying misogynist “alpha” careerist, intent on going to Wall St. with the other eagles to exploit the working poor, destroy the environment, hoard resources, and binge on luxuries.

I wore khakis and flannel, joined the top fraternity, made the Dean’s List, held a number of leadership positions, and bartended at the top bar on campus. I lived in the fraternity house and worked road construction for two summers and interned at a VC firm for one summer, where I hardened my racism, sexism and homophobia into a very tiny, impenetrable worldview. I read Liar’s Poker and Den of Thieves and secured an offer in investment banking. I was a super-charged Stiffler. All was going to plan. Until it didn’t.

After college I took my signing bonus and backpacked around Europe, where I soon realized that life in the United States was far from optimal, that anyone who said we were #1 was an unread and untraveled moron, that the deal I was offered and accepted was so deeply inauthentic, unjust, and unimaginative. These countries were more free, equal, loving, creative, and prosperous. These countries were fulfilling our nation’s purpose far better than we were. I met people from many different countries who had wildly different experiences of life. I took mushrooms, went on bike rides, gazed out train windows, drank with strangers in hostels until the early morning. I realized that Europe had a lot more of life figured out and that my parents and all the “adults” (Ego-centric Stages 3B-F) in my life were full of shit. I realized they had no idea what they were doing and that they had been knowingly or unknowingly lying to themselves and us - my Gen X compatriots. We were hopelessly deluded. I had entered Stage 3A Conform / Rebel.

As I began my first job in investment banking, as I looked up the corporate ladder, as I looked at my friends getting married off in their early 20’s, I thought “what a joke”. What a lie. Movies like “Donnie Darko”, “Fight Club”, “American Psycho”, “American Beauty”, and “The Razor’s Edge” helped illuminate my inner landscape, allowing me to separate psychologically and morally from my unadulted family and peers. I became totally disillusioned by corporate life, marriage, and the American Dream. Everywhere I looked, I saw bullshit.

So it didn’t take long for me to turn that investment banking money into ecstasy, blow, acid, ether, and opium. I went skydiving, orchestrated threesomes, went to Phish shows, took trips to Carnivale in Brazil and to scuba dive in Thailand. By the time I left grad school, I’d been arrested in six different states on charges such as boating under the influence, felony theft, destruction of public property, and assault and battery. I was disillusioned, and looking for any way off the ego-centric wheel, even if that meant my own death.

During my summer MBA internship (2003), I received an email about a personal development elective course that was now accepting applications. The syllabus was 60 pages long, the application was six essay questions, the required pre-reading included six books, such as A Search in Secret India, The Trial Lawyer, and Flow. In the syllabus, I encountered novel terms such as Right Livelihood, quantum entanglement, paranormal psychology, and Eastern Mysticism. I said “yes” to all of it. It seemed like a better escape hatch than death.

I was accepted and read the six books that summer. During each week of the program, we read another 50 pages of mind blowing material, performed a consciousness experiment on ourselves, journalled about it, and were provoked by guest speakers. We went on a powerful weekend retreat to deepen our understanding / unknowing and take a wrecking ball to our pitiful self-concepts. My mind was consistently blown. At some point, I came to the conclusion that I knew nothing about anything that mattered. I knew nothing about myself, nor anything about any of the realms necessary to understand the human condition - psychology, philosophy, comparative religion, mythology, mysticism, poetry, anthropology, etc. I was good at Excel, Powerpoint, and partying, but literally nothing else. And there was no one in my life who was living an examined life. I was alone, surrounded by a sea of adolescents. The only difference between me and them was that I knew we could be so much more.

So I didn’t pursue any of the traditional post-MBA pathways - Wall Street, consulting, Fortune 500, etc. -, and set my sights on self-discovery, Right Livelihood, world betterment, and fully ejecting from the egocentric wheel. In school, I had written a business plan for a cable network focused on these subjects, the territory now covered by OWN and Gaia TV. After graduation, I stopped eating meat, gave up drinking, moved to LA, took an internship with a talent agency, while I networked and tried to build a team to launch this venture. I discovered that no one in 2004 in LA gave a shit about making the world a better place. But I found folks in the SF Bay Area who did.

So, in the fall of 2004, I moved to the Bay, assembled a team of TV executives and began raising money. On the second day of raising money we learned that Steve Case, the founder of AOL, had just acquired Wisdom TV and was poised to own the niche/market. We decided to wait on raising money. I then did what so many people who are on the right livelihood journey do before they know their purpose, I started applying for jobs that I thought would be fulfilling and had a positive impact - jobs in healthcare, renewable energy, education, and non-profits. This is the needle in the haystack approach - I was trying to find a short cut to (or rather, substitute for) self-actualization through work. I was hoping I could find an easy on ramp onto the soul-centric wheel of development.

If you want to go deeper into this eco/soul-centric development, please pick up a copy of Bill’s book, Nature and the Human Soul. You can also read a six-page pdf about the wheel here.

As I was sending out resumes, I received another life-changing email from the alumni group of the personal development course I took in business school. It was about a trip to India to do a 10-day silent Vipassana sit at the foot of the Himalayas and visit holy sites. I couldn’t afford it on my meager income. However, when I graduated business school, my dad gave me a week at a Formula One racing course as a present, which I didn’t have any interest in, so I never booked it. I asked him if instead he’d be willing to buy me a ticket to India. He agreed.

On the 4th day of that 10-day sit, I had a psychotic break / spiritual awakening where I purged many of the toxic images, experiences, and beliefs of my Stage 3A self, and realized my own divinity. I got the oneness of reality, and experienced a small taste of the spiritual power available if I chose to develop it. I was now fumbling through Stage 3 The Thespian at the Oasis. So I came back to the Bay with a white hot intensity for personal and spiritual development. I spent the next six years working at start ups and social enterprises, and gobbling up the best books on the best subjects, meditating, doing men’s work, personal development programs, therapy, hallucinogens, visiting gurus, hiking, camping, attending spiritual retreats, going to Burning Man, practicing yoga, and dating hippies.

I didn’t know it then, but I was culturally / psychologically reprogramming myself, developing a healthy (vs. pathological) ego, preparing it for the dissolution / transcendence of Stage 4 The Wanderer in the Cocoon, aka soul / purpose activation. During this time, many loving and patient girlfriends helped me rip out my patriarchal, modernist, and white supremacist software. I worshiped countless teachers and was consistently disappointed when I realized they were also flawed humans. It was messy and awkward. I didn’t have any real guides. I had to piece it together by trial and error.

In 2011, I met a purpose guide to help me through Stage 4. We worked together for six months, moving through the exercises in Rod Stryker’s The Four Desires and Tim Kelley’s True Purpose. I received permission to discover and live my purpose from my ego parts (critic, skeptic, risk manager, image consultant, wounded child), activated my purpose, integrated my ego parts and soul, and began to live my purpose. In 2012, started a company, EVR1, producing spiritual goods, and receiving praise from outlets such as USA Today and Techcrunch.

I wrote about this journey in Planet on Purpose (2018), so I won’t go into all the details, but let’s just say I was on fire with purpose. I had become its beacon, attracting all sorts of purpose seekers. Initially, I helped connect them with guides, books, and programs, but then something curious happened. They started asking me to guide them. After a good amount of resistance and denial, I began to consider this as a path for my own soulcraft. So I did. In 2014, I began leading people through the same exercises I had been led through, and studying the craft. I helped my Mom and two aunts through their purpose journey. And then my soul demanded that I get trained, signifying the ascent into Stage 5, The Apprentice at the Wellspring.

I reached out to my purpose guide to ask him to train me. The result of that conversation was that we launched a purpose guiding training and certification school, now known as the Purpose Guides Institute (I’ve since severed my relationship with him and the school). During this program (2015-2016), I trained with many masters in soul work (Bill Plotkin, Tim Kelley, Joanna Macy, Jean Houston, Terry Patten, etc.), fell in love with my colleagues / fellow guides, some of whom are still dear friends and collaborators, and developed powerful guiding skills and a deeper level of soul embodiment. During our nine-day intensive in Mendocino, we did a soul quest where I received my true name, Buffalo Heart Who Loves and Wholes the World. It brought me to my knees, as this is very much a Stage 7 Master in the Grove of Elders purpose and I was very far from becoming the man who could fulfill that summons. I wrote about this experience in more detail in Appendix E of Bison Medicine. As I moved through Stage 5, I built a successful purpose guiding practice, faithfully following the practices and methods I trained in, and facilitated several online purpose programs and live retreats.

In 2017, I began the move into Stage 6, the Artisan in the Wild Orchard, developing novel delivery systems and mechanisms for soul work. My soul merged with and felt responsible for the purpose field as a whole, so I sought to strengthen it. My fellow guides and I built a community of practice, the Global Purpose Leaders, mentored each other, strengthened our craft, aggregated the scientific research on purpose, launched Purpose Summits in San Francisco and Berlin, and gathered for three On Purpose retreats in the Northern California Sierras. In addition to Planet on Purpose (2018), I published The Purpose Field Guide (2019) - a group purpose activation journey, learned best practices for scalable culture change at Imperative and ion Learning (2019-2020), launched Unity Lab to scale purpose work within organizations (2020), published Purpose Work Nation (2022), and Bison Medicine (2025).

And here I remain happily in Stage 6, developing new schemes to activate our nation’s purpose and healing our many traumas. I feel the pull into facilitating / ministry and I have been invited to serve as a lay Worship Associate at my church and a Ceremony Leader of ritual and grounding ceremonies with the ManKind Project. I have no inkling yet as to when or if or how the threshold for Stage 7 Master in the Grove of Elders will present itself.

My hope is that it is now clear that adulthood isn’t an age or a one and done thing. I’ve spent 20 years working on it and will keep working on it. It’s also not as linear as the wheel suggests. There is always more work in previous stages to do. For example, it’s clear for me that I have more Stage 1 and 2 to do to more fully inhabit our animist nature and more Stage 3 work to do to more fully inhabit our matriarchal nature.

So what’s your soul’s story? What has it been like for you to compost the trauma of your upbringing? When did you realize our ego-centric / patriarchal / white supremacist / late-stage capitalist society is trying to destroy you? What is the story of your soul’s baptism? What would it be like if all our leaders were soul-initiated? LMK your thoughts in the comments!