Spiritual Atheism

Hi everyone,

Happy New Year!

I have been posting a lot at the Integral Institute Pod and though to blog one response from a thread I started clled Spiritual Atheism. View the whole dialog here.

The integral Institute Pod is the discussion board on Zaadz for all things related to Ken Wilber's Integral Theory.....check it out!

Stay tuned also for video blogging in 2007. I have a little video bit coming up on the same subject...

This is actually part of a group conversation with some great people spanning four threads:
1) Enlightenment?
2) The Myth of the Given
3) Spiritual Atheism
4) Prerational and Transrational Spirituality, The Difference Is?

yes, i hear the fear that without religious myths life would be meaningless. my point, however, is that surrendering the literal interpretation of myth (ie religion) actually deepens, expands, enrichens and exponentialy multiplies the mystery!

that is the existential initiation i am referring to. it goes something like this:

a) the rational honesty and courage to acknowledge that no myth has ever been literally true.
b) the same honest courage to acknowledge that there is not anyone anywhere who actually knows what happens after death and there never has been.
c) the recognition that it is the fear of death, chaos and meaninglessness that leads us to cling to unprovable bliefs or “faith” about that which no-one actually knows anything.

from these flow three blossomed realizations:

a) the myths are creations of the brilliant and mysterious poetry of the psyche!
b) death is a universal constant that binds all of humanity together and that is a powerful archetypal force in the human psyche and culture.
c) the understanding that through setting oneself free of superstitious defenses and really embracing the mystery and inevitability of death as well as the extraordinarily high probability that death is quite simply permanent sleep - one is more spiritually present, more alive to reality, more appreciative of the preciousness of love and the torment of suffering, more commited to living actually in the hugely improbable mystery of human consciousness and feeling.

this is the great irony:

belief in a literal god is not at all mysterious. it is a closing off of an exquisite inquiry that keeps going and going.

having “faith” ie - belief without evidence in a defined idea is actually the exact opposite of embracing the mystery.

and worst of all believing literallly in tthe socially constructed god of my culture (be it from your traditional roots, your subculture exoticism, or the new age orthodoxy i am pointing out) actually profoundly limits awareness of the problems with that cultural worldview and how it blocks growth to the next level.

whenever  i talk about relinquishing superstition, like say in my conversation on my blog about people who claim to channel alien intelligences, others wisely try to accuse me of not being open to the mystery.

actually, i am not open to unproven superstitions that limit the mystery in unsatisfactory ways!

what you are expressing here is i think a confusion of tolerance on the one hand - which of course we should have on a practical level, with, on the other hand, the merely pluralistic green meme position that takes offense at honest inquiry into the relative truth or falsity of certain worldviews.

in other words i can be tolerant of the fact that someone believes in a white bearded man in the sky who grimaces everytime we take his goddamn name in vain or have dionysian premarital sex - but still state, at the same time, that this is a ridiculous and oudated superstition.

tolerance does not exclude rigor, courage or honesty. faith is not an effective path into mystery.

btw - HAPPY NEW YEAR! & thanks for the dialog so far….:O)