There once was a company called The Sharper Image. It had brick’n’mortar stores, typically in airports, but now lives on as a web-based catalog. They might have stores still – I don’t know – but the point of this story is my memory of a fascinating product they once marketed, a product called The Orb: The Self-Contained World.
Back when I was a traveling executive, I would while away the airport hours by shopping the Sharper Image. I would usually buy some little trinket – stupid stuff, the kinds of things that lost whatever allure they had by the time the next flight ended. But it was The Orb that fascinated me the most. Sadly and because of its heft, it wasn’t something I could buy and take home.
The Orb was a self-contained world. It was an aquarium into which you would add water, the little packet of sand that it came with, some twigs of a plant designed for self-contained worlds, and then a packet of microbes or some such thing (probiotics I suppose). It came with a coupon for obtaining by mail-order whatever live animals you intended to throw in, but not fish. These “live animals” were of the kind that grew to a certain size and then no more. They stopped growing, perfectly content to live in their self-contained world. So, they weren’t what we would recognize as fish, but they were big enough that you could not miss them there in the water.
Anyway, you would get it all set-up, add the animals (whatever they were) after the mailman arrived, then screw the top down and wait for eternity. It would in time achieve some sort of homeostasis, being that it was a self-contained world, and then just, well, sit there.
Nice to look at but with not much going on.
Because it was self-contained, there was nothing for its owner to do. It would generate all the nutrients required for sustenance. All you had to do was look at it. And, never, ever, open it up and put in something new. NEVER, for that would disturb the homeostasis. The Orb would react like a human body rejecting a new liver, contorting and twisting to eject and reject the new-whatever. Remove the new object and The Orb™ would return to its steady state.
What had happened, of course, is that The Orb had become a toxic environment. A nice place to live, but you’d never want to visit. Does that make sense? God forfend that you should happen to fall into The Orb! You would be ejected like Susan Sarandon at a Clinton rally. The Orb was for its original inhabitants only – 
nothing new, no one new, no new ideas, no new growth.
Sound familiar? It does to me. I’ve lately experienced being tossed out of an Orb. Flung out and shaking off water like a Sheltie just showered, I looked back and saw The Orb quickly reasserting its homeostasis, trying to act like nothing had happened. Its three little animals – whatever they are (I didn’t have time in The Orb to examine them up close) – jabbering to each other as if to say, “What the hell was THAT? How dare he come into our world! Aren’t we glad we have each other?”
In family systems theory, we are taught about the trials and travails of the typical family and the contortions it goes through to welcome a new member (let us call that “memberment”), to eject or lose an old or unwanted member (let us call that “dismemberment”), and the tendency of some family members to lose their individuation and to join what we might call the “undifferentiated ego mass.” It is this latter thing, this handful of goo we call an ego mass, that is perhaps most problematic: It hints that unless you are willing to lose your individualism and meld into the goo, you will be ejected. You will be dismembered. And, for that matter, you will be dis-remembered too.
And should you decide to join into the goo, you will have lost yourself, perhaps like Dante forever. Of course, that won’t be apparent to you: Looking at the others in the goo, in The Orb, will be like looking in a mirror. 
Self-awareness and repetitive, recursive self-reflection, are needed in order to guard against having your small group become an Orb. Examine how your group – your family perhaps, or your work group – may have become a self-contained world, unwelcoming of new ideas and new members. Hold up to the light of day the manner in which you have created that toxic environment. Look for the signs that you, like those animals that came via mail order, have reached a certain size and then stopped growing. Have you stopped writing? Have you stopped researching? Do you and your fellow Orb inhabitants work together to draw people into the goo and force them to abandon themselves in favor of the group?
Racism, sexism, and ageism are daily reminders, evidence if you will, of goo. We want people in our group who talk like us, squat like us, and look like us, and unless they change (enter the goo forever), we will reject them and shun them like they are a kind of kinky bacteria.
Does your group only add members that are, in effect, duplicates of what arrived via mail order? Do you hire in your own image?
I hope not. It is tough to be rejected. Jut ask the liver.
