Beyond the New Age: An Integral Vision

Above is Manjusri, a Buddhist archetype of spiritual discernment. His flaming sword cuts through to deeper consciousness of truth.

The Integral Vision

What the New Age is Lacking

by

Julian Walker
www.julianwalkeryoga.com

We live in an exciting time. This generation has unparalleled access to the data from Eastern and Western Spirituality, Science, Psychology and Social studies. There is a genuinely integral vision being created by cross-referencing all of the fascinating data and rich practices and therapies available to us, as the world seems to be shrinking in the information age. This makes a possible an exploration of the universal human condition that lies beneath our socio-cultural differences and the development of a worldview that is based in a broader and deeper context than ever before.

This essay explores some of what I feel are key insights into what I am calling the ”Integral Vision” and uses them as a backdrop against which to analyze what is lacking in the presently popular spiritual philosophy loosely referred to as the “New Age”.

While being a well-intentioned and sincere gesture toward the Integral Vision, the New Age fails to capture its possibilities, largely because of its lack of critical thinking, symbolic thinking, psychological awareness and practice orientation. This leads to several central problems with the philosophy. Although New Age thinking in general cannot definitively be called a philosophy or a religion, its basic tenants are fairly ubiquitous and, I would say, insidious.

The problems with these tenants can be explained using the standard philosophical concept (dating back to Aristotle) of the "category error" and what prolific Transpersonal Psychologist Ken Wilber calls the "Pre/Trans Fallacy". John Welwood in his book Toward a Psychology of Awakening has also coined a useful term that applies to another central issue in the New Age:  "Spiritual Bypassing".

Bear in mind that both Welwood and Wilber belong to that special class of philosopher/psychologists who have been actively involved in meditation and other spiritual practices for 20 - 30 years. They have, during this time, been attempting to reconcile the many apparent incongruities between East and West, Psyche and Spirit, Body and Mind, Intellect and Mysticism.

They, along with folks like Jack Kornfield, Stan Grof and to a lesser extent, contemporary Vajrayana Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron, represent the cutting edge of the synthesis of Eastern and Western wisdom for contemporary seekers. Why? Because they are asking the really difficult questions and generating a map of reality and the interior of the human being that is both larger and more inclusive/integrative as well as less prone to misunderstanding, repression and delusion.

Both Kornfield and Welwood are clinical psychologists who in addition to their extensive study and practice of Eastern traditions also have decades of experience working with clients. Kornfield is the co-founder of the first vipassana center in the U.S., Insight Meditation Center and later founded Spirit Rock Meditation Center. He went on to get a Phd. in clinical psychology and continues to teach vipassana from an ever evolving humanistic standpoint that integrates a western understanding of emotion and somatics that is actually absent from traditional vipassana and Buddhism in general.

So influential are his ideas and approach that it would be understandable to make the mistake of thinking that
Buddhism and vipassana meditation already had these emotionally aware and somatically grounded qualities. However, these are more properly understood as part of the phenomenon some are calling "American Buddhism". He is a pioneer in East-West integration.

Unparalleled World Mythologist Joseph Campbell is also an invaluable resource in the attempt to make sense of the psychological and socio-cultural function of myth and religion and in developing a symbolic, mytho-poetic way of thinking. Symbolic thinking, along with critical thinking are almost as entirely lacking in popular New Age beliefs as they are in fundamentalist religion.

 As I will discuss later,  symbolic and critical thinking are elements of the higher order developments of consciousness that spiritual practice and inquiry should properly encourage and cultivate. Unfortunately, popular spirituality does neither, and instead proposes a set of overly literal, anti-intellectual ideas that champion regression to pre-rational ways of thinking and magical/primitive/superstitious ways of interpreting reality.

Transpersonal Psychology

This branch of psychology begins with Carl Jung and his attempt to integrate trans-egoic or “trans-personal” elements into the existing ego-psychology of Freud. This resulted in his ideas about the archetypes, collective unconscious and his recognition of mythic themes common to his patients dream material, even when they had no intellectual knowledge of the mythology in question. Campbell was an avid student of Jung’s work and edited the collection A Portable Jung. Transpersonal Psychology is further developed by Abraham Maslow and then becomes the province of, amongst others, two major theorists who are giants n the field: Ken Wilber and Stan Grof.

Stan Grof is important because of his map of consciousness, a product of 30 or more years of working first with psychedelic therapy and then with Holotropic Breathwork. This map includes Freudian, Jungian, and Rankian psychological stages as well as Bioenergetic type somatic processes, Janov’s Primal Therapy ideas, and altered state/mystical experience data and concepts. In the above mentioned Bioenergetic realm, Wilhelm Reich and his intellectual descendents Lowen, Pierrakos and Keleman are important too.

Based on observing what people went through experientially in his clinical work, Grof confirmed what fellow  non-clinician Transpersonal theorist Ken Wilber also suggests: that there is a "spectrum of consciousness", and that the different psychological and spiritual disciplines are each talking about different, distinct levels of this spectrum. If you argue them against each other, you fundamentally miss the point. Grof observed that people would go through distinct stages as they worked through the various layers of psycho-spiritual healing and awakening. Biographical and
archetypal layers, as well as birth trauma, were pretty standard, all of which manifested in somatic ways as layers of emotional repression were released and powerful waves of energy passed through the person’s bodymind.

He also observed states of mystic rapture and unity consciousness as well as various experiences that seemed paranormal in nature. Grof noted something that ties in with the “spiritual bypassing” idea from Welwood that I am highlighting: patients who went directly into the transpersonal layers of mystical experience, bliss and transcendence, without engaging in a psychological process, were usually bypassing or avoiding the layers of biographical material that were painful for them and still unresolved. The problem with this is that it perpetuates and maintains a fundamental split
and doesn’t allow the spiritual states and insights to be integrated into reality. This syndrome can also be called a "flight toward the light", and as such serves as a defense against existential psychological suffering. It can also create a type of narcissistic inflation that limits real growth and healing and distorts our relationship to reality.

Kalsched

Another extraordinary theorist/clinician who addresses the issue of spiritual bypassing or “flight toward the light” in his own brilliant way is Donald Kalsched, a contemporary Jungian whose book The Inner World of Trauma; Archetypal Defenses of the Human Spirit, describes this phenomenon in amazing detail, complete with mythic and fairy tale analogues for the process of dissociation, fantasy based defense and the path to healing that puts the numinous world back where it belongs, in a place that nourishes and informs the experience of being fully human. The book is based on 20 years of working with severely traumatized patients and includes several illuminating case studies.

The basic idea is this: severe trauma creates a breach in the boundary between the Transpersonal layer of consciousness and everyday reality. Because the trauma is unbearable and threatens to annihilate the very existence of a self, there is what he calls an archetypal defense that splits-off a portion of the self and removes it to a place in the psyche that cannot be reached by the trauma. Here the person experiences transpersonal energies and phenomena - like being in a lucid dream state. Often trauma survivors have a far away dissociated manner and a set of magical
beliefs that are clearly child-like and regressive. They have a personal mythology and live in a world of unseen forces
and magical interventions. Unfortunately they often perceive this mythic world as being literally more real than everyday reality and are usually severely lacking in their ability to navigate everyday reality, interpersonal relationships etc…

Kalsched also makes a fascinating distinction in this book between what he calls "fantasying" and imagination. Imagination, he says, allows for a creative relationship between the inner and outer worlds, while fantasying is an activity that maintains the split and that does not allow this creative relationship.

Psychedelics (Entheogens)

There are several key books on psychedelic catalysts and their relationship to the development of culture and myth, religion, and spiritual practice. The most solidly researched and written is Persephone’s Quest by Gordon Wasson et al. This groundbreaking book demonstrates the probability that the shamanic roots of the Hindu-Buddhist tradition lies in the ritual consumption of the amanita muscaria mushroom. It also explores Meso-American and Egyptian/Sumerian religious roots in psychedelic or what are now called entheogenic sacraments.

The ancient Greek mystery school at Eleusis is also shown to have in all probability been a psychedelic initiatory institution that lasted for twenty-four hundred years. Their sacramental drink kykeon was made of fermented wheat that most likely had the ergot fungus growing on it, a fungus which contains naturally occurring LSD. Participants were guided through a re-enactment of the myth of Persephone and Demeter after having partaken of the kykeon. The mystery school at Eleusis was a source of inspiration and religious initiation for the intellectuals, philosophers and poets that founded Western thought and civilization.

My hypothesis regarding the Hindu-Buddhist tradition is that over time, practices were developed to attempt to mimic or activate similar altered states to those created by the mushroom. Wasson and others like respected Yogic scholar Georg Feurstein suggest that as the Aryan invaders pushed the ancient yogis into areas where the mushroom did not grow, they had to evolve different ritual practices. Clearly, though, the Indian tradition, as well as the Tibetan, is rich in elaborate psychedelic art and visionary archetypal imagery that suggest a deep relationship with altered states of consciousness.

It is telling too that the psychedelic 1960’s in America spawned the East-West synthesis that is happening now, as young seekers became fascinated with yoga and meditation after having psychedelic experiences that resonated so deeply with the art, myth and philosophy of Eastern traditions.

Dan Merkur’s book The Mystery of Manna quotes chapter and verse from the Old Testament to make a compelling case for the presence of the LSD-containing ergot fungus in the sacramental bread that produced the Biblical group visions and shared altered state religious experiences in significantly large groups of people.

Respected scholar Huston Smith, who pioneered the field of comparative religion, published a little known collection of writings just before his death that spanned the length of his career called Cleansing the Doors of Perception, in which he talks about the significance of the pyschedelic experience in his own life and in religious history.

I take this detour to suggest that there are rational (and trans-rational) psychological ways of understanding the origins of religion and the reality of altered states. Also to suggest that mysticism and spiritual insight are state specific, they are the product of sacramental catalysts and/or spiritual practices. That this is so is only a disappointment if one is looking for spiritual meaning somewhere other than in the miracle of human consciousness.

Beliefs will not get you there. The New Age is based largely in a Science of Mind inherited focus on mental beliefs being the key to spiritual freedom and emotional mastery.

Unfortunately, mental beliefs will not generate spiritual insight, psychological healing, or altered state revelation. The later are the province of the various energetic practices, psychological therapy’s and entheogen-based shamanic journeywork.

If there is one single gift that Jung gave to the world it is his very difficult to grasp idea of the Unconscious. I want to suggest the obvious, which is that the Unconscious is what ancient cultures called the “spirit world”. Their altered state processes gave them access to what we now understand as the Unconscious. Our psychological data and wisdom are actually in alignment with their descriptions of their shamanic experiences. Here again Grof’s work is invaluable. This understanding puts the spiritual power and focus again right back where it belongs - this human experience, not some otherworldly fascination and desire to escape. I observe too that the more people process and heal their biographical pain, the less compelling other-worldly spirituality becomes.

New Ager’s are also enamored of a rather naïve romanticizing and idealizing of ancient cultures and their wisdom. They do this without thinking critically about what was lacking in these cultures (like democracy, equality for women, freedom to disagree with the prevailing dogma, etc…) and without thinking symbolically about what their myths are pointing to that is universal to the human condition and often a product of altered state experiences.

So the New Age will generally uncritically buy into the surface features of an ancient culture as being significant and then come up with a literal interpretation that postulates this as being a time when gods really walked the earth, or this tribe was still connected to some alien civilization or able to perform physics-defying acts of magic. What it really should do in the search for meaning is go deeper into the universal features that are being mythologized through the lens of that cultures idiosyncrasies. Their stories read symbolically as representations of a) cultural baggage and superstition that we may want to debunk, b) universal human themes that can offer us insight and c) altered state data that is open to interpretation.

Category Errors

In philosophy, a category error is the misapplication of certain qualities or properties to something that can not have these. It is understood in philosophy that category errors result in unwarranted beliefs. One way to get closer to truth and clarity is to examine one’s beliefs or thought processes for category errors.

Here’s a quote from a web page on the subject:

    "A category error is the application of inappropriate term or predicate to a type of object that cannot be described in those terms.

    Some examples:

    * I had a green sleep.
    * My car is just.
    * I have seen the campus and buildings but where is the university?

    Mind is a set of behavioral dispositions, not a thing.
    * Dualists make the category error of thinking that "mind" is a thing, just like a body, but somehow made of different stuff.
    * Reductive materialists make the same category error, except they think the mind is made of the same stuff as the
body.
    * Anyone who takes seriously the question "Are mind and body identical?" is making the category error. "

For example, it would be a category error to talk about a compassionate Volvo, as inanimate objects do not properly
have emotions or spiritual qualities. Now, we might write a poem about a compassionate Volvo, but this would be
symbolic way of talking about the way we feel in the car, or about the person who owns the car, or about an occurrance that was related to the car - not the car itself.

Understanding that the poem is a symbolic expression,
rather than a literal one is a sign of a certain mental maturity. Failure to grasp this category error locates the emotion in the car instead of the person or the experience. In it’s mild form this is merely whimsical, in it’s most severe form it is psychotic.

Much of New Age thinking contains category errors. For example, the availability of a parking space on a busy street is not a function of the thoughts you had when you left home this morning. The Universe is not trying to tell you something when a space is not available. Similar to the example above ( I have seen the buildings and the parking lot, but where is the University?), the Universe is not a thing/being that communicates with you, it is the sum of all things/beings, and the availability of parking spaces is a function of how many other cars there are on the road, not your state of consciousness or some intention on the part of “the Universe”. In psychological terms the former interpretation is Narcissistic. There not being a parking space is not a sign that maybe you actually shouldn’t make the dental appointment you’ve been rushing to; although you might misapprehend the origin of that thought and ascribe it to someone other than your dentist-hating self! This is a form of psychological projection.



The Four Quadrants

Ken Wilber has a marvelous way of mapping reality into four quadrants. The quadrants represent inner and outer,
Collective and individual phenomena. He often uses the ancient Greek delineations of the Good, True and Beautiful as well as the pronouns “I”, “We” and “It” to explain the quadrants. He talks about different disciplines or sciences as applying to distinct quadrants.

For more check out his book  A Brief History of Everything. For now, here is an incredibly simplified thumbnail sketch:

"I" goes with Beautiful, aesthetics are personal, subjective. They have to do with an interior way of valuing. This quadrant includes art, psychology, spiritual practice etc…..Interior Personal.

"We" goes with Good, ethics have to do with how we treat eachother. The "Good Life" has to do with society and culture.
Interior Collective. This includes hermeneutics (the analyisis/discovery of meaning), social and cultural studies, ethics, law etc…..

"It" goes with True, that which can be empirically proven has to do with exteriors, measurable quantities. The
"It" domain actually covers two quadrants: Exterior Personal and Exterior Collective. Included here are things like
anatomy and brain chemistry (exterior personal) and the study of the exteriors of socio-political structures.

Now while it is obviously true that these domains influence each-other,  even overlap in places, any act of reducing on to another seems to me to generate category errors.

A good example here is the current New Age fascination with the movie What the Bleep… -  a very flimsy piece of work. Granted the interviews with the physicists are interesting and inspiring, and the exploration of the biochemistry of emotional patterning is fascinating, but the attempt by the film-makers to use over simplified quantum theory to prove a priori magical thinking based, reductionist spiritual beliefs is pretty problematic.

Physics gives us data about the external, measurable aspect of reality. Even quantum physics (mind boggling as it is) is still only able to tell us about the activity of molecules, not about the human psyche or that grand mystery - consciousness itself. Emotions, meaning, philosophical truth and consciousness are not the domain of empirical science. They are the domain of the internal disciplines like meditation and psychotherapy.

Great quantum physicists like Nils Bohr, James Jeans and Erwin Schrodinger all knew this back in the 30’s and 40’s when their ideas were being born. They all got interested in mysticism precisely because they realized the inability of empiricism to tell us anything about the great mystery. In the movie this is what the scientists interviewed all share: a sense of awe at the mystery of existence, not a set of magical beliefs. Correctly presented, quantum physics shatters beliefs and leaves one in a state of awe that is a preparation for genuine mysticism. And genuine mysticism is not science-of-mind based magical thinking! It is based in a sense of awe, a not knowing, rather than the idea that I control reality (internal and external) with my thoughts. The makers of What the Bleep, though, seem more invested in using their thinly presented quantum ideas to imply naïve magical relationships like this :

Simply remembering that water molecules can hold the energy of thoughts directed at them, and that the body is made up mostly of water is enough to shift someone out  of an attack of self-hating body dysmorphia and to cure them of an anxiety disorder, allowing them to toss their medication into the trash! Wow.

No mention anywhere of the process of healing, of any practices or therapies. No - just embrace these beliefs, believe in these ideas and you’ll be free!

This is a fun and empowering-seeming message to anyone who doesn’t actually have these problems. To someone who does have these problems, or has worked with anyone who does, it actually just becomes insulting and alienating.

Even the very interesting discussion of how emotional patterns create hormonal cascades that then cause cells to reproduce with increased receptors for the chemical that generates a certain emotional state, did nothing to propose a way of actually working with that syndrome and left us with the implied new age superficial favorite: you are not a victim, you are creating your own sadness, you can just choose another reality if you want to.

Gee, I’ll have to remember that the next time a see a schizophrenic on the street or talk to someone in immense pain over the abuse the suffered as a child.

The problem with these types of category errors is that they actually create what Wilber calls a reductionist flatland, either way you perform them.

This is important: It is just as much an affront to a complete view of reality to reduce everything to the empirical quadrant as it is to reduce everything to the mental/emotional quadrant. It’s only real if I can kick it - is just as incomplete as - Our thoughts create the Universe, which is just as incomplete as - it’s all the fault of society.

The Pre/Trans Fallacy

Back to Ken Wilber. The Pre/Trans Fallacy is one of his most astute contributions. It basically says this: Just because pre-rational and trans-rational states are both non-rational, they are easily confused with one another. Easy example - schizophrenia is not enlightenment. OK? While both may have non-rational features, Enlightenment is a post or trans-rational development of consciousness. Schizophrenia is a failure of rationality to contain and adequately process reality. It’s a disease. Schizophrenia is pre-rational - it is a primitive state, floridly complex as it may be, precisely because it is a disorganized chaos of misappropriated meanings. It is also, by the way, a condition rich in mythic and archetypal material, but so literalized as to rob it of any real imaginative value. Now of course we can argue the meaning of enlightenment, or if such a state even exists, but let’s just use it as a place-holder for a state of supra-rational development, mystic or unity consciousness.

He says that Freud commits the pre/trans fallacy in one direction when he reduces all meditative states to a return to the state of being in the womb. Jung, says Wilber, commits the fallacy in the opposite direction when he elevates all regressive states to the status of being spiritually profound.

Another example: This one centers on conventionality and what might be called pre-conventional or post-conventional behavior. The kid who punches his little friend in the face when she tries to play with his toys is behaving in a pre-conventional manner. He is then educated into conventionality and learns how to “play nice”. Martin Luther King JR. on the other hand was behaving in a post-conventional manner when he broke the law and went to jail for his beliefs. He knew that his beliefs were more ethical, more morally developed than the conventions of his day. Another non-conventional person of note from the 60’s, Charles Manson took some of the same premises as MLK but arrived at psychotic conclusions. He even believed himself and his cult to be post-conventional, but masterminded behavior that was brutally pre-conventional in its violence and cruelty.

Sidenote: I think this is an interesting question: is the goal of education, or spirituality for that matter, to train people to abide by conventions (a la the 10 commandments) or to discover self-evident truths for themselves ( I give you a new commandment - Love one-another)? I think this is one of the primary differences between religion and spirituality, certainly between the new and old testaments and the Hindu versus the Buddhist traditions, at the very least.

The distinctions between pre rational, rational and post rational, pre egoic, egoic and trans-egoic, pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional are an invaluable critical thinking tool that acknowledges the reality of evolutionary developmental processes and points to an incredible area of confusion in New Age thinking which tends to elevate pre states to post or trans states and confuses these two levels all the time.

Central to the New Age zeitgeist is the idea that rational is bad, “square”, limited, masculine. Boo! Non-rational, on the other hand,  is good, “groovy”, spiritual and feminine. Yay! The failure to distinguish between pre and post rational (because both are non-rational, you see?) then results in all sorts of superstition and fantasy getting given the label of spirituality and put on the same level as the profound possibilities of authentic, practice based insight and healing. This leads also to the types of confusion that mistakes dissociation for meditative awareness, or defensive, regressed magical thinking for well-integrated, adult, grounded spiritual liberation.

One of the key insights from Transpersonal Psychology comes in this quote form Jack Engler: “You have to be someone before you can be no-one.” In other words, a rational, healthy egoic level of development is a necessary pre-cursor to trans-egoic levels of development. Any of the theorists I have mentioned elaborate in depth on how the failure to do the work that allows for a healthy ego will result in spirituality being used in a pre-egoic, naïve, delusional way that perpetuates the very split that needs to be healed in order for authentic spirituality to develop.

Contrary to what we might like to think, kids don’t actually come out compassionate or empathic they have to learn these skills. They are part off a developmental process, just as are other things like critical thought and meditative absorption. It is naïve romanticism to believe that if we could all just be like children, the world would be perfect and we’d all love each-other. Ha! Ever watched kids on a playground? But seriously, kids do not have access to several qualities, developed as we become adults and beyond, that actually hold the key to improving the world.

Are we disconnected from spontaneity, trust and emotional authenticity? Absolutely, but this is because of childhood pain and emotional repression than can be healed through spiritual practice and psychotherapy, not through eschewing rational thought.

It is also erroneous to believe that if we could all be just like those vaguely referenced “tribal people” we would solve the world’s problems. Female circumcision arranged marriages, rigidly enforced gender roles? Not very feminine, groovy or “enlightened”, I’m afraid…..

Integral Development and Healing

In some corners here is an extraordinary synthesis going on of the energetic disciplines of movement-based practices like yoga and ecstatic dance with breath-based practices like yoga and Grof’s Holotropic Breathwork, with touch-based practices like bodywork and energetic healing, with awareness practices like meditation and psychotherapy.  None of these require belief or superstition, they are experiential discovery processes that reveal themselves over time. To me these are the cutting edge of the personal aspect of the Integral Vision. They represent the possibility of a psycho-spiritual integration that is grounded in the body, awake to reality, and emotionally aware. This is the contemporary birthplace of compassion and wisdom.

Conclusion

The answers lie ahead, not behind, though we may of course want to reclaim some elements of what we have lost n our hyper-masculinized rational frenzy. The Integral Vision, which I have touched on very, very briefly here, (leaving out many important ideas and contributors) integrates East and West, masculine and feminine, psychological and spiritual, rational and trans-rational ordinary and altered states of consciousness, practice and theory. It does this without confusing them with each-other or using them to invalidate each-other. It proposes transpersonal and trans-rational development from the only platform they can stand on - healthy rational development which includes critical thinking, symbolic thinking and psychological awareness and recognizes the importance of spiritual practice over religious belief of any stripe, traditional or New Age. In this way the Buddha’s advice to “be a lamp unto yourself”, can be actualized.



www.julianwalkeryoga.com