How neuroscience, epigenetics, and contemplative science expand Konner’s vision and align with the Diamond Approach’s path of embodiment.
Shortly after I first entered the Diamond Approach® in 1988, or perhaps it was ’89, I stumbled across a book that left a lasting imprint on me: The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit by Melvin Konner. Konner’s work was bold for its time, a sweeping attempt to bridge biology and psychology, to show how our very cells, hormones, and evolutionary inheritance shape not only behavior but also the longings and conflicts of the human spirit. He asked how much of who we are is carved in flesh, and how much is open to the winds of culture, choice, and transformation.
Looking back now, more than three decades later, the landscape of research has expanded almost beyond recognition.
- Neuroscience has mapped the brain’s plasticity with a detail Konner could only hint at.
- Epigenetics has revealed that genes are not fixed sentences, but dynamic scripts that are rewritten by experience and environment.
- Developmental psychology has traced the subtle interplay of attachment, trauma, and resilience in ways that deepen Konner’s original observations.
- Even contemplative science—the study of meditation, presence, and nonordinary states of consciousness—has entered the dialogue, showing that what once seemed biologically constrained may, in fact, be pliable through practice, attention, and awareness.
So where does this leave us? Konner framed the question as a tension—biology versus spirit, constraint versus possibility. The research since then invites a new perspective: that the human spirit is not simply bound by biology, nor entirely free of it, but is entangled with it, woven into the very fabric of our cells and neurons. The Diamond Approach also suggests this intertwining: that our essence and our biology are not in opposition, but in a dynamic conversation. The body is not a prison; it is a gateway, a living partner in the unfolding of consciousness.
This is where the Diamond Approach departs from much of modern psychology and even spirituality. It insists that to be in the world but not of it is not to transcend the body or to deny biology, but to embody essence through the body. Presence, love, will, clarity—these are not abstractions hovering above our humanity. They appear through breath and heartbeat, through the nervous system’s capacity to relax into immediacy, through the very cells that Konner described as constraints. What appears to be a limit from one view reveals itself as a doorway from another.
The emphasis, then, is not on concepts but on phenomenology—on the felt experience of being. The Diamond Approach does not ask us to adopt theories of mind or body, but to sense, look, and listen into the immediacy of experience. What is fear, not as a theory, but as a sensation in the belly, a contraction in the chest, a story unraveling in awareness? What is love, not as an ideal, but as the warmth that flows unbidden when defenses fall away? Here, the body is not reduced to a mechanism, nor the spirit to a metaphor, but both are honored as living expressions of reality.
In this sense, the research, since The Tangled Wing and the Diamond Approach’s unfolding wisdom, converges.
- Neuroscience reveals that the brain is not fixed, but rather open to change.
- Epigenetics shows that environment writes itself into our biology. Developmental psychology shows how presence and absence sculpt the soul.
- The Diamond Approach reveals that engaging with these discoveries is not merely about thinking about them, but about experiencing directly the unfolding of essence through the body—life itself as the bridge between the finite and the infinite.
And, of course, there is quantum entanglement. Physics reminds us that particles once joined remain mysteriously linked across vast distances, moving as if they share a hidden thread of communication. Perhaps this is more than a metaphor for the human condition. Our biology is entangled with our spirit, our cells with our consciousness, our bodies with the vast field of being. What Konner glimpsed as “constraints” may be better understood as resonances—threads of connection binding us not only to our evolutionary past, but also to the boundless dimensions of essence. In this light, biology does not limit the human spirit; it reveals the very fabric through which the infinite touches the finite.
John Harper is a Diamond Approach® teacher, Enneagram guide, and student of human development whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and deep experiential inquiry. His newest book, Nurturing Essence: A Compass for Essential Parenting, invites parents to discover the role essence plays in child development. He is also the author of The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life and Good Vibrations: Primordial Sounds of Existence, available on Amazon.