What lens are you using?

The one ring: certainty and the twelve worldviews

The ring of power

This piece is about certainty: on the one hand, how fragile a notion certainty is, and on the other, how it is a real barrier to more in-tune, regenerative ways of thinking, being and doing. This is rewritten from articles, poems and essays from the last 10 years of my writing, collected around a set of thoughts that are ever-present for me, all on the general theme of integrative and fluid or living thinking. I hope in sharing them there is something useful for you the reader. The poem it’s centred around was written when I first had experiences that gave confidence to these notions, which I have been dancing with for many years.

Certainty. No-doubt

That is the ring of power

That keeps us clinging on

To dualistic absolutions of black and white

To be certain, to be right

When our thinking is truly examined, it becomes apparent how enchained our thinking has become, bound to others' assumptions, often held within one view. And this ‘ring of power’ runs deep: all-encompassing, intensely compelling, often binding our judgements through one view in a deeply embodied manner. Holding certainty is a most potent ring of power, a burning cold wisdom that can cause strife, corruptive power enactment and, well, banality.

And you claim certainty? You act from a position of knowing, for sure?

For it is only on this knowing that wisdom becomes crystallised and cold

And conscience silenced enables peaceful sleep after cruel actions

Justified because one knows - for sure, with certainty

Lenses on reality - Twelve partial truths:

"The gift of thinking was not bestowed upon us for the purpose of a precipitate formulation of thought but for the purpose of searching and seeking. Thinking as such should be regarded as a process which should remain such for as long as possible. And when a thought has been formulated it should be held in abeyance until we can feel assured that the facts have been turned over and over and looked at from every possible angle. Very much will depend upon whether a sufficient number of human beings can realise and understand the significance of what has just been said."

– Rudolf Steiner, Memory and Habit, 1916

In a series of lectures given in 1914, published as Human and Cosmic Thought, Steiner described in detail 12 different worldviews that each have a valid claim to truth, within their unique, valid but partial perspective of viewing reality and its nature. This is already a lot to digest, as it brings deep questions to many certainties that are held from a particular perspective. Yet getting our heads around even some of these views, and most of all the notion of the integrative nature of truth (that there are seemingly confounding yet equally real perspectives on reality), the whole of which can never be captured or claimed by one worldview or another - opens us up to a world of wonder.

One way into this is to think of each worldview as a lens. Look at the same thing through an electron microscope, a zoom lens, a fisheye or an X-ray, and each reveals something different about it, and something true - but also missing a lot. One could argue forever over which one shows what the thing really is, like the blind men each certain of their own part of the elephant. The thing is the same; the lens is different. But life lives in between these different views – and it lives: it cannot be captured holistically in snapshots, however sophisticated these snapshots may be. Reality is living, and to begin to tune into it more holistically, we need a thinking that lives.

This model can help to cultivate what Steiner variously called Michaelic, free, and living thinking - integrative, learning (rather than knowing), and alive. This emergent new way of thinking that Jean Gebser, Integral theorists and many others have also identified can remind us of just how partial any truth-claim is, and through this acceptance we can legitimately reclaim wonder from a world that wants you to follow the certainty - whichever paradigm it is shaded from. And acknowledgement of the fluidity that no one perspective can truly capture - the experience of this - can catalyse the realisation of thinking that is alive: thinking that is happier to sit in questions, rather than being stuck in the search for the answer, which it then sits on.

Certainty does exist, of course, in context: drop a glass and it will fall. The certainty I mean is certainty about the whole – 'this is the right way' – held by the atheist and the believer alike. The spiritist view can dominate reality-perception just as the materialist one can. Living thinking can arrive at certainty in context without stopping there. As the novelist Dan Chaon puts it, "a conclusion is simply the place where you got tired of thinking." In practice, this means reassessing our current certainties as a daily habit of thinking.

In Steiner’s model these 12 worldviews or philosophical stances, which correspond to signs in the zodiac, are further coloured by 7 'soul moods' (corresponding to the 7 planets), which I like to also call 'epistemological dispositions' - or stances towards forming knowledge. This further complicates certainty - not only can we inhabit different perspectives and constellations of them, but we also have different ways of approaching how truth is identified within them.

Even more archetypal are three 'psychic tones' (corresponding to Sun, Moon and Earth): theism, which seeks the divine in the outer world; intuitionism, which seeks through flashes from the inner depths; and naturalism, which studies the phenomena of nature without going beyond them. I am coming to think of these as 'life-attitudes' that almost tidally influence our own particular constellation. And finally there is a fourth, integrating tone that Steiner names, perhaps misleadingly, anthropomorphism: the human lens itself. The twelve worldviews are summarised, and compared more fully, in the appendix.

The ring that binds is certainty through any one of these angles, or more often through a constellation of them. No angle is itself the problem. Each holds its valid but partial truth. It is the making of one view lord of all the others that is the deeper source of distortion. Like Tolkien's rings of power, there are many; what binds is the One - certainty (whatever its particular flavour).

The favourite theory validates all

the one ring that binds them

And yes, the model itself, like other integral models, can become the ring, so I offer it not as a lens to live through, cluttering or ordering the moment, but as an exercise in tuning into perspectives, thus enabling a glimpse into what Jean Gebser calls ‘aperspectival’ perception: a way of seeing that passes through and integrates single perspectives, rather than standing in any one of them.

"The perspective fixates the perceiver as well as the perceived… On one side man who due to this isolating fixation has to stress his I more and more, on the other side the world as an opposite, an enemy which becomes stronger by taking more and more space."

– Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin

One can see this with materialism today. The underlying issue with materialism is less whether it is true or false; you can't deny its truth. It is the fact that it has become king, so it speaks for domains that it can't speak of. Materialism holding that there is nothing beyond what can be measured in the material is a jump. And one sees inverted forms of the same jump in the counter-views, especially spiritism and idealism: a spiritist denying that the material has validity would be equally wrong.

Ontological humility

The simple take-home is that certainty is a complicated matter, and humility – 'ontological humility', a term I first heard from Fred Kofman – is the logical result of working with and digesting what the model highlights.

Steiner saw the task as peacemaking among the worldviews: truth comes, in his words, "not by insisting on one of these tones, but by letting them sound together". Chuang Tsu, more than two thousand years earlier, suggests "leaving the different viewpoints as they are".

The regenerative paradigm arrives at the same place. Across the leading thinkers in this field, almost the first thing they all say is that to change the way we do things, the thinking needs to change first, and that this new thinking is integrative as opposed to 'mono-ontological': a multiplex of worldviews, all with valid partial truths, none with a valid claim to knowing the whole.

Looking out, and looking in

I have long been keenly interested in the relationship between worldview – the perspective(s) with which an individual makes reality – and behaviour – the actions a person makes and the way in which they make them.

Understanding ideas – where they come from, who they came from, and most importantly which assumptions about the nature of reality they are built on – is a journey into the fundamental questions of what reality is (ontology) and how truth can be identified within a given perspective (epistemology). On the one hand this means learning to look out: to try to understand things from the perspectives from which they are seen. This requires a sense of wonder, and certainly of interest in ways of thinking that are completely different to what we are used to or comfortable with.

But in order to truly understand the implications of ideas, the 'so what?', what they mean in practice when applied into life, one has to look at oneself: completely, without fear or horror, without hiding from the shadow, the part of ourselves that compels our behaviour when we're not fully aware. As Rudolf Steiner put it (paraphrased), one needs to become aware of who you are as a behaving personality, with the objectivity and soberness of a judge, in order to come to an understanding of the laws that drive human existence. Another way of saying it is to turn the self-focused tendency to self-elevate outwards into enthusiasm for the world, and to turn the cold lens of objectivity onto the self.

Does my walk match my talk?

Even when observing my behaving self from outside

With the incisiveness of a judge?

When coming to know the self as a behaving personality becomes a habit, together with the cultivation of warm interest in others and the world, the impulse to spend time and energy thinking about others greatly dwindles, and the ability to understand and communicate constructively with others greatly increases.

What gets really interesting is observing the patterns in the relationship between certain behaviours and the kinds of worldviews from which their compulsions and cognitive dissonances spring.

Mount Doom: mercy and instinct

The remedy for the ring of certainty is multifaceted, but has two pillars to form and hold: one through observing our behaviour, the other through where our ideas come from, discovering the ideas driving our doing. But the actual release is no easy task, and perhaps borrowing from Tolkien can help to get across both how hard this is, and yet, mysteriously simple: a sprinkle of mercy and surrender can completely transform the whole 'battle'.

In The Lord of the Rings, at the very brink, after all the challenges faced and overcome, Frodo cannot let go of the ring. Will and virtue are not enough.

It is Gollum who saved the day

Not Gandalf, not even Frodo

But an act of pure innocent greed

The repressed and rejected

Finding its rightful place - saving all

Yet Gollum is only there because of Frodo's earlier mercy. What saves the day is a paradoxical combination: innocent greed, which is really more instinct (Gollum bites the ring from Frodo's finger), and mercy (Frodo let Gollum be Gollum, and somewhere knew his presence had a purpose). The part of ourselves we repress and reject, and the worldviews we reject in others, are not to be defeated but spared, given room, so that they can find their rightful place.

What lies beyond the ring is a higher realism: not a winner among the twelve, but realism transformed by having gone round the whole circle, where one perspective can never more be made the one to rule them all, and where doubt has its place. Knowing becomes participation rather than possession: not truth grasped as a ring to be held, but a taking part in the world's own becoming.

Then we can begin to see

That thought lives best

When it is alive and free

Let go of holding theory, let go of clasping ideas

And just be - creative

For our thoughts are both uniquely our own and whispers from the divine. We both choose, and follow; our existence a participation, a co-creation.

_______

If any of this sparks ideas for developing your team or organisation, I'd love to hear from you. Please get in touch via the contact box below.

Edited, researched and illustrated with the help of Claude.

Appendices

The twelve worldviews

In brief, the twelve worldviews and their corresponding signs are:

• Idealism (Aries): Material world devoid of meaning unless there is a progressive tendency in it. There must be a realm of ideas and ideals within the world process.

• Rationalism (Taurus): Grants validity only to ideas one discovers outside oneself, not those that come through intuition or inspiration.

• Mathematism (Gemini): Recognises as valid only what can be treated mathematically; admits nothing beyond mathematical formulae. Draws threads from one observation to another. Denies superstition.

• Materialism (Cancer): Recognises the material world and its laws. Denies the spiritual world. Nothing exists except what manifests itself through sense impressions, which point to a separate objective world.

• Sensationalism (Leo): Peels off from phenomenalism everything that comes from understanding and reason, and allows validity only to the impression itself.

• Phenomenalism (Virgo): Recognises how the world appears to one. Cannot say it is the real world, only that it is a world of phenomena.

• Realism (Libra): Recognises the external world around one. No reason for admitting or denying spirit. Restricted to what one sees around one. 'Forces' are superstition.

• Dynamism (Scorpio): Cannot concede that existence is made of beings. Recognises that all is ruled by forces.

• Monadism (Sagittarius): Abstract spiritualism. Describes spirits as entities, having varying powers of perception. No unitary spirit.

• Spiritism (Capricorn): The material is only a manifestation of the spiritual. Matter is only illusion. Recognises spirits of the different hierarchies.

• Pneumatism (Aquarius): Beings who have ideas must also be active; accepts Spirit or Spirits of the world; Universal Spirit.

• Psychism (Pisces): Enhanced idealism. Accepts the ensoulment of the world. There must be some sort of beings in whom the ideas can live.

References

Betti, M. (2019) Twelve Ways of Seeing the World: Philosophies and Archetypal Worldviews for Understanding Human Consciousness. Stroud: Hawthorn Press.

Chaon, D. (2012) Stay Awake. New York: Ballantine Books.

Chuang Tsu (1974) Inner Chapters, trans. Gia-fu Feng and Jane English. New York: Vintage Books. Chapter Two.

Gebser, J. (1985) The Ever-Present Origin, trans. N. Barstad and A. Mickunas. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

Kofman, F. (2006) Conscious Business: How to Build Value Through Values. Boulder, CO: Sounds True.

Steiner, R. (1914/1991) Human and Cosmic Thought (GA 151), trans. C. Davy. London: Rudolf Steiner Press. See especially Lecture Three.

Steiner, R. (1916/1948) Memory and Habit (GA 170), Lecture Two, Dornach, 27 August 1916.

Tolkien, J. R. R. (1954–55) The Lord of the Rings. London: George Allen & Unwin.

© 2026. Melvin Jarman. All rights reserved.