• This is the final part of a short series introducing three archetypes that underpin our work as entrepreneurs, freelancers and professionals—The Artist, the Merchant and the Seeker. (They are also the subject of my book, coming out in June.)

    In part one I talked about the Artist, and how so many of us have our inner creativity trained out of us through our schooling, culture and resulting wounding.

    In part two I wrote about the dilemma of the Merchant. How can we bring our offerings boldly to the marketplace without selling out our depth or authenticity?

    This article is about the third archetype. The Seeker.

    Together, these three—The Artist, Merchant and Seeker—make up a triad that sits at the heart of our work. No matter the specialism, if you’re an entrepreneur in the modern marketplace, you’re standing upon the foundations of these archetypes.

    Examining them, and how they sit inside you, can be most helpful to the work at hand. In fact, I’ve found it most illuminating to myself and clients I’ve worked with. So much so that I’ve spent about 1000 hours writing a book about it!

    Our culture teaches us that we have to compartmentalise ourselves, that we can’t bring our full range and depth to our work.

    This is not only a false narrative (the marketplace has in fact already moved on) but holds us back from the greater transformation we’re all a part of.

    When we learn to integrate these dimensions of ourselves, in our own unique way, we’re able to find richer success in what we do, and deeper peace in who we are.

    And so in this article I want to speak about the Seeker in you, and the fundamental perspective it holds inside your work. We’ve been afraid to truly own this one for quite some time now. Yet it holds the key to our future.

    The Archetype of the Seeker

    The Seeker is the part of you that searches for truth in all its forms. The quintessential explorer on the path—they seek to discover the hidden secrets of this world.

    Whether it is the rational observation of the natural sciences or a mystical inquiry into the nature of your own mind, it is the Seeker that drives your quest for truth.

    This is a core dimension of our humanity. We cannot help but ask the big questions.

    “What is this world? Why are we here? Who am I?”

    Since time immemorial the Seeker was a natural and present part of our lives. Life was spiritual. Because we’d never considered the alternative. Our lives were spent in constant relationship to the gods and the spirits.

    One of the earliest professions we know about—the shaman—is a deep Seeker, able to traverse the pathways of reality bringing back knowledge and understanding. This is how we lived for most of our existence.

    It’s only in the last couple of centuries that we took an unprecedented turn as a people. We killed God and became rational-secularists.

    It’s this dissociation of mysticism and science that has both accelerated our amazing technological progress, and hamstrung the awakening of our greater consciousness. We’ve got into a twist, where rational science and spiritual mysticism are seen as contradictory, rather than two dimensions of the same seeking.

    Awakening to our True Nature

    My own path of seeking has taken me into extraordinary places over the last 10 years. I’ve explored things I never would have imagined, and realised truths I had attributed only to genuine spiritual authorities.

    But as each new expansion occurs, the whole thing feels simpler.

    “Oh yes. I remember now.”

    I remember some of why I came here this time. Which of course means I remember being here other times too. This has been quite a revelation to me, and helped calm an enormously confused part of me.

    In 2023 I had a series of awakening experiences. Even though I’m perturbed by the ease with which the term awakening can be thrown around nowadays, there really is no other way to say it. And I think it’s time we speak more of these things.

    One of the truths I awakened to was that spirit, and spirits, are very real.

    Consciousness really isn’t based in the physical world. When we die, we don’t cease to be. In fact, we return to and remember who we really are.

    This means there are beings who don’t have bodies. In fact, this is the true nature of all beings. Physicality is but one of our possible dimensions.

    So what we call “non-physical beings” are in fact real. And we can talk to them—if we’ve found the methods, and healed enough of our fucked-up nervous systems to do so.

    I wrote about some of these experiences in Meetings with Spirit Guides.

    It is quite a strange and wonderful revelation to discover that there are non-physical beings who we can communicate with, and who can wisely help guide us along our path. This is something that I would have called myself deluded for believing 10 years ago.

    For my birthday in 2023 they told me they had a present to offer me. They “spoke” as they always do, inside my own head, as though they were my own thoughts. But now I can (mostly) tell the difference.

    That night they spoke loud and clear through my heart that was cracked and open.

    “Would you like to hear about what is in your soul contract?”

    I felt amazed. And absolutely leapt at the chance! I’ve been fascinated by my purpose ever since I can remember thinking about life…why am I here? What’s my role?

    It felt like the most wonderful gift.

    They gave me a small list of things. Many to do with my intentions, and the challenges I came here to face. They dropped right into my core, and have shaped things ever since.

    One of the things they told me is not just personal to me. It’s also true for a great many of us.

    I came here in this life at Mother Earth’s invitation, to help with her great project.

    Project Earth: Collective Awakening

    There is widely shared prophecy, if you know where to look. We’re going through an enormous shift as a species and as a planet.

    But while the details are all being worked out in real time, and the future undetermined, there is a bigger plan.

    Earth herself (for she is also a being) has decided it’s time to awaken to a fuller/higher dimension herself. And that means us (the humans) waking up to who we really are. For we are the apex species—her most complex children—and so her awakening happens through our own.

    This is a remembering—something we used to know, but have forgotten. And it’s also an unprecedented evolution. For we’ve come such a long way since those early days.

    And we’re at a critical juncture. Right now. This phase we’re all living through is the meat in the sandwich.

    She invited enormous numbers of souls to come and help with this collective awakening process. There are hundreds of millions who volunteered to come and help. I am one. I suspect you are too.

    It can feel like an amazing idea before you’ve started. And then you get in the thick of it and wonder why on earth you agreed to do it. I often feel this way. When the challenges mount, and the whole thing feels hard as fuck.

    This is now a collective experience. We’re in the thick of the game, trying to resolve paradigmatic issues, in a world gone crazy.

    It is the archetype of the Seeker that plays a central role in this unfolding, and shows you the way through the swamp of confusion.

    How do we now walk the path of truth, given all the complexity and paradox we now take as given?

    What does the spiritual path look like? We can’t walk our ancestral one, for we’ve forgotten it, and the world is completely different, and our minds too smart. We can’t follow the traditional religious paths, because that’s what got us into the mess in the first place, and required us to “kill god” and start anew.

    We have to find new paths. Ones that help us integrate all we already know. And allow us to choose the way.

    Part of this new path, I believe, winds its way through our work. Not simply something confined to the monastery or temple, but as an explicit part of who we are and what we offer in the marketplace.

    The Seeker in our Work

    I remember when I first started creating businesses, we had to be careful with our revelation of the Seeker. Even in “progressive” circles anything too spiritually “out there” would see markedly smaller responses.

    In the early days my friends and business partners would talk about “trojan-horsing” it. Rather than leading with the spiritual/consciousness stuff, we had to smuggle it in.

    I became good at it, but I also resented having to do so.  

    This has already changed a great deal. Even in the last 5 years, I’ve watched the Seeker emerge boldly into our mainstream reality more. I’ve lost count of the number of prominent people I’ve heard speak about direct and profound spiritual truths on mainstream podcasts. People who would never have spoken about such things in public before, are unashamedly describing their deep spiritual experiences and their existential worldviews.

    I find this tremendously encouraging. For I hold a deep belief…

    It’s part of our work to discover the truth of our nature. To be a Seeker. And to share our discoveries with those on a similar path.

    This is not an adjunct to your job—something you do on the side or as a secret hobby. It’s a core dimension of your work, and the business you run.

    At its heart I feel this is about us truly owning our spirituality. No matter the content.

    This is still uncomfortable for many of us. There are real risks in the marketplace.

    Telling everyone you talk to mystical aliens could quickly erode trust you’ve built up. Even if it happens to be true. Because some stuff is still pretty fucking far out there.

    And yet, I think we’re all still running on old stories—ones that urgently tell us that it’s dangerous to reveal our spirituality and mysticism.

    It’s not surprising. Our ancestors were literally hunted down and killed for outwardly practicing the mystical arts—burned at the stake or tortured by the inquisition. These memories are still embodied in us, as forms of trans-generational trauma.

    But damn, if there’s ever been a time in recent history when it is safe to fully reveal our spiritual selves, it is now.

    This is an edge I am leaning into. And in this very article too!

    Because I think it’s one of the great invitations of our time.

    It’s part of Project Awakening. And it’s part of our work.

    Each time we reveal the true spiritual seeker in us, we make it easier for another to do the same.

    And each step takes us a little closer to the remembering of who we are, and what we’re doing here.

    If you liked this article, my book: Artist, Merchant, Seeker will be published in June. Get on my mailing list if you’d like to receive a free copy.

    Ewan Townhead

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  • I don’t want to feel it.

    Whatever the fuck it is, I don’t want to get close to it – that feeling lurking inside. Because I know it changes everything.

    The feeling is me.

    The feeling is my actual experience of the universe, in this moment, as I let the tingles creep over the outsides of my hands, and my spine starts to uncoil of its own accord, and the buried grief from a lifetime ago yells to be acknowledged.

    The feeling is everything. The unfiltered phenomena of life in this skin on this earth, under these stars.

    And encoded within the feeling is everything I am. And everything I don’t want to face.

    You don’t want to feel it

    It is understandable. Life is a shockingly visceral affair. There’s a lot of it, and not very much of you. It plants itself inside your body, pulls on your nerves, weighs down on your shoulders, plucks at your heart strings, squeezes at your guts.

    It’s understandable you don’t want to feel it. Because if you choose feeling, the result is non-consensual. Once you peel off the hardness and shake out the stuckness, you are then plunged into feeling itself. All of it.

    You don’t get to choose what you feel, and what you don’t. You can’t let in the nice stuff and keep out the painful. It’s all or nothing.

    Easier to stay numb. Safer to veg out. Simpler to maintain that you are nothing more than the ideas in your mind, and the job that you perform, and the identity you’ve been given.

    Much better not to feel.

    There are two fundamental ways to do this.

    One. You can rise above it

    Rise above the feeling.

    You can do this through calming breaths, positive mantras, or simply arguing with the utility of feeling in the first place.

    You can seek out the holiest of holy spiritual ideals, and float above yourself on a cloud of love and unicorns.

    You can drink five espressos a day, and drown out the feeling with a heroically full schedule.

    You can craft a superior and grandiose throne for yourself from which you can condemn and banish this feeling.

    You can do many of these at once! You may even be able to do it for years, decades. Some do it right until the bitter end. But bitter then you will be, for you will have spent your entire life in evasion.

    Because the feeling is none other than experience itself, which is none other than God, who is none other than you.

    And so as you rise above yourself, you ascend to a plane unearned, and thus pull rank on God himself, and claim that you know better than he, what should be felt, and what should not.

    You will not find yourself this way.

    Two. You can sink into it

    There is another way to wriggle out of this inconvenient problem of feeling. The relief of the full bodied collapse.

    Fall. Fall so fully into the feeling that you become it. Let it consume you and pull you down into its dark and warm embrace.

    Let the feeling becomes so full that the line between you and it dissolves as you become One.

    When you emerge once more, you may feel grateful. You might call it catharsis. You might even have paid workshop leaders to take you into this experience so you can feel like you’re making good progress toward finally healing yourself.

    You can spend a very long time looking for yourself in the intensity of the feeling. But it will not provide what you seek.

    For while you may believe you have honoured the feeling by communing with it so fully, what you have actually done is to have merged with it.

    You have unplugged your consciousness from awareness, and relieved yourself of the responsibility of experiencing the feeling. You have collapsed the boundaries and returned to the infancy in which there is no difference.

    You cannot feel the feeing if you are the feeling.

    You will not find yourself this way either.

    The movement of the centre

    First, drawing in the fullness of breath, to fill your chest and dilute the dry nameless pain. Bringing to life what you don’t want to feel.

    Then, slowly releasing the fullness of breath, to empty yourself and return to the silence. Reminding yourself that you are more than what you can feel.

    First, expanding up and outward, giving you a higher perspective so you can lead the chaos of life as it happens.

    Then, hunkering down and inward, bringing you into contact, so you can surrender to life as it happens.

    Up and out. Down and in.

    And in this moment it all comes together.

    The heart, held in the centre, delicately moving back and forth, regulating the flow of life.

    It is in this feeling that you reside.

    This is where you live. All of you.

    This is where you’re closest to God.

    This is where you find yourself.

    Ewan Townhead

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  • The professional. A role as old as Adam.

    The professional used to be someone who had a trade – a craftsman, farmer, healer, soldier. The new professional is one who follows a vocation – literally a calling.

    And by following this calling, the call of the gods, we step into the shoes of the hero. We travel the mythological hero’s journey.

    The hero is the intersection of three fundamental professional archetypes – the seeker, the merchant and the artist, as I wrote about in part 1.

    The seeker seeks the truth and shows us the way. Their mapping of reality gives us a path through the struggle. Their unquenchable thirst for deeper understanding keeps us curious, humble, and constantly learning.

    The merchant is a tradesman of the good. Whether it is material goods, political good or spiritual good, the merchant knows that by trading what they have to those who want it, the world is made better.

    The artist creates beauty. Their compulsion is to make something from nothing – the mysterious process that even the artist himself does not understand. By doing so they create things that touch us and change us.

    The hero is a different order of archetype. The hero is all about the journey, not the character. The journey that the hero embarks upon is defined by the process, not the content.

    The hero walks the eternal quest, constantly working to unwind the code that lies deep within his soul, and to realize the vision that he is called to create.

    The hero is the one who hears the call to adventure, to transformation, and through doubt and resistance finds the courage to say yes.

    This great transformation changes you, and so as you complete the cycle, and return home, you return changed, and the world with it. You return to the marketplace, complete with a new consciousness, and new hands, with which you help those who need you.

    “We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to centre of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with the whole world.”
    – Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

    Tension fuels transformation

    It is the creative tension that exists between the outer three types – the merchant, the seeker, and the artist – that drives the hero.

    It is the contradiction or paradox between the outer trinity that demands conversation. The heroic journey is in part, the quest to integrate these languages, these aspects inside you.

    How can I make money (merchant) from my creative expression (artist)? How do I bring the truth that I understand (seeker) into the marketplace (merchant)?

    The hero is not simply the overlap of the three types of the trinity. It is the transcendent principle, held in tension by the first three.

    The point is to mine that tension, for it is the fuel that propels the hero on his journey.

    The Hero Cycle

    Phase I – Disintegration

    No one knows how long ‘normal’ lasts. But if you pay attention, you’ll begin to notice that sooner or later, what once felt right, now feels wrong. What once worked, is starting to suck. Something is out of whack.

    This is not a fault in the execution of your life, or a fundamental flaw in who you are.

    No. This is simply the wheel of transformation starting to turn. God is beginning to crank on your lever, turning you toward a fuller, more beautiful version of yourself. Can you feel it?  This is the call to adventure – the whisper in your ear.

    You are so much more than you dare believe.

    You have a choice. Will you listen? You cannot turn off the whisper, but you can refuse its council.

    You can numb the pain of your dissatisfaction. You can eat burgers. You can binge on Game of Thrones. You can bury your head in the sand and simply refuse to look God in the eye.

    It is your right. But the consequence is an ever deeper journey into the cycle of phase one, into disintegration.

    If you refuse long enough your life will literally fall apart.

    Some choose to let themselves fall apart, and die. They live out increasingly empty and meaningless lives. They die from drugs or illness. They literally kill themselves.

    This is God’s way of forcing you to choose. Life or death?

    Will you choose life? Will you look into the light and see the image of who you are asked to become?

    The hero is the one who answers that call.

    When you surrender to this divine will, when you seize your own sovereignty and choose the path before you, you commit to something with untold power and consequence.

    “Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.”
    – William Murray, The Scottish Himalaya Expedition

    You say “yes”. You consent to the journey you have been asked to make. You step into the unknown, knowing it’s something you must do. And by doing so, you cross the first threshold.

    Phase II – Initiation

    The path extends before you. You are in esteemed company. Every great hero has passed this way.

    “Do you think that you shall enter the garden of bliss without such trials as came to those who passed before you”
    – The Quran, verse 2:214

    Turn to your mentors. Turn to those inside you – the harmony of your highest potential, who you are at your most essential. Turn to those around you – your friends and advisers, the ones you trust most deeply. Read again the great minds that nourish you and show you what you don’t yet understand.

    For you are on a journey that has already passed beyond the edges of your known reality. And as you consent to its invitation, you are drawn into the most challenging of new experiences.

    You will be stretched beyond your edge. You will be hurt. You will feel strife and suffering. But it is not the suffering of unmet commitment in the first phase, it is the existential kicking that you will receive at the boots of the unknown.

    Can you meet it? Can you rise up and face it with courage and conviction?

    These are the trials. Their purpose is not to ultimately break you, but to stress the muscle of your being, so you can be built anew.

    You will be tested for exactly as long as you need, in order to be ready for the great battle in the dark. Your initiation climaxes with the facing of your greatest fear – the great dragon at the heart of your being.

    You are both the hero, and the foe. It is not an exorcism of your demon, it is an alchemical meeting. Can the light in you meet its equal and opposite darkness?

    This is the culmination of all your initiatory challenge. The great showdown. The hero is the one whose leg shakes as he stands up tall, and looks the demon in the eye.

    You will be slain. Some great rock that your identity has rested on will be obliterated. Something or someone dear to you will die. Something that clouded your eyes from the truth will be ruthlessly ripped away.

    When you die, you cross the second threshold.

    Phase III – Transformation

    You have emerged from the dark underworld. But while you have faced down the great darkness and survived, your quest is far from over.

    For now, you must come to terms with who you have become, who you are becoming. You do not understand yourself, you have new eyes, new capacities, but they are foreign. The world has changed, because you have changed.

    Who are you now?

    You have been gifted a great blessing – your prize for meeting the dragon and being changed in the alchemical meeting of light and dark. But what do you now do with this great boon?

    If you were the protagonist in a movie, you would receive a great magical sword, or the secret to a great power. In your journey, the boon is one of deep and profound realization.

    You are rewarded with the greater consciousness and greater power of one who has faced down their fear and been reborn in their own higher image.

    You are on the road back home, but you may feel strangely alone. Perhaps those who you used to associate with no longer understand or see you. This is to be expected, for you no longer understand yourself.

    You are being transformed. What once propped up your identity has been whipped from under you. What once lay in the realm of strict possibility has been realized.

    You must come to terms with yourself – your new self – and realize what you are now capable of. What will you do with this great gift, this great boon?

    When this internal transformation is re-organised into a new understanding of who you are, you cross the third threshold.

    Phase IV – Integration

    The legend of a hero does not end with his great achievement, or her great discovery. The imperative for the one who has discovered great power, is to return with it. To return home.

    You return to the marketplace – the communities that matter most to you – with helping hands.

    “The Hero shall now begin the labour of bringing the runes of wisdom, the Golden Fleece, or his sleeping princess back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet, or the ten thousand worlds.”
    – Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

    You offer your goods, you speak your truth, you reveal your beauty. You integrate this new you, back into normal life, back into your work.

    You harvest the great fruits of your labour – the existential gift of your journey. You create your art, imbibed with the truth you now see. And give it, to feed those around you.

    As you do this, all the pieces begin to come together. The change that has occurred inside you is transmitted through you into the world around you. You change the world.

    It is not a single moment. This is your work now – to integrate who you have become with the world before you. You must straddle the two worlds of the dark and light, of the unknown and the known, and give yourself for the benefit of those around you.

    Blessings to you dear one, you have made it through. God has drawn you through the great change, the turning of the wheel, the latest revolution in the eternal quest.

    You now know your work. Your work is to live it, be it, create it. This is the phase of great productivity. Appreciate it honour it. For the next turning maybe closer than you would like to believe.

    The eternal cycle

    There is a new hero born anew with each cycle of the journey. For by the time the wheel turns full circle, and calls you on a new adventure, the hero that was born in the last chapter is now the one who clings to normality and safety.

    Every great leader knows that what got them to where they now are, is the very thing that will impede them from getting to the next stage.

    Where are you in the ever turning cycle of the hero? What phase do you find yourself in? For the nature and necessity of each phase is fundamentally different from the last.

    If you are trying to stably define who you are, and yet are in the first half of the cycle, your attempts will be fruitless. For the point of disintegration and initiation is to break you down, and burn off the dead wood of who you think you are. Give yourself to it.

    If you are looking for the thrill of adventure, and yet find yourself in the second half of the cycle, you will sabotage the work you must do. Your mission now is to understand yourself as you now are, and bring the fruits of your transformation back to the marketplace.

    The quest may be eternal. But your time here in this life is not. Know where you are, what you are asked.

    Your job as the hero is to devote yourself to this turning, no matter where you may find yourself on the journey.

    Ewan Townhead

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  • We live in interesting times. The famed ‘fast changing world’ – the best we can do to describe the overwhelming whirl of evolution as it gathers pace.

    I believe that we’re in the midst of the early chapters of a new age. Ken Wilber calls it integral. James Altucher would call it “choose yourself”. Seth Godin talks about the connection economy. I used to think of it as the age of the realized entrepreneur. I think I was half right.

    Our ideas of professional work are in the midst of great flux. The professional used to be someone who had a trade – a craftsman, farmer, healer, soldier.  Then it was a job was had, with a contract and a role, and a boss.

    Now the standard is more like a vocation, which originally means calling. It’s professionally answering the call to the higher, to the gods, to what burns deep inside your heart.

    The enactment of this new professionalism is transformational by nature, that is, by following the call of the gods, we must become someone new and travel the mythological hero’s journey.

    The hero isn’t a person, the hero is an archetype – the one who hears the calls, steps onto the path, and is initiated into their higher self through great challenge. It is the sacrifice of comfort for the greater realization of your reason for being here.

    This is not an abstract concept. It is the thing that happens to us all, if we consent. Or even sometimes when we don’t. It was a hero’s journey for me 6 years ago when I decided to leave the comfort of employment at a fast growing internet company, and leapt into the unknown, with some vague notion of being an entrepreneur and talking about consciousness.

    It’s what it takes to write a book that bears genius in its pages. It’s what Steve Jobs must have had to go through to return to Apple after being fired, and creating the first iPhone.

    The map I present in this article is my attempt to show you who this hero is, or more precisely, what makes each of us heroic, and how we can use this map to better navigate our own journeys and transformations.

    This is the hero as I see it, the intersection of three fundamental professional archetypes – the seeker, the merchant and the artist.

    And it is the roots of this archetypal trinity that I will begin my story with.

    The philosophical roots of being

    Running throughout philosophy – from the Bhagavad Gita, through Plato, through Immanuel Kant, through Jurgen Habermas and up to the present day – is a triadic structure that under various guises, has been presented as deeply intrinsic to reality.

    The ancient Greeks thought of the three domains of life – art, morals and science, and the three transcendentals that related to them. Karl Popper called them the objective, subjective and cultural. Kant wrote his three great critiques.

    Ken Wilber, whose work first introduced me to this pattern, ties them to universal pronouns – I, We and It. He calls them The Big Three. They are the first demarcations we make in the oneness of reality. They are that fundamental.

    For Plato they were the good, the true and the beautiful. And it is that frame I want to use here.

    The three languages

    You can think of these three ideas – the good, the true and the beautiful – as three languages.

    Each one fundamentally different from the last, and yet each one fundamental to human experience. That is – one language cannot describe the territory of another language. Yet each one is part of the whole, and so where one finds truth, one will also find beauty, and goodness.

    “Words which give peace, words which are good and beautiful and true, and also the reading of sacred books: this is the harmony of words.”
    – Bhagavad Gita, 17:15

    To find the harmony in the three, you must learn to hear the individual melody of each language. For the language of truth, cannot tell us what is beautiful. The language of goodness cannot tell us what is true. The language of beauty cannot tell us what is right and just.

    The True

    The language of truth is the language of discovery and precision. It is the language of deep science – that deliberate and practical means by which we test the world, and ourselves, and discover ever deeper truth about its reality.

    It is something we uncover and reveal, it is something that we posit and falsify. The language of truth seeks to gently or forcefully, spear the squirming fish of meaning, and define its patterns and structure.

    Is it true that human beings evolved from higher apes? Yes. It took us a long time to discover this truth. But it’s now self evident for most fo the world.

    Is it true that if I spend enough time looking into the nature of my own experience, I will be unable to find the location of my own consciousness? Yes. I’ve tried. Like thousands of yogis and roshis. It’s not in my head, it’s not in my toes. It doesn’t even seem to limited to my body. It’s kind of everywhere and nowhere.

    When we seek the truth, we must attack and destroy our own assumptions about what is. We must bind together polarities that feel uncomfortable, and find harmony in the integration of relative truths. This frees us, and liberates our notions of what is possible, and who we are.

    “And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
    – Jesus of Nazareth, John 8:32

    Ken Wilber’s famous phrase is that “everyone is right”. Every single human perspective has some partial truth. But for that to be true, we must also hold that some are more right than others.

    The great seekers of truth understand this, they constantly seek for greater truth that transcends the partial truths.

    “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.”
    ― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

    Truth is an objective science, whether the terrain physical, conceptual or mystical. Mathematics is a dialect of truth. The Tao Te Ching is a treatise on mystical truth.  Cartography is mapping physical truth.

    To know what is true, reality must be examined, tested and mapped.

    The Good

    Whether any of this is a good thing is an entirely separate question.

    The good is the language of ethics.  What is right, just? How do we know? It is not an objective science – it is not a solitary investigation. It is a collective exploration of our own ethical principles. The codes by which we feel it is right to live.

    “To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.”
    – Plato, The Protagoras

    Is it good that many people still suffer, and struggle to have enough to live? No. I don’t know anyone who thinks that’s a good thing.

    Is it good that the homicide rate in the West are at their lowest rate in recorded history? Yes.

    Is it good that we have ever more free markets? That’s tough. I’d say yes. Many would say no. It’s an unknown. We’re still in the conversation.

    “Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings.”
    – Steven Pinker

    The language of the good is relational. You and I have a conversation, create mutual understanding, and thus form a We – something greater than the sum of its parts. And in that collective We, decide what we think is just and right. It is not scientific. It is not subjective. It is inter-subjective.

    To decide what is good, we must engage in a conversation about how we want to live with one another.

    The Beautiful

    When we ask what is beautiful, we enter the domain of art. It is about expression and provocation. It is the ultimate subjective world. For beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the I alone.

    Beauty cannot be scientifically tested – it cannot be proved to be true or false. No one can declare that the Mona Lisa is officially ‘beautiful’ or that Star Trek is not.

    Nor can it be said to have moral foundation. Is it good that Tolkien spent two decades making up Middle Earth, and writing The Lord of the Rings? It’s the wrong question.

    The question is, did it change your experience? Were you struck by it? Did it leave you with a question mark in your experience?

    “We can slip into the Beautiful with the same ease as we slip into the seamless embrace of water; something ancient within us already trusts that this embrace will hold us.”
    – John O’Donohue

    Beauty is the ultimate subjective experience. The phenomenological aesthetic. An expression of something utterly indescribable, and yet instantly recognizable.

    How can you describe the language of a sun set? The untranslatable feeling of looking out as our great star sinks once more behind the horizon, as it’s done since the beginning. Writers have spent centuries to describe the beauty of a sun set, and none of them have nailed it. We can never nail it.

    Beauty is what is all around us, we know it intimately, and yet to capture it, is to capture the most striking and elegant butterfly. As soon as it’s in a net, it becomes less beautiful.

    “Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting.”
    – Ralph Waldo Emerson

    To see what is beautiful, I must look with my own eyes.

    The three archetypes

    It is these languages that the three archetypes – the seeker, the merchant and the artist, speak in.

    These are not the only branches that grow from the roots of the languages. These are what I have come to think of as the professional dimension of these three languages. That is, how do the good, the true and the beautiful, show up in the domain of contemporary work?

    The Seeker

    The seeker seeks truth. Whether it is the deep spiritual truth of Adyashanti or the deeply human truths of Brene Brown, the impetus is to explore the unexplored, map the terrain, and come back to teach us.

    “It is not the possession of truth, but the success which attends the seeking after it, that enriches the seeker and brings happiness to him.”
    – Max Planck

    It’s manifest in the Tibetans who sat in caves in silence for thousands of years and developed the most exquisite maps of human consciousness. It’s the Victorian explorer who braved the dangers of uncharted seas and discovered new lands. It’s the physicist who finds new theoretical models that explain the unexplainable.

    In the professional arena, it is the seeker who shows us the way. Their brilliant mapping of difficult things gives us a path through the struggle. Their unquenchable thirst for deeper understanding keeps us curious, humble, and constantly learning. It could be a scientific seeking of truth, like Tim Ferris. It could be mystical seeking of truth, like the Dalai Lama.

    The vice of the seeker is pride – the seeker who claims to have found the truth, a truth no-one else has. They revel in it, boasting of the truth they know, denigrating the truth of others.

    It is the spiritual teacher whose existential arrogance leads them to outrageous claims, or relational abuse. It is the scientist who refuses to believe any kind of truth other than his paradigm, disparaging claims that fall into a different language or dialect.

    The mature seeker understands that they are an instrument for truth, using themselves to understand ever deeper and more elusive truth that they share for the benefits of others.

    Famous Seekers
    Jesus Christ, Albert Einstein, James Cook, Brene Brown, Adyashanti, Tim Ferris, Isaac Newton, Christopher Columbus, Alan Watts.

    The Merchant

    The merchant trades in the good. Whether it is the material goods of Wholefoods or the political goods of Barack Obama, the conviction is the same – that trading goods benefits everyone.

    “Man is an animal that makes bargains: no other animal does this – no dog exchanges bones with another.”
    – ­Adam Smith

    Trade happens between people. It is an intersubjective conversation about trust, permission and integrity. To trade, you have to believe the other person has good intentions. When they do, and you do too, more good is created, more ethical wealth is generated. The world becomes richer, in materials, freedom and culture.

    In the professional arena, it is the merchant that knows how to scale their impact, to bring their goods to ever increasing numbers of people, or at ever increasing depth. The merchant is the innovator who who builds brilliant new apps, or the marketer, who knows how to speak to their audience.

    The great vice of the merchant is greed – they use their mercantile skill, subterfuge and manipulation to extract maximum value for them self, at the expense of everyone else. This is the Victorian factory that uses its workers as expendable cogs in an industrial machine.

    They have forgotten that what is good is only determined in fair and transparent marketplace of goods and ideas, where we decide together, what is ultimately valuable, just and good.

    Famous Merchants
    Adam Smith, Steve Jobs, Seth Godin, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, John Mackey, Jeff Bezos, Henry Ford.

    The Artist

    The artist creates beauty. Whether it is the mystical beauty of Leonard Cohen or the magical beauty of Neil Gaiman, the compulsion is to make something from nothing, and touch us.

    “Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art.”
    – Don Miguel Ruiz

    The artist follows an invisible design, obscured even from the artist them self. It reveals itself as the artistic path is followed, and the picture comes as if from the page.

    Art happens in the spaces between things. The afternoon left free of appointments, and a song on the radio inspiring a burst of new writing for hours. It happens when you walk in the park, enjoying the beauty of the birds playing in the trees, and something moves in you.

    In the professional arena, the artist is the one who creates things. Through some mysterious process they produce artifacts – writing, paintings, music, design – that touch people and change things.

    The artist’s great sin is envy, or more precisely, the great fear that they are in truth, mediocre, one of the bottle, not special. And so to spare them this great pain, they seek to acquire the prestige or standing of others around them.

    They forget that beauty is seen through the eyes of the gods, and instead, judge their beauty through their own narcissistic eyes. They replace the great I for the small I, and endeavour to prop up their own ego by being the most beautiful person, rather than the person who creates the most beauty.

    Famous Artists
    Michelangelo, Neil Gaiman, Leonard Cohen, William Shakespeare, John Lennon, Rumi, Darren Aronofsky, Rainer Maria Rilke, Herman Hesse.

    The hero of a new age

    These are three fundamentally different vocations. They are based on languages that describe three fundamentally different worlds. And while each of us will be a native speaker in one archetypal language, the goal is to integrate these three archetypes in you, infusing their worlds into your work.

    Never has there been a time when integration across these three worlds has been more needed or more possible. This I believe, is the professional imperative of our age.

    Now I have given you a simple map, can you see where you are on it? What is your native language? Which is most foreign to you? Where do you have tension between the types?

    I am a native artist. And for most of my life, the world of the merchant was completely foreign to me. Much of my personal work over the last few years has been to integrate the merchant more deeply into my work.

    This is the first part of the map – the outer three archetypes. In part two, I will explore the fourth archetype – the hero – and how it relates to this trinity of the seeker, the merchant and the artist.

    For the hero is you, the future you, that is yet to be created through the journey of transformation. And to be a professional hero, is I believe, the vocation of this new age.

    Ewan Townhead

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