Obstacles To Conscious Action
(Part 2 of 3)
Four Levels of Motives

In our human design, we possess an evolutionary process of learning through mistakes that helps us and our society make better choices. Unconscious motives support us in learning the hard way. Conscious Motives because they are complete and open, allow effortless interaction. In motives, there are 12 options that can be combined and amplified to generate any result. Unconscious instinctive, intellectual, and idealized motives all have downsides that must be neutralized for their potential to be unleashed. This requires uplifting everyone, so we are creatively connected.  Otherwise, the defensive distortions will compromise our interactions and limit our aspirations.   

— From The Wise Old Sage Commentaries

Understanding That Choices Are Expressed As Motives

HA motives are a way to recognize how intent is compromised in the people with whom we interact. The four levels of motives reflect the degree of intent we have activated in ourselves. These levels reflect our degree of consciousness or spaciousness. Action can be classified by these levels in terms of body, mind, passion, and creative spirit. In addition, we have masculine, feminine, and unified expressions of intent on each of these levels that allow us to grow up and be more responsive. There is a motive or a combination that reflects our condition and where we want to go. To represent all activities, we need to access feminine, masculine, and unified expressions that represent our change, growth, and striving.

What this points out is Gender Identity Role-Playing. where masculine energies predominate and feminine energies are repressed, guarantees imbalances in our motive participation. These repressed expressions compromise action. This makes it hard to get in alignment with those we love, those we do business with, or our families. While a lot of activities can be totally contained within our own experience and do not require feedback from others, this discovery process works well. It is often moderated because of the reactions of others around us who do not understand or accept our choices. This is how repression and suppression limit our growth and keep us from developing our consciousness. Our intent grows with each level of motives.

Four levels of motives (instinctive, intellectual, idealized, and intuitive) and 3 types (feminine, masculine, and unified) define our 12 unique motives.

Our feminine motives initially ground us in nesting behavior, and this encourages us how to trust ourselves and others. This and a focus on Intimacy and social power are developed to bring about group cohesion and self-reflection. This process helps us to respect ourselves. We can confirm this in a desire for wisdom, not knowledge, for connection, and not distance. In our initial feminine development, we are receptive and seek support for our aspirations.

As we anchor ourselves in Greed, Personal Dominion, Idealized Trust, and Universal Dominion, our growth is about expanding our space so others can easily connect to us. When we develop Idealized Trust it teaches us the cost of hope without a track record of success. It requires us to develop greater autonomy while enhancing our transpersonal skills of presence. Universal Dominion is how we mutually respect our creative autonomy and choice while putting together families.

Our masculine motives ground us in the pursuit of knowledge or information, so we can be productive in some endeavor. Arrogance allows us to determine what others want for us and what they do not. This supports us in building independence and self-esteem, so we are willing to take risks in service to greater recognition. The problem we face is that some aspects of us hide the truth and are not authentic, causing us grief. We need to separate what is true from what is not, which is the beginning of Autonomy.

The masculine development sequence is Arrogance, Personal Achievement, Idealized Unity, and Mutual Accomplishment. Personal Achievement pushes us to expand our self-definition and conquer new areas. After developing self-esteem, we realize that we need others to share esteem with, thus our quest becomes to find partners worthy of our truth and trust. When we work to speak our truth despite adversity, we go beyond Idealized Unity to Mutual Accomplishment. The masculine path starts with independence, to Autonomy, cooperation, and team building. Masculinity is mastering calibration, tools, and time.

Feminine expressions use being present and spaciousness to evoke new solutions while Masculine expressions become who they are with conscious tools & time.

When we combine our masculine and feminine sides, it integrates our fears and desires making us more responsible for our choices. It also results in greater self-reflection when our fears and desires are not addressed or handled. Lust, Self-Serving Activity, Idealized Co-Creation, and Conscious Participation are the four steps to personality integration. These unified factors are usually precipitated by being around others we admire or adore. These are usually a response from unconscious gender role-playing in Lust to conscious co-creative opportunities for mutual engagement in Conscious Participation. The benefit of this ladder is to understand how we are maturing and integrating our inner and outer needs.

The benefit of integrating our masculine and feminine motives is we are then able to see the full spectrum our who we are without Gender identifications. We need to recover our humanity and be able to empathize we others despite differences. By unifying our motives, we can finally see what motivates others. This consciousness also helps us to detach from unquestioned personality-driven perspectives to who are we as Creative Beings. This opens the door to being present and available despite our fear (all repulsions) and personality desire (all grasping, clinging). We need to get beyond these attachments, positions, and projections and see ourselves as a continuum of feminine and masculine expression. As this process of detaching from highly reactive personality-anchored motives occurs, we can then begin to appreciate our enhanced, intuitive, creative choices.


Ironically, our Instinctive motives are animalistic and therefore pre-personal and not a reflection of our individual personality. Intellectual motives are territorial and our first attempts to act and differentiate ourselves. Our idealized motives become insulated to prove we are better than anyone else. It does not occur to us until we reach the limits of idealization that we have been the biggest obstacle in our own development of some of the choices we have made. The level of motive is what we seek to shift to create a sense of equality, so we work co-creatively. Until we balance our level of consciousness with our partners, we cannot neutralize defenses.

Secondly, masculine and feminine polarization is the other problem with defenses. While our creativity provides the true degree of masculine and feminine for each person, our past experience and gender role-playing often spark conflict and reduce cooperation. This requires each partner to examine and be open and vulnerable in speaking their truth about their past, so does not interfere with action in the moment. Polarization is often positions between innocence and strength, sexiness vs. arrogance, and creative self-acceptance and personality self-rejection. Until we unify these perspectives, we are not open and available for consultation with a partner. Motives are acted out as a result.

Instinctive Motives

Intent is compromised and lost most in the Instinctive Motives of Greed, Lust, and Arrogance because our selfishness is both the only thing that motivates us and the only thing we accept in others. We see to make sure that both covet the same thing so the competitiveness will be on the up and up. The big issue is our constant attempts to direct the actions of others to serve us. It is all about haggling. Ironically, when we have no self-respect we allow others to take charge and objectify us. There is always something in it for them besides the stated objective.


We could also notice how easily these individuals become chameleons and adapt themselves to others to conform to what is expected of them. The problem is that everything is false and seductive. These personal distortions attempt to possess, control, or manipulate others’ contributions to serve their own purposes. This is usually cloaked in passed down parental imprints of beauty, the defensive illusion of truth while trying to prove they are doing all this to benefit others when it is only to benefit themselves. In a dog-eat-dog competitive world, they justify Greed, Arrogance, and Lust to get ahead, have an advantage, and survive and succeed.

Instinctive motives are uninterested in supporting action unless they see great self-interest in participating. They are reactionary obstructionists.

Superficially we can be deceived by their carefully constructed facades because it does not occur to us that these individuals are empty and completely self-centered. What this selfishness does is isolate us from others and make us even more needy and driven to conquer and possess others. Of course, it should be noted that this can be either an overt or covert process. What this accomplishes is jealousy and Co-Dependent need which eventually leads to betrayal and abandonment. Instinctive motives close and eliminate any real participation. Conscious people learn how to avoid these individuals who cannot see their inner beauty because they are not black holes in unpredictable behaviors.

Intellectual Motives

On the intellectual level, the motives are Personal Dominion, Personal Achievement, and Self-Serving Activity. This is all about your desire to create a home space or a home base for yourself to prove how valuable you are in what you do and then to relax by separating yourselves from others that would drain your energies. This is why so many of us are caught up in activities where we do not really need to have conversations with others around us. The big issue is how we become identified with our defensive image and fall into competition with others to prove how much better we are.


While the measurements may be money or power or accumulating assets, this does not keep us from doubting ourselves or finding ourselves attracted to those who are opposite us. These opposite attractions occur because we have separated ourselves from a part of who we are. We fall in love with the part we have denied in ourselves reflected in the people we date. We are intellectually stimulated by differences, but we do not realize that our truth requires paradox and going beyond positions. We find ourselves again in a certain degree of loneliness because we have no one who gets us. This is why we search for people who we believe will complete us.

Intellectual motive actors fixate on being right and pushing others to follow their lead. They act one-dimensionally.

Motives become obvious in our Authentic Life Expression (ALE) when we define an outcome and we see our progress or lack of it in attaining it. The big challenge is when you are doing your life work is to serve others and as you become more efficient you attract more constituents. To serve these constituents you need to have people who work in the same way. You seek to establish a standard in which to measure the outcome that clients receive. It can be disappointing when it takes a long time to have people able to re-create the process you do.

Motives either amplify and support you in the process or minimize or neutralize those who could be aligned with you. We can sabotage the development of our life expression by holding back, by operating with a sense of urgency rather than patience, and getting caught up in setting high standards without the courage to implement them.

Idealized Motives

On the Idealized level, the motives are Idealized Trust, Idealized Unity, and Idealized Cocreation. Idealized Trust is our inability to appropriately gauge how much to trust others. When we idealize them, or they idealize us it creates imbalances that lead to heartbreak and disappointment. In Idealized Unity, we seek examples of people, processes, and places that give us hope and inspiration that we can someday be in this exalted space. People that have attained great results in the world or have become famous actors, sports stars, tech billionaires, and even some politicians are highly idealized as role models or trendsetters.


We are either repulsed or attracted to these personalities. This creates an imbalance where we either fight ourselves or others. There is not an equal capacity and respect and so people do not know how to create the possibility these people represent for themselves. Finally, there are those situations we think that a partnership with someone would lead to great results, but our lack of true unity reduces our capacity to implement. Idealized Co-Creation is the belief that we should be able to do better without the knowledge of how to implement that in a mutually cooperative way. 

Idealized motives seek to be influence leaders and see actions as a way to organize movements. If actions do not amply their message, they resist.

By now it should be apparent that any imbalance in our intent keeps us from being aligned and clean about our motives with each other. Until we can see the inner qualities of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, we can be highly deceived by the outer presentation of such. This means that the individual is not able to commit fully to the activity. The kind of problems that arise are a lack of motivation or self-sabotage, a lack of ability to follow a mutual plan, and the inability to establish a common vision or outcome. Also missing is the connective tissue required to bring these things together.

At this point, you may be over-identifying with unconscious motives because they can by default, run our lives. Our fears can have a detrimental impact on our choices. What would be better is to observe your own process of responding to requests and start to examine how many of these responses are in reaction to our partners. We need to separate those we initiate from those we amplify and push to get what we want. We also need to determine the levels of consciousness that are motives are pointing to and ask what we could do to complete these lessons.

All personality level Motives have hidden expectations that close down our conscious awareness, so all our choices remain unexamined.

The instinctive level is about safety, being alive, feeling at home, and being honored for our creative impulses. The intellectual level is about security (which comes with having creatively aligned partners) and wisdom (assuming you do not know any answers but are addressing the situation anew). Showing emotional vulnerability would also make you more human. At the idealized level, the lessons are about how you could love yourself without needing to be self-important by honoring your creative contributions and learning how to respond to those around you. Recognizing the difference between authentic and caretaking goodness moves us to the Intuitive level.

Intuitive Motives

Intuitive motives are Universal Dominion, Mutual Accomplishment, and Conscious Participation. Universal Dominion is the ability to accept and stimulate the mutual potential of the people involved in the process. The objective of Universal Dominion is to expand the context so that the vision can be critiqued without taking it personally. It also means we must let go of any prejudice or lack of trust because of differences. We know this is accomplished when there is enthusiasm and constant regeneration of the vision as it gets closer to completion.


Mutual Accomplishment is all about having not just esteem for yourself but esteem for others. It is about resourcing each other as team players so that everything is bent toward the most effective outcome possible. At the core of Mutual Accomplishment is usually a plan that is both flexible and inclusive. This allows the process to continue to iterate so that through discovery it knows how to make the process and the outcome better. It ends with a state of unity in the member participation.

Intuitive motives establish a common human bond to be there for each other because they are based on creative expression and the equality of purpose.

Conscious Participation integrates both Universal Dominion and Mutual Accomplishment. It requires that there be a balance between individual participation and group process contribution. We always start with everyone being 100% committed to the outcome. In the process, we recognize when people cannot engage in the topics they are responsible for and we involve the measurement process so other people recognize the problems and expand areas that are problematic. Conscious Participation requires us to recognize when we hit our limit and find new ways to contribute more than what we imagine. In today’s world, it is about recognizing how we have to creatively actualize ourselves and what can we effectively bring to any situation.

Conscious individuals see the value of separating their personal stuff from their creative expression. They talk about service and the greater good. They also talk about productivity improvements experienced by their client. Unfortunately, this requires an organization that has done its personality development both individually and as a group. This means the group needs to be operating on inner success four or greater. There are very few organizations that we can see that are operating with that degree of aligned service. The ones we do see are therefore their own reasons to contribute to something because they are committed that others will not be in certain negative situations. They see the common good as eliminating the common problem.

Where are we in our motives? Our motives may be different between individuals. They may combine depending on the degree of attention, acknowledgment, and acceptance we experience with a person. To what degree are we operating transpersonally in our relationships by sharing motives? Do we actively seek to have times of presence with others in our lives where we synch up? This means we have differentiated our personality from our Creative Self and possess Autonomy. This allows us to engage more conscious possibilities and it also supports us in acknowledging when people show up focused on the outcome rather than just their personal lives. If you are tired of being in locked-down, non-creative relationships, it is time to move into Conscious, Co-Creative Partnerships.

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