Integrative Spirituality: Grounded Contemporary Perspectives

Very nice, Julian. You certainly have set the bar pretty high for the rest of us! ;-)

Great stuff Julian. Unfortunately, I’m rushing off to the hospital for a marathon shift, and will not have time for in-depth commentary until tomorrow. Thanks for getting this party started in such grand fashion.

–Bob

Well done, Julian! I've been looking forward to your post in this series since you announced it. I'll just make a few comments.

You mention “over-identification with beliefs” stemming from too much surface work at the expense of depth work. I am reminded of Wilber's distinction between what he calls “translation” versus “authentic transformation” (especially in his 1997 essay, “A Spirituality That Transforms,” which first appeared in What Is Enlightenment magazine and was later reprinted in Wilber's book One Taste). “[H]elpful translations” are necessary, but are–or should be–transitional. Translation involves beliefs, “a new way to think or feel about reality.” Authentic transformation, on the other hand, “is not a matter of belief but of the death of the believer.” Or as one of my teachers used to say, there is no transformation without “loss of face.” Depth work is often painful for it can undermine the self-image, including the spiritualized self-image that so many who are drawn to spiritual (and integral, transformational, etc.) paths tend to build up.

You say that “[m]any sensitive and/or traumatized people drawn to spirituality” take a route that entails a lack of differentiation between the intuitive stream and shadow material and projections, etc., and this “ends up being overly literalized in a kind of superstitious way.” I think the relationship between trauma and what may be referred to as “flight toward the light” or simply “ascent-bias” warrants more attention than it tends to get. Again this relates to how depth work–and “depth” of course refers not only to psychological depths but to somatic depths or the psyche in and as the body–is sometimes avoided by spiritual aspirants because it is often painful. To go into the depths is to meet not only personal trauma but the trauma of the human condition. It's all too easy to leap to a kind of “we are gods” or “we are always already enlightened” or “we are perfect just as we are” mindset, and thus avoid our rawness, vulnerability, tenderness, and humanity.

You say, “Codependent dynamics based in an inability to tolerate the reality of suffering in ourselves and others are extremely common in non-integrative spirituality and give rise to all sorts of defensive beliefs that are the orthodox lingua franca in some circles.” Yes, some who are drawn to spirituality seem intent on denying the reality of suffering, and thus we often hear talk about how suffering doesn't “really” exist, and how suffering is really an illusion, etc. A line from the movie The Last King of Scotland comes to mind, where one character tells another (who is about to be tortured), that (and I will paraphrase), “We are real. This room is real. And your death may be the first thing in your life that is real.”

One last comment, related to what you wrote about a distinction between healthy anger and toxic anger. I would say that healthy anger isn't really anger, and that anger in general is a “destructive emotion” as some contemporary Buddhists put it. This is a difficult issue, for as most of us no doubt know, there is a very real difference between genuine compassion and what Trungpa called “grandmother compassion” or “idiot compassion.” We don't want to repress anger, nor do we want to act it out, nor do we want to lie to ourselves and others by pretending that our anger is really “bodhisattva” behavior.

Again, excellent post, Julian, you've touched on a lot of imporant territory!

Jim

An excellent summary of your work. Those who are living this process have experienced the power of it. Lots of hard work, not always pretty, and no quick fixes. Sounds like Life…

Looks good, Julian!  I just skimmed it this morning, as I'm on my way to jury duty.  I'll return to it and read it more carefully this afternoon…

Wonderful post, Julian! And a worthy beginning to this symposium. I like how you combine a broad overview with focused insight—truly well done.

A few comments on specifics to follow…

One corrolary to this is a kind of unboundaried overabundance of intuitive awareness with a lack of either the structure of ego-strength or the awareness of the depth work - such that the intuitive stream is often undifferentiated from one's shadow material, projections etc and ends up being overly literalized in a kind of superstitious way. Many sensitive and/or traumatized  poeple drawn to spirituality take this route.

This is an interesting and important observation, and reminds me of Rudolf Steiner's views on the difference between what he called “spiritual science” and the psychism that was rampant in the late 19th century—which correlates with the channeling of the last forty years or so. Steiner emphasized—as elaborated in Richard Leviton's excellent The Imagination of Pentecost: Rudolf Steiner and Contemporary Spirituality –the importance of engaging the “spiritual realms” (the transperonal) from the foundation of a strong ego and intellect, and in an empirical fashion (thus “science”), rather than through the mediumistic method of unconscious or semi-conscious channeling. The main problem being, among others, the potential for tainted information and, as you might put it, mythic concrete beliefs, without an understanding of hermeneutics.

The Self is constantly communicating with us through things like dreams, intuitions, projections, fantasies, emotions, psychosomatic symptoms. Think of the (deep) Self as being more authentically in touch with what is really going on under the surface of the defenses (rationalization, denial, magical thinking, projection etc) - the Self has a clearer picture of the whole of our experience and has acccess to the disowned shadow material of emotions, desires, experiences, resources and archetypes that our ego has not yet learned to tolerate, actualize, and integrate.

I might take this a step further: rather than the Self having a “clearer picture,” it has a crystal clear picture in that it is the Witness of whatever arises. The realm of its communication is “between” the causal and the mental, what has been called the soul or daimon. Thus, again, the importance of a strong, healthy ego—and intellect: we all “receive” communication from the Self in that we all have dreams, intuitions, and visions; but the key is how we interpret what we—as the mental-verbal self—experience/intuit.

….spirituality actually is a bit of a magnet for wounded people. Now, if the kind of spirituality that is encountered is not integrative, it will likely perpetuate the very defenses (denial, rationalization, magical thinking) that are keeping the ego and the Self from being in an integrated fluid relationship.

While I agree with your point here, I think you over-emphasize the “kind” of spirituality, rather than what one “does” with whatever type of practice they are engaged in. How we eat is just as important as what we eat (see, for example, Marc David's excellent The Slow Down Diet). The shadow and/or blind aspects of ego have a way of co-opted whatever modalities one is engaged with, which is why spiritual materialism is rampant no matter what “kind” of spirituality.

Again, my point is how is at least as important as what.

I liked your differentiations between healthy and pathological variants of different emotions and psychological structures. I wonder, however, what “healthy anger” looks like at higher developmental levels. For example, you list “moral outrage” as an expression of healthy anger, yet I question whether at higher waves/altitudes moral outrage would even arise, or at least whether it would arise in a different form.

As we engage in practices that allow development and healing to occur, insight arises. Insight is distinct from belief in one simple way: belief is an outside-in phenomenon. Insight is as the word suggests an inside-out phenomenon. In other words imposing a belief that one has decided is worthwhile, or that one has heard is spiritually correct is very different from going through a process that allows insight to emerge experientially.

This is a very helpful observation. One potential problem that we must be aware of, however, is the difficulty in differentiating between insight and belief both in ourselves and in others, especially when disagreement occurs. It is all too easy to assign another's view as based on “mere belief” simply because it differs with our own (supposed) insight.

Personally I feel that the great initiation into genuine transpersonal spirituality has to do with integrating the hard-won development of cognitive, emotional and spiritual lines into an existential awakening to the mindblowing miraculous sacredness of reality as it is in a way that redefines the old world ways of using those terms and finally understands that words like god and spirit actually refer to our own complete true nature and have been a way of trying to wake up to ourselves all along. In that moment the mysterious and the mundane are revealed as one and the same and any metaphysical construct that needs to somehow look outside of reality as it is is seen as a ghostly substitute for this one brutal, beautiful, unfair, magnificent, tragic, grace-filled ride through the inner and outer cosmos.

This is beautifully said and I am completely with you on this. I would, however, amend your phrase of “genuine transpersonal spirituality” to “genuine integral/existential spirituality,” because what you describe here is an integral interpretive framework. Other interpretive frameworks can still be authentically transpersonal, but what you are talking about is how we interpret the transpersonal. Your framing of “god” and “spirit” is still interpretive, albeit more integral than previous magic, mythic or metaphysical views. In other words, you are still interpreting the Ineffable—which is just fine, and the beauty of the mind. But the point is that no matter how integral or comprehensive our current framework, it can and will always be superceded…'tis the nature of evolution, after all!

The “moment the mysterious and the mundae are revealed as one” can arise within just about any cultural context, any interpretive framework. But we should be careful to differentiate between that moment and how we interpret it, for when we say that “words like god and spirit actually refer to…” we are interpreting, concluding, limiting the ineffable. Again, this is fine and he beauty of the mind, but the “moment” cannot truly or adequately or fully be “referred to,” no matter how integral our view might be.

I look forward to discussion and the rest of the symposium—thanks for this opportunity, Julian!

Hey, your dudeness! This is a fine survey of some major distinctions that, if not clarified, graciously provide headaches to many seekers. Thank you for opening.:-)

Nice text Julian.

Your views concerning the psyche and its dynamic seem to follow closely psychology of the self (Kohut and the like). The unconscious or depth component is composed, according to your definition of Shadow material (traumas and the like) and some constructive or energy feeding things like “self-parenting” “archetypal imagery” “and insight into our personal process and the unversal human condition”.

I liked Wilber's view of more than one unconscious, as described in “The Atman Project”. It seems an interesting map to describe the experiences we see in humans, as opposed to one unconscious which is like a basket full of what we want him to be full of!

Another point: No need of the concept of the pre/trans fallacy in your model..isn't it?

Keep up the flame and the work,

With love Patrick

Interesting stuff, Julian, and an astute analysis of the issues facing spiritual seekers today.

I think there's a cultural aspect to the chronic low self-worth many people experience, since this phenomenon is virtually unheard of in more communal cultures. Starting at infancy, the virtues of individuality, independence and non-conformity are pressed into our heads, to the detriment of many people. The thinking seems to be that low self-esteem is the catalyst for productivity. Unconditional love is purposely withheld, forcing chronically alienated individuals to work desperately hard to earn the affection of family and friends. Even the name we assign it – “self” esteem – implies that it is a primarily individualistic concern, and that conceals the fact that often, low self-esteem is caused by internalizing deeply conditional cultural values.

We need to feel important, special, loved, accepted, admired – but these are conditional attributes. The main reason we focus on them is because in this culture, people who are perceived to have those attributes are given a level of acceptance and value that's unavailable to most of us. Though still conditional (one can become unimportant, or cease to be special), these attributes are seen to offer a greater level of security in an insecure world.

I suggest we do one better: offer unconditional acceptance to the unimportant, the ordinary and the everyday, in ourselves and in others.

~MrTeacup

excellent post! thanks for the links. my only suggestion is that, moving forward, it would be better to keep it a bit shorter, and/or focused on certain key areas. this way, the comments will be focused as well. for example, there are too many topics for commenting on this post alone. you can always sum it up in a conclusion post where you bring everything together into one cohesive post ;)

having said that, i'd like to comment on the chakras. do you think the chakra system is a purely psychological model or does it have physical/biological correlation with our nervous system? what's your take on paranormal/psychic phenomena that are attributed to opening a particular chakra? sorry bro. once you start mentioning chakras and kundalini, you open up this can of worms :)

thought experiment: how would you explain or assist a person suffering/undergoing, kundalini “awakening” without giving them lectures on integral theory? in short, how would you meet them where they're at?

btw, not everyone seems to agree with Wilber's taxonomic system on subtle energies. see this response from Esalen.

“Overall, Murphy emphasized the need for contemporary researchers to remain “theoretical agnostics” or “theoretical pluralists” about phenomena such as the survival hypothesis, the chakra system, and subtle bodies. Until a much richer natural history has been conducted on them, it is difficult to argue for a tight classification system.”

finally, how would you interpret this statement by the late U.G. Krishnamurti?

“I have not set myself up in the 'holy business' of liberating people. I have no particular message for mankind, except to say that all holy systems for obtaining enlightenment are bunk, and that all talk of arriving at a psychological mutation through awareness is poppycock. Psychological mutation is impossible. The natural state can happen only through biological mutation.”

to me it sounds like UG was collapsing everything to the physical (Right Quads). but it's hard to counter the fellow because he was the one who underwent and lived through the actual experience of “waking up.” to say that he has a big/small ego is a projection on our part, because according to him, he is nothing.

that's all for now. i'll leave you a quote from a friend of mine.

“Only those who have awakened know that they were sleeping.”

~C

great start j. i'll reserve specific comment until this time next week. plenty of time for cross-pollination after this symposium.

mostly good feedback too. focused on the issues, and giving extra distinctions, questions, and references. very encouraging of new learning.

regarding length of your entry as mentioned by c4, it is tricky. the subject requires a broad scope, so the entry will necessarily be somewhat general in nature, but too short and it's hard to say anything meaningful. i think having framed it as a symposium allows for more length than usual in a blog format.

work demands notwithstanding, i think i'll find keeping my entry concise the hardest part…

i think this is a very positive start from you and the comment contributors.

For folks interested in integrating psychological and spiritual development, particularly drawing on the insights of Object Relations theory and Self Psychology, I recommend checking out two of Almaas' books, The Pearl Beyond Price and The Point of Existence.

julian…you never cease to inspire me with your ability to communicate your perspective with such clarity and intelligence…not to mention your ability to facilitate the growth of so many that come to you for transformation and healing…its also entertaining to witness all the different reactions to you and your posts…once a punk rocker, always a punk rocker, eh?…with grace…S.

sorry to arrive so late to this great symposium…i've been in transit. :)

and actually, i just want to ask 2 questions at this juncture.

1) julian, what do you feel is the purpose of “magical thinking?”

seperate from what other theorists may define it as…what is your personal perspective? do you feel that “magical thinking” serves a purpose? and if so, what is it?

2) how do you perceive people who experience God and Spirit in the personal aspect? Instead of relating spiritually within an impersonal paradigm, they relate/connect within a personal paradigm. And they do so consciously. Perhaps, like Ramakrishna, Kabir, the Gopis, Mirabai, Jesus.

Looking forward to your sage feedback…  :)

btw, the organization, depth, and clarity of delivery on this most recent post is outstanding, j.

:)

Julian -

A good read, overall.

Like ~C4Chaos, I would like to hear more from you on the chakras.

Frankly, I see a rather contradictory stance of yours being a demythologizing, condescending, reductionistic tendency when thinking about God (“I think we dreampt up god to explain all manner of things that have since been understood by science”) that is somewhat bold and offensive, while being soft and sympathetic and lovey-dovey friendly-friendly to the chakra system, which you think is based on anatomy, actual “energies” , and metaphorical/imaginal ways of talking about the mind-body matrix. Unfortunately you don't quite apply the same degree of sympathy to ancient beliefs outside your own prefered tradition, which strikes me as narrow minded (or possibly a symptom of classic denial and projection). Of course, you're welcome to your prejudices, as are we all, but then you have to live with the seemingly contradictory (or at least non-integral) nature of your own strongly held stances.

Yeah, I'm with Joe (wolfspirit) on this one, Julian. A truly integrative (integral) spiritual practice needs to have a second person devotional element, just as much as a first person reflective awareness element, not to mention a third person Gaia-esque element. Get top heavy in any one direction and you risk running into all sorts of problems and limitations.

I'm not suggesting we have to believe in some bearded guy living up in the clouds that will hurl thunderbolts at us if we're bad, but if an image like that works for you, go for it. My point is, we need to practice a well-grounded devotion to Spirit as a second person “out there”, and not focus all of our attention inward to the Spirit inside of us, else we risk getting stuck in the ultimate ego trip.

Namaste

“awakening to the mind-blowing miraculous sacredness of reality as it is in a way that redefines the old world ways of using those terms and finally understands that words like god and spirit actually refer to our own complete true nature and have been a way of trying to wake up to ourselves all along”

I like that Julian, but I also agree with wolfspirits comment above. God and all the other names for transcendent reality, love and truth, instead of dismissing them and at once alienating all people professing faith in a higher Essence, I much rather will try to understand it in its context and convey any inherent truth found.

“You have to be someone before you can be no-one.”

Not sure if that will make it into my blog Wednesday or not (at least not explicitly), but a litte over a year ago there was a good series of talks on Integral Naked that went into this issue. The 3-part series was called “Touching the Face of Tomorrow” and included Michael Beckwith (I've linked to his profile page because links to all three parts can be found there), Rabbi Marc Gafni (he wrote hoping it wouldn't kick off an entirely irrelevant debate), and Ken.  Part 3, “The Three Faces of God”, in particular goes into first, second, and third-person aspects of Spirit.

It's a nice morning coffee here in London

OK, so both Beckwith and Gafni are human (as is Wilber, of course), but that doesn't change the fact that what they say in that dialogue makes a lot of sense. At least to me.

Oh, and sorry, I've never managed to get into soccer, despite living over here for 15 years. Now MotoGP on the other hand… watching Rossi ride a motorcycle is almost a spiritual experience in itself! ;-)  Seriously though, did anyone else see that mindblowing qualifying lap he did in China last weekend? He had to be seriously in the “flow” when he did that.

No problem. One thing I've learned from online “debating” is that you can't do it healthily if your goal (or expectation) is to pursuade others. If pursuasion happens as a byproduct, that's fine, but the main objective should, as I see it, be practicing your own cognitive and communication skills and learning something from others and from the whole process. (Not to mention the community-building/social benefits.)

Thank you very much, Julian. There's some really helpful stuff in there. However, I have to weigh in on the second-face-of-God issue (you can count me as one of the devotional insomniacs–no, I didn't just wake up for an early-morning meditation, unfortunately). Here's Ken from a What Is Enlightenment? interview: 
 

Wilber: There are three topics I've written very little on. One is psychic phenomena; one is rebirth and reincarnation; and one is God in second-person. Because as soon as you open your mouth and say anything about any of those, nobody takes you seriously in the influential academic world… . So the 1-2-3 of God or the three faces of Spirit basically mean that Spirit can be approached in first-person perspective or second-person perspective or third-person perspective. First-person Spirit is the great “I AM,” the pure radical subjectivity or witness in every sentient being. And then Spirit in the second-person is the great “Thou,” something that is immeasurably greater than you could ever possibly be in your wildest imagination, before whom surrender and devotion and submission and radiant release and gratitude is the only appropriate response, and from whom all blessings and all goodness flow unreservedly. And a relationship to that Other, in love and devotion and ecstasy, is the only appropriate response if you have any sanity at all… . This is one of the criticisms that I develop in Integral Spirituality, which is what I call a level-line fallacy-that the second-person view of Spirit got truncated in the West. It got chopped off at the mythic level of development. Spirit in second-person has become stunted and identified merely with God the Father, the old white-haired gentleman, the mythic patriarch of the Bible that nobody believes in anymore… .

Cohen: Without all three faces being included, will have only a partial perspective on who and what God is. One's interpretations of one's own God-experiences will always be incomplete. And it's been apparent to me ever since I began teaching twenty years ago that especially for us postmodern extreme narcissists, the second face of God is absolutely essential. Without God as Thou, the great Other before whom we all must ultimately submit, becoming a living, felt dimension of our own direct experience of Spirit, I wonder whether it's possible to ever move beyond ego in any kind of authentic way.

Wilber: That's so true… .  So you have to say: “Wait a minute. I have to face something that I completely surrender to. I have to face something greater than I could ever imagine myself possibly to be.” You have to utterly surrender with devotion and actually want to do it, because second-person perspective carries a naturally welling up infinite love and gratitude. So it's not something that can be forced. If you're forcing it, then it's not really a true transcendental surrender.



Now this is really going to stretch some people's credulity, but I'm going to quote a little Ramana Maharshi. Now I do not believe this wholesale. I do not believe in some omniscient God that has everyhing locked down and planned out, as Maharshi apparently believed and which his culture certainly supported, but this is none the less illustrative and definitely not entirely without truth:

“The present difficulty is that man thinks he is the doer. But it is a mistake. It is the higher power which does everything and man is only a tool. If he accepts that position he is free from troubles, otherwise he courts them.”

Ramana Maharshi was not an idiot. Ken Wilber called him the greatest sage of the twentieth century. Certainly Ken would disagree with such an extreme metaphysical approach as this, and so do I, but there is a reason the great realizer said things like this. This and similar sayings of his were born not merely out of his cultural conditioning but out of experience. The deeper psychic is where the self really meets the second face of God in Ken's model. And we should also remember: Ken's model, in his words, is a rational reconstruction of the transrational. There's a great mystery out there.

Hey, J, you're probably sleeping at this moment. Well, it's noon here, and I'm also having some coffee, in my case it's macchiato, and I ain't no face slapper…:-) As to the second face: you can't be that much a spiritual atheist not to recognize that the second face is the way of developing deep devotion, but also a crucial aspect of many tantric meditations (deity and guru yoga). Granted, all three faces are unpacked from Suchness, BUT practice happens in the relative realm, right? So, your 2nd face may not be that pronounced or even explicit, but I don't see how you can dismiss it entirely without serious damage.

Don't know why the 1-2-3 of God didn't occur to me, but of course that's exactly the same thing I was talking about.

As for the Ramana Maharshi quote, I'm not so sure Ken would disagree with it. If we take “man” here to mean man in the manifest realm, and given that he contrasts this with “the higher power”, I think we can assume that's what he meant, then he's right to essentially be saying that Spirit acts through us. But that doesn't exclude the possibility of also becoming aware of Spirit as it arises within us as a first-person experience. The danger arises when one fails to distinguish between egoic duality and spiritual non-duality. And having a second-person devotional practice helps us to stay grounded in that regard.

hi grey

i didn't want to comment before all the posts were up this week, but your response to wolfspirit's comment - which is a different argument focusing i think on feeling unfairly offended by julian's selective and ostensibly contradictory metaphysical sympathies -  compels me to break radio silence. i just want to know in response to both the gafni-beckwith talk and this:

“A truly integrative (integral) spiritual practice needs to have a second person devotional element, just as much as a first person reflective awareness element, not to mention a third person Gaia-esque element. Get top heavy in any one direction and you risk running into all sorts of problems and limitations.

I'm not suggesting we have to believe in some bearded guy living up in the clouds that will hurl thunderbolts at us if we're bad, but if an image like that works for you, go for it. My point is, we need to practice a well-grounded devotion to Spirit as a second person “out there”, and not focus all of our attention inward to the Spirit inside of us, else we risk getting stuck in the ultimate ego trip.”

why?

for what reason do we need a second person? why do we need to be grateful for being alive? why do we need to have someone else to thank? why do we need a devotional element? why do we need to surrender? why do we need humility? why do we need to devote ourselves to someone else? why does the absence of these things necessarily lead to an “ego trip”, or arrogance, or vanity, or anything else undesirable? in whose debt do we live? to whom or what do we owe allegiance and humility for being alive, and having an ego? are we not allowed to live happily without these things? by whose authority are we so beholden?

now, if a plausible argument can be made for the assertions regarding the existence of _Spirit_  - however defined, then there may be corollary answers to the above questions. your comment is invited…

i'll definitely be covering these issues on thursday, they seem pretty fundamental to me.

(as a footnote, regarding gafni, i don't judge the man on sexual impropriety - nothing remarkable about that in a man of the cloth or spiritual teacher types. what i found remarkable about him  - in most of the video and audio i've seen/heard -  was the amount of meaningless, incoherent, nebulous, faltering waffle he engaged in, encouraged by much sympathetic nodding of heads and sounds of agreement around him. if this man is a teacher, i pity his students. um, er, well, basically, you see, you know, simply, um, hard to say exactly, er, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. wilber's support of him by association was not encouraging, but not surprising. both the king and his courtiers were most definitely in the alltogether at times…

from what i saw, i found the guy to be personally likeable, and intellectually insufferable. pity i'm not the only one whose knickers he - allegedly - got in a twist.)

sorry grey - you did say you didn't want to kick off an entirely irrelevant debate, but that's the loa for ya ; )

dig the motogp passion - although i'm a ducati man myself : )

ciao 4 now!

Hi Julian,

Camelot suggested to point you here for proof of psy - you seem to have moved from the totally sceptic position to being open…

May the Force be with you,
Mushin

In a book he and Mark Addis edited titled Wittgenstein and Philosophy of Religion, Robert Arrington writes:

If believers try to prove the existence of God by appeal to the ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments, this would seem to imply that they think the belief in God's existence needs proof–and indeed that such proof can be provided.

In response, I think it is fair to say that most of the believers who do appeal to these arguments are of a philosophical bent, and this rules out most believers. Wittgentstein would not be impressed with the reactions of the philosophers and would-be philosophers, since he would see their philosophy as a source of disctraction and confusion. With regard to religious discourse, the philosophers themselves, or at least Anselm and Aquinas, would be held responsible by Wittgenstein for much of the confusion that surrounds the question of the existence of God. These 'metaphysical' theologians would be guilty in his eyes of the same confusion he attributes to metaphysicians in general, namely that of confusing conceptual and factual inquiries. Indeed, these two medieval thinkers might stand as paradigm cases of metaphysicians who confuse grammatical statements with factual ones. 'God exists,' which should be construed as a grammatical remark, might be confusedly taken (and is so taken by these medievals) as asserting a matter of fact–and then one wants some support for it, some proof that it is true. Anselm and Aquinas oblige and offer their proofs. But the very project is wrong-headed if 'God exists and is the creator of the world' is a grammatical rather than a factual claim.

It may not be necessary for the reader to know what Wittgenstein means by “grammar” in order to get the gist of what Arringtion says here, but if anyone is interested, here's a link to a brief account of Wittgenstein's ideas on “Private Language, Grammar and Form of Life.” And here is a link to an account within an article on philosophy of religion of Wittgenstein's approach to “religious grammar”: “Religious Forms of Life and Practices.”

I take Julian to be speaking in response to those who speak of God or Spirit in ways that confuse “conceptual and factual inquiries,” to borrow Arrington's terminology. Julian says “archetypes are real - but only within the psyche,” and here he says quite a bit. To Jung, the psyche is real and it is only through the psyche that we experience anything. For humans, there is no such thing as experience without the psyche. Thus, when I know God or Spirit, I don't know anything about what may or may not exist in a psyche-independent or mind-independent world.

To Jung, the psyche is real, archetypes are real, and God or the Self is the greatest, deepest, and most primordial archetype. There is no obstacle here to an I-Thou relationship to God or Spirit, and this is implicit in Julian’s reference to active imagination, which is an incredibly potent approach to inner work developed by Jung. The word “imagination” in this context is not in the least bit pejorative or reductive. To Jung and Jungians, the imaginal is the life-blood of the soul or psyche. (For a user-friendly introduction to Jungian active imagination, see the book Inner Work by the Jungian-Aurobindian Robert A. Johnson.)

elektroglide: if a plausible argument can be made for the assertions regarding the existence of _Spirit_  - however defined, then there may be corollary answers to the above questions.

Huh? I thought the existence of Spirit was pretty much a given. I didn't realize we needed a plausible argument for its existence. But if we assume, even just for the sake of argument, that Spirit exists, then it not only exists inside of us, but also “out there” in second (or first-person plural if you prefer) and third-person land.

And yeah, looks like Stoner's gonna be a tough nut for Valentino to crack this season!

Peace,
Grey

MotoGP and Rossi, yes I am a devotee. It's all for Liverpool now. Let's pray brothers.

How and why should we cultivate Devotion? In my experience it is an outcome of being closer to home. Being more in touch with reality, to strive for understanding, to go out of your way to help someone. Devotion comes naturally when we see beauty (I'm with you Michael). When we finally come to realize that we have learned enough for us to be of service in this life. Then we pass on Lifes lesson; live, love and learn.
In the Baghavatam(major Hindu scripture) Vedanta(the end of the Vedas -the Advaita Absolute teachings) is taken to its furtherest point and results in a life of Bakhti (devotion).
Surrender is the way. And to surrender there need to be another. On the battlefield it doesn't make sense to shout “I surrender!” to no-one. Real surrender always happens to another. Giving up your life/will, surrendering, is the final sacrifice needed. We can't negotiate surrender. It's all or nothing.

@ Devotion and 2nd person: how about remembering that devotion arises originally as a spontaneous reaction to what is awakened in recognition of the majestic and mysterious depth inherent in every partial manifestation. There's an indisputable Sovereignty being disclosed in the causal Onlyness, which admitedly is only one aspect of it, and is found directly, immediately in the Heart, beyond any dualistic concept. It's quite a different question how such is interpreted in mythic and rational and relativistic terms. But it's primarily a direct apprehension, not a logical disclosure. Hence, Faith and Devotion to the Ineffable for those aspiring to realization.

grey

“I thought the existence of Spirit was pretty much a given. I didn't realize we needed a plausible argument for its existence.”

in the context of this symposium, i think that's a pretty remarkable pair of statements.

i'm not omniscient. please humour me:

firstly, tell me what you mean by Spirit.

secondly, on what basis do you consider belief in something for the existence of which there is no plausible argument, appropriate?

elektroglide, you seem to reject the unanimous reports of world's leading mystics and realizers, as well as your own immeditate awareness. “proof of spirit” is none other than the fact you're being aware at this moment.

hokai and grey

you have just provided ample evidence to contradict all those who protested that julian was just forming a gang to promote a narrow excluding rationalist worldview.

hokai, there are so many epistemological and ontological presuppositions and poetic devices in your comment that i find it really hard to understand what you're saying. as wittgenstein would have said - could we have that in plain german please? (not that he's the final word on the word).

i knew i should have kept my mouth shut…

anyway, haven't you got better things to do today ; ) ?

oops - i have. see ya!

hokai, comments crossed. i guess i need walking through this spirit/Spirit thing, because i see and read so many conflicting versions of it. it's definitely one of the words in my growing metaphysical zaadz flexicon, with a multitude of meanings. please help me pin it down guys. seriously.

i have no problem rejecting the unanimous word of mystics and realizers… if i am aware of no good reason to agree with them on any point. i never was a big fan of social proof.

i do need help with understanding what is being referred to…

jim - i would love to discuss your post above in greater depth at a later date. some interesting observations.

if we get the language right, much of the discussion, and the truth claims, disappear in a puff of mixed metaphor.

otherwise, it's just rolling around in alphabettispaghetti

eGlide, i can humbly offer my perspective on this. to begin with, your last comment is one example of spirit.:-) Now, spirit/Spirit (let's equate these two, since we're not discussing ghosts or animal spirits here, but the “one and only”) is That which is immeditate Presence in each and one of us, and that Presence recognized free or empty or pellucid or devoid of any appearance, object, even “subject” which is another object etc. In Buddhist terms, it is the sheere cognizance, that also has qualities of emptiness/spaciousness and bliss i.e. unobstructed feeling. In plain Enlighs, it is your awareness here and now, that is NEVER reducible to eye, ear, nose, tongue, body or thought apprehensions. It ain't memory, nor egoic contraction, nor inclination or personal idiosyncracy of any kind. And it's not a construction “because we need it to explain things”, but rather something quite obvious and yet mysteriously nondual. In the 1st person, it is known as “Witness”. Now this is from Wilber (if I'm allowed):

So Who Are You?

by Ken Wilber

“The witnessing of awareness can persist through waking, dreaming and deep sleep. The Witness is fully available in any state, including your own present state of awareness right now. So I'm going to talk you into this state, or try to, using what are known in Buddhism as “pointing out instructions.” I am not going to try to get you into a different state of consciousness, or an altered state of consciousness, or a non-ordinary state. I am going to simply point out something that is already occurring in your own present, ordinary, natural state. So let's start by just being aware of the world around us. Look out there at the sky, and just relax your mind; let your mind and the sky mingle. Notice the clouds floating by. Notice that this takes no effort on your part. Your present awareness, in which these clouds are floating, is very simple, very easy, effortless, spontaneous. You simply notice that there is an effortless awareness of the clouds. The same is true of those trees, and those birds, and those rocks. You simply and effortlessly witness them. Look now at the sensations in your own body. You can be aware of whatever bodily feelings are present-perhaps pressure where you are sitting, perhaps warmth in your tummy, maybe tightness in your neck. But even if these feelings are tight and tense, you can easily be aware of them. These feelings arise in your present awareness, and that awareness is very simple, easy, effortless, spontaneous. You simply and effortlessly witness them. Look at the thoughts arising in your mind. You might notice various images, symbols, concepts, desires, hopes and fears, all spontaneously arising in your awareness. They arise, stay a bit, and pass. These thoughts and feelings arise in your present awareness, and that awareness is very simple, effortless, spontaneous. You simply and effortlessly witness them. So notice: you can see the clouds float by because you are not those clouds-you are the witness of those clouds. You can feel bodily feelings because you are not those feelings-you are the witness of those feelings. You can see thoughts float by because you are not those thoughts-you are the witness of those thoughts. Spontaneously and naturally, these things all arise, on their own, in your present, effortless awareness. So who are you? You are not objects out there, you are not feelings, you are not thoughts-you are effortlessly aware of all those, so you are not those. Who or what are you? Say it this way to yourself: I have feelings, but I am not those feelings. Who am I? I have thoughts, but I am not those thoughts. Who am I? I have desires, but I am not those desires. Who am I? So you push back into the source of your own awareness. You push back into the Witness, and you rest in the Witness. I am not objects, not feelings, not desires, not thoughts. But then people usually make a big mistake. They think that if they rest in the Witness, they are going to see something or feel something-something really neat and special. But you won't see anything. If you see something, that is just another object-another feeling, another thought, another sensation, another image. But those are all objects; those are what you are not. No, as you rest in the Witness-realizing, I am not objects, I am not feelings, I am not thoughts-all you will notice is a sense of freedom, a sense of liberation, a sense of release-release from the terrible constriction of identifying with these puny little finite objects, your little body and little mind and little ego, all of which are objects that can be seen, and thus are not the true Seer, the real Self, the pure Witness, which is what you really are. So you won't see anything in particular. Whatever is arising is fine. Clouds float by in the sky, feelings float by in the body, thoughts float by in the mind-and you can effortlessly witness all of them. They all spontaneously arise in your own present, easy, effortless awareness. And this witnessing awareness is not itself anything specific you can see. It is just a vast, background sense of freedom-or pure emptiness-and in that pure emptiness, which you are, the entire manifest world arises. You are that freedom, openness, emptiness-and not any itty bitty thing that arises in it. Resting in that empty, free, easy, effortless witnessing, notice that the clouds are arising in the vast space of your awareness. The clouds are arising within you-so much so, you can taste the clouds, you are one with the clouds. It is as if they are on this side of your skin, they are so close. The sky and your awareness have become one, and all things in the sky are floating effortlessly through your own awareness. You can kiss the sun, swallow the mountain, they are that close. Zen says “Swallow the Pacific Ocean in a single gulp,” and that's the easiest thing in the world, when inside and outside are no longer two, when subject and object are nondual, when the looker and looked at are One Taste. You see?”

@ Jim: “Thus, when I know God or Spirit, I don't know anything about what may or may not exist in a psyche-independent or mind-independent world.”

I'd be careful with that formulation. Ultimate reality (which is “God”) exists quite independently of “psyche”! But not independently in an objective fashion, since it underlies and transcend all dichotomies. You may not know it directly on the level of psyche, and hence whatever you know on that level IS by definition psyche-dependent. On the level of psyche we may cognize only symbols of ultimate reality. However, in deep state of meditation (high subtle, low causal and further) the psyche is quite dormant i.e. absent. Ultimate reality or God is self-existent, even by Buddhist notions, but not in a discursive, dualistic sense. Ultimately, Suchness is Mind, but is not “mind-dependent” if by “mind” you mean “psyche”.

Ultimate Reality is a figment of the imagination - sorry - a product, a fantasy of the imagination. There are many types of ineffable experiences and even non-experiences (as one doesn't posit oneself as experiencer) but there is non of Ultimate Reality (as there wouldn't be any beyond to it…).

Self-evidence does not Umltimate Reality make…

ok - thanks for this. finally… relatively plain egnilhs - from you anyway.  wilber and buddhism i find largely disintegrative, reductionist, and patronising, the former veering towards charlatanism (i suspect he actually believes most of what he says), the latter veering towards schizophrenia, the combination of the two frustrating, as evidenced above.

so, by spirit you mean the part of human consciousness which is pure awareness, the most fundamental aspect of awareness accessible to the human mind.

variously described as:

witness consciousness
awareness of awareness
self-awareness

now, this is purely an objective definition i am surmising. this has no bearing on, or indication of, the intensity of subjective experience possible when the trained locus of attention is coming from this place, which in my blissed-out experience is an all time killer to any notion of the futility of life. it's joyful beyond measure, although, like an orgasm, it can be simply described without recourse to poetry.

but i don't think that's what most people mean by Spirit. i think they're talking about something else altogether. not spirit as in the latin spiritus - breath - the breath of life, but something else entirely, something external to the individual consciousness, some other force or mechanism or entity which in my observation has animistic qualities attached to it. i suspect you and/or grey may be able to confirm that that is the case, and supply further insights into this. or tell me that no - that is all that you mean by spirit/Spirit, and anything else alluding to what i suspect is bogus.

i just read that your definition of god is ultimate reality… so why do we need the word god, since it has so many other really unhelpful connotations, interpretations, definitions, emotions etc?

does anyone else see the importance of conscious and precise language use - including definitions, conventions, grammar, context relatedness - in the  discussion of metaphysical philosophy? thursday will be a gas compared to this…

keep punching. i'm all ears. itty bitty ears ; )

@ Mushin: “Ultimate Reality is a figment of the imagination - sorry - a product, a fantasy of the imagination.” I wonder if your ineffable experiences and even non-experiences (I bet you can tell us a bit more about those), are also a figment / product / fantasy of the imagination. You are denying the very ground on which you stand, sorry, which you ultimately are.

hi mushin, hope the seminar is going well.

Ultimate Reality is a figment of the imagination - sorry - a product, a fantasy of the imagination.

i don't believe that you are saying that there is no reality outside of the imagination, i think you're getting at something else - maybe that the concept of ultimate reality is just that - a concept. (if i'm wrong, you might want to explain your statement further)

 There are many types of ineffable experiences and even non-experiences (as one doesn't posit oneself as experiencer)

who does one posit as the experiencer if not oneself?

but there is non of Ultimate Reality (as there wouldn't be any beyond to it…).

not sure about the reasoning for that statement (just needs clarifying for me). i think i know what you're getting at…

Self-evidence does not Umltimate Reality make…

gotta have some debriefing on that one. das ich ist ziemlich verwirrt… ; )

Hi Hokai.

I was using the ambiguous word “psyche” loosely and broadly, in a sense in which “the psyche” and “the human mind” refer to the same thing. Technically you are right, that on “the level of psyche” we may only cognize symbols of ultimate reality, but I was using the term more broadly than that (and Jung sometimes used the term in the broader sense, and sometimes in the narrower, more technical sense). So I was not intending to speak of anything which is absent in deep meditation. If there is a living human being with a functioning brain sitting in deep meditation, then the psyche (in the loose sense in which I used the term “psyche”) is not absent.

Philosophers use the term “mind-independent world” in the context of discussions about philosophical realism and philosophical idealism, the latter being the idea that everything that exists is mind or a modification of mind (or consciousness, etc.).

There are ways of defining “mind” that can make it trivially true that everything is a modification of mind. For example, Wilber has said that he thinks that II-member and philosopher David Chalmers' “relative level” solution to the mind-body problem is one he can agree with. According to Chalmers, any information system, such as a thermostat, can be said to be conscious. Surely this is not what most spititually oriented people mean when they say things to the effect that everything is a manifestation of mind or consciousness.

Wilber says, and I agree, that the “ultimate level” solution to the mind-body problem is satori or the dissolution of the subject-object dichotomy. This is fine, but this is phenomenology and tells us nothing about ontology or what exists, and I maintain (and here I apparently agree with elektroglide) that nothing epistemic can come from satori or mystical experience in general. In other words, we can't make propositional statements or truth claims about the ineffable.

I realize that not everyone agrees with this, but I've yet to hear a good argument in defense of making propositional statements or truth claims about the ineffable.

Wilber says:

When the yogis and sages and contemplatives make statements like, “The entire world is a manifestation of the Self,” that is not a merely rational statement that we are to think about and see if it makes logical sense. It is rather a description, often poetic, of a direct apprehension or a direct experience, and we are to test this direct experience, not by mulling it over philosophically, but by taking up the experimental method of contemplative awareness, developing the requisite cognitive tools, and directly looking for ourselves. (SES, 1st edition, p. 268)

about some of my ineffable experiences I have spoken here, I have created a video about one of the ways that I do create ineffable experiences which you can see here, I have created a little contemplation how to have one kind of ineffable experience here, and talk about another kind of ineffable experience here.   Looking out of my window right now constitutes an ineffable experience and so does eating, sitting, walking and so endless on.

In a way, of course, you are right - whenever we are having an experience we can never truly separate it from our imagination. My objection goes against the word “ultimate”. In a reality ( which certainly is also a mystery)  that is without boundary anywhere whatsoever it seems hubris to speak of ultimates.

Jim, excellent points! Thank you. My statements above are neither philosophical, nor poetical descriptors. I'm strongly practice-informed, and I basically employ the logic of the path (i.e. stage specific). But as to philosophical accuracy, I agree with your remarks.

jim

it is so refreshing to read your comment above. i could discuss some points in further detail for even more distinctions, but for example the point about differentiation between mystical-poetic and truth claims is great. both mystical-poetic and truth claims are fine, just don't mix 'em up and tell the world it is what it ain't (or can't be demonstrated to be).

also, your pointing out the questionable validity of any truth claims made about what is accessed metaphysically in meditative states is great.

it brings such a feeling of relief to see someone else writing this. praise the lord ha ha.

how do you spell relief?

r-e-a-l-i-t-y

oh - and m-a-s-s-a-g-e

mushin - i have a feeling that my apparent lack of understanding of your comments is more to do with sprache than anything else. reading between the lines, i think there is more concensus than is apparent.

on the subject of ineffable - even when an experience makes words redundant, words can still be used as a signpost to those who aren't having that experience in that moment.

Hi elektroglide! Yes, I hope we'll get to talk more on these subjects.

I must say that I think a lot of the differences people have in these discussions comes down to something Alan Watts addressed in his 1966 classic, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. (Does everyone know that Wilber has said that he learned to write by literally hand-copying every single one of Watts's books? He said this at the Shambhala Wilber Forum in, I think, 2000, and I think I've seen him say this elsewhere.)

Watts talks about “partisans of 'prickle' and the partisans of 'goo.'”

The prickly people are tough-minded, rigiorous, and precise, and like to stress differences and divisions between things. They prefer particles to waves, and discontinuity to continuity. The gooey people are tender-minded romanticists who love wide generalizations and grand syntheses. They stress the underlying unities, and are inclined to pantheism and mysticism. Waves suit them better than particles as the ultimate constituents of matter, and discontinuities jar their teeth like a compressed-air drill. Prickly philosophers consider the gooey ones rather disgusting–undisciplined, vauge dreamers who slide over hard facts like an intellectual slime which threatens to engulf the whole universe in an “undifferentiated aesthetic continuum” (courtesy of Professor F.S.C. Northrop). But gooey philosophers think of their prickly colleagues as animated skeletons that rattle and click without any flesh or vital juices, as dry and dessicated mechanisms bereft of all finer feelings. Either party would be hopelessly lost without the other, because there would be nothing to argue about, no one would know what his position was, and the whole course of philosophy would come to an end.

;-)

hi Elektrogleiter ;-)

the seminar went remarkably well, it was truly an enlightening affair ;-)

Ultimate Reality is a figment of the imagination - sorry - a product, a fantasy of the imagination.

i don't believe that you are saying that there is no reality outside of the imagination, i think you're getting at something else - maybe that the concept of ultimate reality is just that - a concept. (if i'm wrong, you might want to explain your statement further)

You are right, I'm not saying that there is no reality outside of the imagination, but neither am I saying that there is a reality out there somewhere.  I simply don't know, how could I?  As I pointed out to Hokai I object against the term “ultimate” in connection with reality (which is a mystery to me).

 who does one posit as the experiencer if not oneself?

 I am not one, I am many. When I'm having sex I am a different one then when I'm acting childish, and so endlessly on.  I speak as the first person singular but I guess it would be more proper to speak of myself as “we”.  But speaking of myself as “ourself” doesn't seem proper this day and age…

but there is no Ultimate Reality (as there wouldn't be any beyond to it…).

not sure about the reasoning for that statement (just needs clarifying for me). i think i know what you're getting at…

 the way I understand the term it would mean, well, ultimate - and there is simply nothing beyond that…

Self-evidence does not Umltimate Reality make…

gotta have some debriefing on that one. das ich ist ziemlich verwirrt… ; )

This alludes to Hokai saying, “However, in deep state of meditation (high subtle, low causal and further) the psyche is quite dormant i.e. absent. Ultimate reality or God is self-existent,[bold by me]  even by Buddhist notions, but not in a discursive, dualistic sense.”
Ich hoffe es ist jetzt entwirrt…;-)

You may have it on my word that Ultimate reality is not a figment of imagination, because imagination itself is a figment liberated in the Ultimate reality. But who am I to say, right?

One is free to choose whether Ultimate (not “ultimates”) exists or not, as long as one is playing with propositional thinking. I am only considering that which is realized directly. As to the “ineffable” nature of sense impressions, well of course, but that's not what Ineffable means. By the way, tons of excellent material have been writen on the Ineffable, but only as a way of pointing to the Path.

Hokai okay. I guess I am a bit gooey the Alan Watts sense of the word (thanks  very much for the quote, Jim).

You seem to still be enthralled by the perennial philosophy happily believing people to aspire to, be informed or blessed by, and basically move around a singular Transcendent Sun - Ultimate Reality - common to all faiths, creeds, mysticisms and spiritual Paths and practices.

This seems to resonate with the situation in astronomy when we believed that our sun was the center of the universe.  We have had to learn, though, that obviously this universe does not have a center at all or, to put it differently and just as true: the universal center is everywhere. And yet, when it comes to (integral) spirituality we are very reluctant to take serious what we have learnt from studying the heavens astronomically. We object to the image that there are numerous Transcendent Suns - Ultimate Realities - around which meaning, understanding, love, devotion and divine, true and valid mystic experience revolves.
And even then, surrendering one's defenses against this understanding, many still would love to salvage some of perennial philosophy's tenets by believing these Suns to turn around a common Center - ULTIMATE REALITY. And indeed, it seems that some Suns do; for instance the Suns of most Christian, Islamic and Jewish faiths turn around the Monotheistic Galactic Center. Yet, other Suns do not turn that way, they participate in and form other constellations in different Galaxies of our local cluster which, of course might be part of other non-centered constellations.

thank you, julian and everyone, for the great responses to the 2 questions. :)

i rather liked that quote from Wilber (thank you, David):

“And then Spirit in the second-person is the great “Thou,” something that is immeasurably greater than you could ever possibly be in your wildest imagination, before whom surrender and devotion and submission and radiant release and gratitude is the only appropriate response, and from whom all blessings and all goodness flow unreservedly. And a relationship to that Other, in love and devotion and ecstasy, is the only appropriate response if you have any sanity at all…”

j, this has been my personal experience of Spirit in second-person. In fact it sounds incredibly pretentious of me to even refer to Spirit in this manner…heh, heh…second-person. ha! ;)

Now, from KW's description, I do not perceive a “parent projection” immediately inherent in a personal relationship with Spirit. A person may temporarily devolve/regress (for varying lengths of time) into a “parent projection” in their relationship with Spirit. And that can be potentially awesome. A great way to heal and work things out from time to time when the person is consciously aware of the relationship they are participating in.

We may also begin to relate with Spirit as a “friend projection,” a “child projection,” and a “lover projection.” And how beautifully convenient that is for us as human souls needing to heal and complete things, especially traumas. We get to work these things out against a palette of infinite possibilities that say “neti, netiti” or conversely “so'ham.” We are afforded a clear mirror into our smaller selves to do a little psyche clean up work in preparation for deeper spiritual experiences.

And as KW says in the above quote, Spirit in the second-person is “something that is immeasurably greater than you could ever possibly be in your wildest imagination.”

i love that. there is no room for projection in that kind of true second-person relationship with Spirit. Spirit is beyond our wildest imaginings, including our personal individual projections.

and there is something very comforting about experiencing our delicate littleness. and also something very awe-inspiring. a true 2nd-person experience of Spirit is simply how we taste the truth. of course, we can receive all of our nutrition thru an IV if necessary. or even a tube inserted directly into our stomach or intestines. yet, there's is nothing quite like tasting wild blackberries and cream on the tongue. yum! :)

yet, i agree it is helpful to keep a balance between the 3 faces of God (thank you, Grey), and not become overly engaged in just one. in fact, i would suggest that THAT is when human projections of the psyche abrupt. when we are out of balance in our relationship with the 3 aspects. and regardless, even if we are out of balance…as long as there remains some conscious awareness that we are out of balance and that we are projecting…we can make it worth our while and do some psychological healing work with what comes forward. hence, personal responsibility kicks in, and we head off to the local spiritual counselor, psychotherapist, somatic healer, integral teacher and etcetera.

as for “magical thinking,” i would like to say just briefly that not only can it be used as a buffer from feeling past pain and trauma—

—“magical thinking” can also be used to “play pretend” within a growing understanding and development of new spiritual paradigms that accompany genuine mystical experiences.

how do children learn to become socialized within this world and explore identity development?

thru playing pretend and engaging in magical thinking.

we too can be like children when it comes to spiritual development in the grander scheme of things, and get ourselves into great gobs of trouble when we think we know it all.

magical thinking can be a great way to “lean into” vast concepts not readily grasped by a newly developing intellect. magical thinking can also make a spiritual path appealing to those who have been burnt by religious fundamentalism.

when children play pretend “house,” are they really starting a family and caring for a home? perhaps, not. what are they doing? warming up to it. playing pretend what it's like to start a family and care for a home. playing pretend what it means to do this and act out all the dynamics involved.

magical thinking is a great warm up into actual spiritual life.

therefore, balance (keyword: balance) between magical thinking/play pretend and actually learning the chores and tasks of spiritual life (metaphorically: washing the dishes, cooking, mowing the lawn, paying bills, sweeping the floors) is a balanced way of nurturing lasting growth and development that gradually blossoms and matures.

from my personal perspective, a healthy dose of play pretend daily keeps the imaginative juices flowing and the openness and receptivity to actual experience alive.

also, here's another way to look at this subject from the healing from trauma perspective:

do you know what foot binding is? that ancient tradition in China of binding a little girl's feet so that they will stay tiny and not grow?

fundamentalism is like this. whether it is in religion, politics or what not.

people who have been raised in these fundamentalist paradigms have stunted growth, and perhaps, are even intellectually/psychically crippled as a result. walking an integral path of Spirit in the 3rd or 1st person only not only looks cold, dry, and excruciatingly painful to these folks. it looks impossible.

there is something inherently kind and forgiving in magical thinking for people whose psyches have been battered by fundamentalism, extreme dualism and concepts of punishing over-righteousness. magical thinking allows them the opportunity to imagine something other than the constraining thought processes they were raised within and engage in spiritually thinking outside the box in order to conceive of new and much more healthy paradigms.

iow, i see magical thinking as not necessarily regressive altogether. rather, it is like a high-chair, a tricycle, or a pair of crutches assisting some people to elevate and ambulate.

is magical thinking then not a form of compassion for these persons?

i can't see it delia, i don't buy it.

god knows that people born into psychologically, emotionally, and intellectually repressive fundamentalist cultures must in some ways seek solace by engaging in magical thinking. does that make it a good thing? i do not think so. magical thinking is actually part of the conditioned repression of free thought, especially in mythic religions. giving them more seems to me to be putting out the fire with gasoline.

that children engage in magical thinking is a consequence of being born with a brain that is so complex that it is not only not fully formed at birth, but requires many forms of external and internal input in order to develop properly at all.

that religions and many spiritual practises promote it as the truth to children and adults is one of the main reasons why we're so fucked now.

your compassion comes through, but i perceive romanticism as well.

magical thinking is mad thinking. it is the literal interpretation of faulty apprehension of causal relationships which are more properly apprehended by reason as the child matures. it is delusional thinking, which if sustained into adulthood is deeply damaging to the self, and the self-esteem of the magical thinker, who presumably must keep on creating ever more fantastic explanations and rationalisations for the inevitable anomalies that reality inconveniently keeps presenting.

while it is appropriate to guide children through the developmental process with tools which are applicable to them at their stage of development - song, myth, poetry, fairy stories, fables etc, it does human beings the greatest disservice if they are not appropriately disillusioned as they develop their own mental faculties.

i do not condone the use of lying by way of bringing comfort. reality hurts sometimes, more so if resisted, and even more if avoided.

play, spontaneity, role playing and creative imagination are something entirely different, as is the conscious processing of archetypes and myth later in life.

i think children become socialised by a process of replacing mythical thinking with rational thinking. that they often grow up in an irrational and fucked up environment or culture (and that's pretty much all of the cultures available right now) is not a justification for claiming virtue in sustaining self-delusion.

while we may look fondly back on the stories of giants and witches and flying horses and people ascending to heaven, and remember the warmth and love with which those stories were hopefully told to us, letting go of magical thinking allows one to more fully apprehend the really mindblowing causal relationships that do exist, and to maintain a proper relationship with reality.

it's part of growing up. and we need to grow up.

there is a middle ground between magical thinking, and thinking we know it all. that's where we're at.

as for three faces of god as anything other than conceptual metaphor - now that's magical thinking…

julian

“elektroglide and joe - i actuallly do not agree that there is anything metapohysically contradictory about my above staements.”

nor do i (did we say there is?) - but that's because you're fairly explicit that you are talking about conceptual devices for deepening positive affective states, and connecting with, and appreciating more deeply, what is.

however, i think the same effects can be had more healthily without recourse to language almost exclusively associated by the vast majority of humanity with literal entities (magical thinking again), and in any case more than slightly prone to contradictory interpretation, little of which could be described as coming from a grounded perspective.

“Conceptual metaphor” sounds awfully dismissive to me, although I suppose you could mean it in a more profound, spiritual way.  I'd be careful, though, not to confuse “magical” with “mystical”. It appears to me that you may be doing this at times, but maybe it's just a problem of language limitations?

mmm - i think metaphors can be pretty powerful things - we can't really think without them. i didn't mean to undervalue them in this context

if you believe that second person god is anything other than a metaphor, you probably would consider it dismissive. i'm not saying that's the case with you, but may be

“I'd be careful, though, not to confuse “magical” with “mystical”. It appears to me that you may be doing this at times”

i may indeed have done just that - quote me an example, i'll clarify what i meant.

thanks for the heads up. the limitation won't be with the language, it'll be with how i'm using it.

Delia, you've said many interesting things. I agree with you that I-Thou experience is legitimate – its hard not to spend time with Rumi and not get that. There is a problem, as Julian says, with literalizing it, and its close association with mythic-magic religion doesn't help.

I'm also not sure that balancing the divine in all 3 faces is necessary though. If we view I-Thou as a feminine mode, and I-Me / I-Its as a masculine mode, David Deida seems to argue that spiritual development does not necessarily entail a balancing of masculine and feminine. He seems OK with extremely agentic and extremely communal modes balanced outside the psyche with an opposite partner creating the balance. But isn't that a projection? Is male-female psychic imbalance OK, just not integral? Or is it always fine? The jungian perspective would be helpful for me to understand this.

That's what I meant by language limitations, not that you don't have a grasp of the language, just that language is inherently inadequate when it comes to spirituality.

That said though, I think we may have to just agree to disagree on the metaphor thing. But perhaps the phrase “second person” is also misleading. I don't mean that I think there's a distinct “entity” out there that we have to worship, but I do think that Spirit is much more than a metaphor. I mean, you can't truly love or dedicate your life to a metaphor, and I don't think it's healthy to direct all that love and dedication inward. And if you don't feel there's non-dual Spirit in more than a metaphorical sense, I don't see where else you can direct it.

Elektroglide,

magical thinking… is the literal interpretation of faulty apprehension of causal relationships… play, spontaneity, role playing and creative imagination are something entirely different, as is the conscious processing of archetypes and myth later in life.

Is it? For me, there is regressive magical thinking, and healthy magical thinking, and I don't agree that magical thinking always entails literalization. My 2 year old is in that phase, and she does not literalize her imaginative play because literalization is a feature of the Piaget-ian concrete operational stage. Also, magical thinking does not ordinarily need to be “socialized” out of us – given room to grow and the absence of trauma, concrete operational thinking replaces preoperational thinking as a matter of course.

Regressive magical thinking is unhealthy and often requires intervention, and I think one of its important characteristics is a rigid, fixated obsession with specific imaginary creations, unlike healthy magical thinking, which shifts fluidly and doesn't get tied down for long in one place.

“When 2nd person god is explored in the way i think we all mean it can result in extraordinary heart openings, feelings of gratitude and surrender, ego-defense softening, reverence.”

This is all good stuff, but I think there's more to come if the person continues to explore.
 

“When literalized you get the history of religion on the planet, the crusades, witch hunts, inquisition 911, suicide bombers, etc etc.”

I think this is just what KW was arguing against when he said, 

“This is one of the criticisms that I develop in Integral Spirituality, which is what I call a level-line fallacy-that the second-person view of Spirit got truncated in the West. It got chopped off at the mythic level of development. Spirit in second-person has become stunted and identified merely with God the Father, the old white-haired gentleman, the mythic patriarch of the Bible that nobody believes in anymore.”

In other words, those items in the list are all amber interpretations of the second face of God. But what Ken and Andrew are talking about is an indigo-violet interpretation of the second face of God. It's also what Michael Murphy and Andrew Cohen are talking about in this 9-minute video (it's the fourth to last video on this page).

thank you, julian, for the distinction a la donald kalsched. i agree so much with that perspective: does the creative imagination serve to integrate the inner and outer experience or fragment them? in my comment, i was absolutely referring to the former. i am eager to promote that line of cognition, as well.

ekg:

“that children engage in magical thinking is a consequence of being born with a brain that is so complex that it is not only not fully formed at birth, but requires many forms of external and internal input in order to develop properly at all.”

it is my experience that we are not stagnant in physical adulthood (post 18-25 years of age). we continue to evolve and to require many forms of external and internal input in order to continue developing properly. then of course, there are transformational and mystical experiences that promote even further evolution, and these necessitate continuing digestion and assimilation of spiritual content.

for example: here we are—all participating in a symposium on integrative spirituality. clearly we are pursuing further input to support our development. we are still growing. we are still developing. therefore, creative imagination has not become obsolete in the lives of adult human beings. however, evolution necessitates that it must develop beyond usage for the purposes of fragmentation and warring. we can use a knife to kill someone or cut them a slice of bread.

that said, i was not in anyway condoning the use of myth or magical thinking to promote dissociation or fragmentation from reality in any way. rather, i am promoting the opposite: how can we engage our imaginations to engage more fully in reality in a deeper, more profound, and integrative fashion.

no matter how dirty the bathwater. we must not throw out the baby. we must seek out the baby from the muck and care for him/her.

what i speak of as it concerns fundamentalism is the dirty bathwater. what i am promoting is the fact that there is still a baby (creative imagination) in there worth caring for and nurturing.

i am not suggesting that we coddle religious fanaticism and fundamentalism and their estranging belief system into further cultural and psychological fragmentation. no. not at all.

i hear your passion for truth, ekg. that is apparent. yet i also hear a form of (perhaps) well-guised romanticism…(tee, hee, hee) ;)

it is completely unrealistic to expect someone who can barely jog around the block conceptually, to be able to run a marathon on day two of their spiritual initiation. their canon of experience and developmental knowledge is not equipped for that task in many cases. therefore, one can engage recovering literalists and  fundamentalists with the developmental tool of creative imagination to expand and comprehend more tolerant and inclusive spiritual paradigms they had never before even considered.

and if you'll indulge me for a moment: there is a difference between gently exposing a child to the fact that mommy and daddy buy his/her x-mas gifts (not santa), and screaming it out loud to them as they present you with their heartfelt, carefully written letter to the old guy at the north pole. :)

kindness.

baba muktananda once defined a great litmus for telling the truth:
1. is it true?
2. is it kind?

is bitter truth ever really true? or is it just bitter?

honestly, i feel that that is the draw of the new age and all its sundry fluffiness in the first place. large masses of people are so desperately longing for kindness in their lives. so much so that they are willing to overlook disparate untruths for just a drop of loving kindness.

therefore, i feel that it is imperative that any exploration of integrative spirituality include these truths: kindness and compassion. otherwise, the pews will certainly go barren of eager, attentive asses. (i'm referring, of course, to buttocks not mules) ;)

personally, spirituality sans joy holds no interest for me whatsoever.

:)


“as for three faces of god as anything other than conceptual metaphor - now that's magical thinking…”

i agree that it is a conceptual metaphor. metaphors are largely all we have to describe certain metaphysical experiences. there exists no material, empirical or scientific referent. thus metaphors, poetry, and love songs become our protractors and sliding rules.

overall, ekg, i feel that we may agree on more than may at first seem apparent, my rationalist good sir

:)

if i could pose a question at this moment to you (and perhaps, everyone), it would be this:
what do you love about spirituality? there is something in it that makes your juices flow and your neurons fire…what is that?


now, as i am on vacation (at last!), i must be off to watch The Fast and The Furious trilogy with my father who's been warming up the subwoofers and the enormous flat screen tv, and is raring to go!

:)

salve grey!

That's what I meant by language limitations, not that you don't have a grasp of the language, just that language is inherently inadequate when it comes to spirituality.

i think that people's lack of critical thinking and writing about spirituality is more of a limitation than language

perhaps the phrase “second person” is also misleading. I don't mean that I think there's a distinct “entity” out there that we have to worship

right

but I do think that Spirit is much more than a metaphor

my definition of spirit (the breath of life, that which pertains to life but is not comprised of matter) makes it much more than a metaphor. i really need to hear your definition of spirit. hokai chimed in splendidly earlier. i think it's a crap word to use, another flexicon word with too many vague meanings, you gotta share yours.

I mean, you can't truly love or dedicate your life to a metaphor, and I don't think it's healthy to direct all that love and dedication inward.

that sounds like a functional utility application of spirituality. as if you're looking for a purpose or vision - something to focus towards other than yourself. although i think more people should direct love and dedication inwards without fearing narcissism - it's actually more like hard work. integrated joyful human beings are generally very benevolent human beings. the complete opposite of christian altruism which promotes self-sacrifice. fuck that!

And if you don't feel there's non-dual Spirit in more than a metaphorical sense, I don't see where else you can direct it.

life, your self, love of life, love of self, the planet, your loved ones etc… or am i missing the point?

buona notte

“My sense of it is a spirituality that… integrates Eastern and Western approaches…”

I am a weak reader of philosophy and systems thinking; this is a personal limitation. Yet I've been in the counterculture and a seeker for a long time, and finding Zaadz and hoping to be involved I'm trying to hold on amid the terminology. I'm also wary: a book titled A Brief History Of Everything suggests to me reduction and postmodern sarcasm, neither which I care for. And now, as I'm writing this, I'll have to read the book.

The clause in your post I quote seems to jibe with lots of talk about east-west synthesis, yet I think that the half-century history of this proposed synthesis is dangerously slanted. The west that is spoken of is not western culture as an entity, complex, whole, and full of tensions, but two abstractions from it. The first is science, viewed as a cultural apex. The second is psychology as a form of literature, specifically the theories derived from Freud and Jung. Yet science always has had a troubling relationship with its host culture, and it is this science that now largely dismisses literary psychology in the face of larger truths it thinks it finds in brain science.

What has dropped off the map in the discussion of what the west brings to any synthesis of the spiritual is (I'll just pick five) Oedipus blinding himself; II Isaiah; the Sermon on the Mount; Augustine, with the best intentions, turning out the lights; and the final scenes in King Lear. Instead we get Freud's (Jung's, Perls', Maslow's, etc., etc.) long look back at these real or imagined occurences, and the systems add-ons that follow, and the hard sciences that would like to reduce what it sees as a lot of cultural mysticism to enzyme malfunctions. But it isn't mysticism; it is life, partly spiritual, partly not, lived in the world.

This reduction seems to have begun in the early Esalen days and been generalized as human potential declined into new age. The western heritage not exclusively rational or exclusively mystical is forgotten or clouded. Doubters of this claim might search Zaadz for the cultural occurences listed above–or for Shakespeare, Dante, Jefferson, Henry Adams or other major western figures who grappled with the spiritual and secular in their time.

Is there east-west integration if the west isn't truly heard?

PS: I appreciate western self-disguest as a cause of this cultural forgetting. Henry Miller leaves Paris in 1940 by showing his American passport, and eventually finds his way to Esalen. Walter Benjamin, a German Jewish writer, also leaves Paris in 1940. He has a U.S. visa, but Nazis won't let him cross the border. They kill him there or he kills himself.

Hi Delia.

You wrote (to Julian, I believe):

if i could pose a question at this moment to you (and perhaps, everyone), it would be this:
what do you love about spirituality? there is something in it that makes your juices flow and your neurons fire…what is that?

I would define spirituality as having to do with our ultimate concerns (and here I am following Paul Tillich, as Wilber does when he defines spirituality). I and everyone I know will die, and everything I can possibly possess will decay or be destroyed by catastrophic events (such as 9/11, Katrina, the Virginia Tech massacre, tornadoes, war, disease, etc.). This would be reason for despair (for me, at least) were it not for the fact that I have been blessed to know a happiness which does not depend on “external” conditions (meaning external to my brain) and which in that sense is unconditional.

I cannot predict how I would behave were I in the World Trade Center on 9/11 or in a Nazi concentration camp, but I am moved and inspired by these stories:

After 9/11, someone wrote a letter to the NY Times about her brother, who died in the WTC on 9/11. He’d called someone in his family to tell them that he was on a lower floor with a co-worker and friend who was paraplegic, and who therefore could not be gotten down the stairs. (The elevators were not working at this point.) He said he was not going to abandon his friend, and hoped they would be rescued. They weren’t.

A concentration camp commandant decided to execute a number of prisoners in order to punish all the prisoners for some infraction. One of them began to cry that he had a wife and child. A Catholic priest who was not among those to be executed volunteered to take this man’s place, saying that unlike the prisoner who was to be executed, he was old and had no family. The commandant let the priest take the man’s place.

hi teacup

(btw this is the second time you've accosted one of my posts with your own (somewhat oblique) definition of a word as a counter to my defined use of the same word. i'm not sure yet what's going on there, but in general, since i tend to define my terms, it doesn't really make sense to interject with your own definition and use that definition in itself as an attempted counter to whatever point i'm making. you're free naturally to use whatever definition you want as long as it's clearly stated, but that definition does not constitute an argument in itself. you may just be doing it to clarify the point for yourself, but you should be aware of the emerging pattern, and i'd like to know if you've spotted it and if so what it is about. the last time, we both got ratty with each other, as i didn't catch on quickly enough. i hope we don't go down the same hole again - i haven't had time to go over the last incidence together with you to sort it out)

“magical thinking… is the literal interpretation of faulty apprehension of causal relationships… play, spontaneity, role playing and creative imagination are something entirely different, as is the conscious processing of archetypes and myth later in life.”

Is it? For me, there is regressive magical thinking, and healthy magical thinking

ok, that's fine, and although the distinction seems somewhat redundant given my comments to delia which already distinguish between magical thinking in the course of the normal developmental process, and magical thinking which is indulged in as an adult - or more likely which remained undifferentiated, and was never contextualised by the adoption of critical thinking. also, do you dis/agree with my statement about it before making further distinctions? this seems more important.

and I don't agree that magical thinking always entails literalization. My 2 year old is in that phase, and she does not literalize her imaginative play because literalization is a feature of the Piaget-ian concrete operational stage.

forget the models - i'm talking about the real world. literal is a word with meanings outside piaget. most of which fit congruently into the context of my statement, which refers to faulty apprehension of causal relationships. believe me, she literalizes her apprehension - she believes what her brain tells her (mostly). she doesn't know it that's all. nor do most magical thinkers. your disagreement again seems  unrelated to my point, rather to my incongruence with an abstract that you happen to be partial to. i feel as if you're not concentrating on what i'm actually saying, rather comparing it to how you would have said it.

Also, magical thinking does not ordinarily need to be “socialized” out of us – given room to grow and the absence of trauma, concrete operational thinking replaces preoperational thinking as a matter of course.

given the pervasive level of ritualised and everyday adult magical thinking in tribal groups and cultures historically (as well as modern day), i'd say that specifically rational socialization is indeed a necessary but insufficient requirement, or at least an absence of magical indoctrination. con-op does develop spontaneously under reasonable conditions as autonomous survival demands, but does not replace magical thinking unless the culture encourages that displacement either actively or passively. ask an aborigine.

Regressive magical thinking is unhealthy and often requires intervention,

although intervention rarely happens, either in fundamental religious or mythical cultures, or in relativist cultures which do not teach critical thinking. again, ask an aborigine. or your average new-ager.

and I think one of its important characteristics is a rigid, fixated obsession with specific imaginary creations

i don't know about that. i thought it was to do with falsely ascribing causal relationships to unrelated objects or phenomena. that characteristic is not something i recognise as particular to magical thinking.

later

delia

i love nothing about spirituality. i'm very prickly, i exist to be picky. i live in a small box with no furniture in it, with “beware of the dogma” written neatly on the lid.

and no subwoofers…

ldgussin,

Another cause of the cultural forgetting might also be lack of relevance. Much of Western grappling with spirituality is caught in its own cultural narratives about what is spiritual and what is secular, and looking at it from the outside, it looks much like they are wrestling with and conquering their own imaginary demons. This is even and especially true of supposedly counter-cultural movements, which are as deeply embedded in their own myths – of reaction and antagonism – as mainstream culture is. Even writers who were influenced by Eastern mysticism, like the Beat generation, integrated its truths naively and opportunistically, finding what they wanted to find in it.

Not all is irrelevant though, some things can be salvaged, but I have personally noticed that along the spiritual path, much fiction ceases to feel authentic and compelling. The characters don't seem to be cutting to the heart of the human condition anymore, just aimlessly pushing around cultural constructions in hopes of a more harmonious arrangement in a way that perpetuates delusion instead of freeing us from it. I don't think it needs to be this way, and I think our culture is weakened because of it, but unfortunately, that's the way it is at the moment. I look forward to it changing though.

Mr. Teacup says:

and I think one of its [magical thinking] important characteristics is a rigid, fixated obsession with specific imaginary creations

elektroglide says in response:

i don't know about that. i thought it was to do with falsely ascribing causal relationships to unrelated objects or phenomena. that characteristic is not something i recognise as particular to magical thinking.

Magical thinking is defined at Wikipedia as “non-scientific causal reasoning.”

Here's a link to a scholarly article titled ”Magical Thinking in Complementary and Alternative Medicine” by SUNY anthropologist Philip Stevens, Jr.

And here's a permalink to a NY Times article on magical thinking titled ”Do You Believe in Magic?”

“that children engage in magical thinking is a consequence of being born with a brain that is so complex that it is not only not fully formed at birth, but requires many forms of external and internal input in order to develop properly at all.”

it is my experience that we are not stagnant in physical adulthood (post 18-25 years of age).

i didn't say we are. come on delia, just because you're on holiday doesn't mean you can go all limp on me. this is my last blog of my most blogged day ever. for which i apologise in advance. i know you can take it.

 we continue to evolve and to require many forms of external and internal input in order to continue developing properly. then of course, there are transformational and mystical experiences that promote even further evolution, and these necessitate continuing digestion and assimilation of spiritual content.

for example: here we are—all participating in a symposium on integrative spirituality. clearly we are pursuing further input to support our development. we are still growing. we are still developing. therefore, creative imagination has not become obsolete in the lives of adult human beings.

now you're changing the subject to creative imagination. bah.

however, evolution necessitates that it must develop beyond usage for the purposes of fragmentation and warring. we can use a knife to kill someone or cut them a slice of bread.

or cut them a slice of bread then kill them. your point is what exactly? have some more chocolate then come back to it…

that said, i was not in anyway condoning the use of myth or magical thinking to promote dissociation or fragmentation from reality in any way. rather, i am promoting the opposite: how can we engage our imaginations to engage more fully in reality in a deeper, more profound, and integrative fashion.

easy. stop believing in bullshit because we're scared of reality. stop teaching bullshit to children, teachers, students, learners.

no matter how dirty the bathwater. we must not throw out the baby. we must seek out the baby from the muck and care for him/her.

as a multi-perspective politician, i should point out that given the current world situation, we need bathwater much more than we need babies, and the water is only dirty because we put the baby in it. therefore, i propose throwing the baby out before it gets anywhere near the bathwater.

what i speak of as it concerns fundamentalism is the dirty bathwater. what i am promoting is the fact that there is still a baby (creative imagination) in there worth caring for and nurturing.

you are so sweet. you deserve another piña colada. then i might have a clue what you're talking about.

i am not suggesting that we coddle religious fanaticism and fundamentalism and their estranging belief system into further cultural and psychological fragmentation. no. not at all. i hear your passion for truth, ekg. that is apparent. yet i also hear a form of (perhaps) well-guised romanticism…(tee, hee, hee) ;)

where? i'm a grumpy old git. no romanticism in me ma'am.

it is completely unrealistic to expect someone who can barely jog around the block conceptually, to be able to run a marathon on day two of their spiritual initiation. their canon of experience and developmental knowledge is not equipped for that task in many cases. therefore, one can engage recovering literalists and  fundamentalists with the developmental tool of creative imagination to expand and comprehend more tolerant and inclusive spiritual paradigms they had never before even considered.

what's that all got to do with magical thinking? who said anything about expecting joggers to run a marathon? are you talking about converting fundamentalists? forget it - they're not interested. the fear and psychological consequences of questioning are too deep and too invisible for most to engage in such a process while embedded in the original culture. and there's no need for literalists to change - they just need to literally believe in the truth.

and if you'll indulge me for a moment: there is a difference between gently exposing a child to the fact that mommy and daddy buy his/her x-mas gifts (not santa), and screaming it out loud to them as they present you with their heartfelt, carefully written letter to the old guy at the north pole. :)

so the money i spent on that santa outfit wasn't completely wasted then…

whaddya think i am - the grinch???

kindness.

bah humbug!!!

baba muktananda once defined a great litmus for telling the truth:
1. is it true?

i'm with him so far! is that one of those important ancient truths?

2. is it kind?

now he's lost me.

is bitter truth ever really true? or is it just bitter?

or is it just truth?

honestly, i feel that that is the draw of the new age and all its sundry fluffiness in the first place. large masses of people are so desperately longing for kindness in their lives. so much so that they are willing to overlook disparate untruths for just a drop of loving kindness.

nothing new about that. self-delusion has always been a favourite escape route from reality, assisted by cocaine, peyote, heroin, and copious quantities of budweiser. my point which i'll hammer on thursday (oops tomorrow) is that the kindest thing they could do for themselves is to face reality and find the real loving warmth and comfort in the real world.

therefore, i feel that it is imperative that any exploration of integrative spirituality include these truths: kindness and compassion. otherwise, the pews will certainly go barren of eager, attentive asses. (i'm referring, of course, to buttocks not mules) ;)

are you suggesting that i sex up reality? what like - “come on in - the water's fucking freezing, but you'll get used to it”

and mules have buttocks too you know. what happened to pluralist zoology? call yourself integral? pah!

personally, spirituality sans joy holds no interest for me whatsoever.

i think it's sad if folks can only find joy in spirituality by deluding themselves. although, as ayatollah khomeini said - “there is no fun in islam” so maybe any joy is shooting a bit far.

“as for three faces of god as anything other than conceptual metaphor - now that's magical thinking…”

i agree that it is a conceptual metaphor. metaphors are largely all we have to describe certain metaphysical experiences. there exists no material, empirical or scientific referent.

not strictly true, correlates found in all quadrants for contemplative state changes, plus lots of data esp. ul and ur.

 thus metaphors, poetry, and love songs become our protractors and sliding rules.

i think people have been conned into believing that they can't describe things. i just think they're not in the habit of describing anything very well.

overall, ekg, i feel that we may agree on more than may at first seem apparent, my rationalist good sir

don't bet on it you deranged scumqueen ; )

enjoy your hols! : )))))

elektroglide,

I'm trying to say, somewhat obliquely, that delia's understanding of magical thinking differs very little from yours, as you know. Delia's take on it, however, highlights the fact that higher levels of development do not render the previous levels obsolete, they build on each other. But this is not a mere semantic debate. In viewing Jim's wiki links, the developmental aspect of the analysis is incomplete, it appears to be preop -> formop, which ignores the important fact that fundamentalist religion is in fact conop, and that formop necessarily builds on conop and preop. The NYTimes article is a little better, but provides incomplete information about the preop stage.

If we're looking for solutions, the developmental perspective is essential.

As for the pattern, I have noticed it. No hard feelings though, I hope? Its just me perceiving, rightly or wrongly, that other people agree with you but use different terms. In the past, you've insisted that other people use your terminology, even though they have other priorities and good reasons to use different terminology. Perhaps I'm being reactive though.

julian - apologies for bringing down the tone of this blog! i was getting too tired to give delia's post the seriousness that it deserves. i needed a laugh, hope she has one too. in any case, it'll prove to the gender-conscious symposium detractors that - as they suspected - i (at least) don't take women seriously, so everyone gets to feel good ; )

teacup - no hard feelings whatsoever. i do recall asking people to define their terms, and recognise commonly accepted definitions, don't recall insisting on terminology use. i'm not in a position to. if i bang on long enough about protocol, people may realise with all the confused blogging going on, that it might be a good idea to follow basic discourse procedure. i'll look harder for agreement underlying word usage. i'm glad we could have this exchange.

mr. teacup: yes, i tend to veer into a developmental perspective. it is my achille's heel. i have a soft spot for salamanders…not quite out of the ocean…not quite established on dry land. i also get a little weak in the knees for the platypus. such a beautiful mish-mosh of evolutionary fancy that one is.

jim: thank you for sharing with such heart about your personal and spiritual experience of  the people who died in the WTC and Auschwitz. what you wrote was very moving. it is clear that you resonate very deeply with compassion and surrender. and that humanity and caring mean a great deal to you. again, thank you. :)

julian, i just caught this phrase in re-reading your original post…was wondering if you would mind elaborating a little more on it—here or in another future post…very interesting proposition you are making…:

“From these stages we are able to reclaim what the rational stage cast off from the literal mythic and magic stages of development and reinterpret it through the symbolic lense of our deeper more sophisticated capacities.”

j, my understanding of past, current, and future myths is that they are symbolic. and despite the fact that you say you and ekg agree on pretty much everything…here on this point, i find you two gentlemen varying quite profoundly…perhaps.

given your recent comments (weary or not!…no sympathy for you! ha!), ekg, it is my current understanding, given your reply to me, you feel that literalists need not change their literalism, but rather change what they are literal about. i'm guessing that symbolism does not get a seat at your dinner table, ekg? is that correct?…

:)

let's chat for a moment…shall we ekg? come…draw closer, my good man…

thus we spake:

that said, i was not in anyway condoning the use of myth or magical thinking to promote dissociation or fragmentation from reality in any way. rather, i am promoting the opposite: how can we engage our imaginations to engage more fully in reality in a deeper, more profound, and integrative fashion.

easy. stop believing in bullshit because we're scared of reality. stop teaching bullshit to children, teachers, students, learners.


and thus we spake some more:

it is completely unrealistic to expect someone who can barely jog around the block conceptually, to be able to run a marathon on day two of their spiritual initiation. their canon of experience and developmental knowledge is not equipped for that task in many cases. therefore, one can engage recovering literalists and  fundamentalists with the developmental tool of creative imagination to expand and comprehend more tolerant and inclusive spiritual paradigms they had never before even considered.

what's that all got to do with magical thinking? who said anything about expecting joggers to run a marathon? are you talking about converting fundamentalists? forget it - they're not interested. the fear and psychological consequences of questioning are too deep and too invisible for most to engage in such a process while embedded in the original culture. and there's no need for literalists to change - they just need to literally believe in the truth.


ekg, let me put two of your sentences together…hmm…like this:

stop teaching bullshit to children, teachers, students, learners. and there's no need for literalists to change - they just need to literally believe in the truth.


no…wait…perhaps like this:

and there's no need for literalists to change - they just need to literally believe in the truth. stop teaching bullshit to children, teachers, students, learners.


ah…very good.

now—please tell me the truth.
then tell me what is reality.
then tell me what to teach.
then tell me the purpose of all the above.

clearly, i have no idea what i am talking about in my ramble of sloppy metaphors (pina colada?! pshaw! hefeweizen, please!), and absolutely need to learn by example.

a masterful demonstration of the aforementioned by yourself ought to give me a much clearer understanding of your (delightfully) persnickety grievances with my confusing, yet happy, holiday ponderances (<– not a real word…i don't care) :p

(btw, F & the F rocked! really enjoyed Tokyo Drift…would love to learn how to do that high-speed drift thing…tips from experienced reckless drivers are appreciated…please, message me privately…thx so much) ;)

you know ekg…you remind me of my childhood teddy…or was it this guy…hmm…perhaps it was this dude…no, no wait…it was this guy…yes—totally like him!

;)

i had a fabulous laugh. thanks, you thoughtful cranky old integrate-and-teach-the-truth-of-my-perspective-of-reality-or-suffer-a-horrible-skewering bastage.

:)

elektroglide: life, your self, love of life, love of self, the planet, your loved ones etc… or am i missing the point?

Well, sure these are all fine, but perhaps you are missing the point. First, I'm not saying that love of self is bad, just that it can be taken to an extreme if we're not careful. Love of the planet I would say is a sort of third-person approach to Spirit (what I meant by Gaia-esque before). Love of others is also fine, but this all gives me the impression that you're trying to be far too rational about Spirit and spirituality, which is a severly limited approach in my opinion.

The same goes for your idea that language is able to adequately describe the non-dual “mystery” that is Spirit.  I mean, sure, to an extent it's important to be clear on the meaning of the terms we use, but there are some terms, like Spirit, that can never be properly “nailed down” by a clear definition.

And don't get me wrong, pretty much all of my spiritual awareness is coming from the cognitive side of things.  I mean, I've done a bit of Big Mind process and I meditate, but I don't think I've ever experienced what I imagine spiritual ecstatic joy would be like. So in that regard, a lot of my awareness comes from reading about the experiences of others and keeping an open mind to accept that just because I can't see it or rationalize it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Where critical thinking comes into play is in being able to distinguish between regressive magical and transpersonal mystical, not in trying to explain away everything we can't see or feel or describe using clear, concise vocabulary.

But time to get to work on finishing my contribution for the week!

delia…you ask what gets the juices flowing…and i would have to say that is the all the moments that are so very based in experience that talking about them is never going to do them justice…but i will attempt anyhow ;o)…they are the doorways to greater mystery and deeper questions and the passion to continue this unfolding…

which is why i find all this talk of a second person God kind of baffling…i can wrap my mind around a first and third from experience with both the inner self (all the way through to the Self) and the outside forces such as nature and time that will ways be beyond my grasp, but which exert a certain power under which both faith and devotion and surrender come into the picture…but the second person?…just seems so connected in with the magical thinking/existential safety net that indeed keeps the first and third experiences from unfolding to their fullest potential…

that all might have been said in the long discussion already unfolding of which was a bit long for my late night attention span, but that is my itty bitty perspective from the simpler mind of me…my deepest respect and gratitude for all those involved here…for keeping my juices flowing…i have learned so much from you all…unlike grey, pretty much all of my spirtual awareness is through the experience of ecstatic joy, so please forgive my lack of deeply intellectual contribution, but to participate here with all of you is helps me to integrate these amazing experiences…

with grace…S.

sa'rah, i agree. those awakening experiences are remarkable and often challenging to find words for despite our greatest efforts. alas! alack! :)

yes, i might find the 2nd person experience baffling, too, were it not a large part of my spiritual awakening and continued ongoing awakening.

first off, as i mentioned in an earlier comment, i too find the notion of God as a second “person” kind of funny. that is not what is meant in this discussion of that concept, however. what is meant by “second person” is not what God is. it is about how we experience and engage with God.

let me provide an example (though rather crude…do forgive me…it's a bit late where i am).

let's say you have a puppy. and you love this puppy. you adore this puppy and relate with this puppy and all of its wonderful antics and quirky habits. let's say you begin to really, trul and genuinely fall in love with this puppy. you only want to care for this puppy, see to its needs, nurture it, give to it, care for it, cuddle it, and love it.

wonderful. healthy. yes?

okay. so let's say one day you begin to talk with the puppy, and tell him how wonderful he is and how adoreable he is. you begin to notice all his responses to your affection and you relish the interaction. you talk to him more. you teach him tricks or commands, all conveyed verbally and with intonation (for the most part). you notice how responsive he is to these commands. you talk with him more. you think about him when you are at work. you talk about him with your family. with your friends. with anyone on the subway or bus who also has a puppy and wants to share in the puppy love.

this all seems fairly normal and healthy. yes?

this is a “second person” experience of God.

has that puppy become a “second person?” hellz no. that puppy is still a puppy.

has that puppy evolved linguistically and now understands every word you are saying? probably not. he is probably responding mostly to your facial expressions, intonations, and physical body language.

nevertheless, you continue to be devoted to your wonderful puppy, and engage in a “second person” relationship with that puppy, not once expecting to come home from work one day and find that your puppy has turned into a literal “second person.”

it is (in essence), the same with God. God is what God is. God is. Spirit is. the Self is. how we relate with God/Spirit/Self is entirely up to us. we are not going to change God by how we love Him/Her/That. Yet there is something very rich and deeply beautiful and heart opening about relating with God in a “second person” (anthropomorphic?) manner.

and it has been my personal experience that God doesn't mind. the same way that puppy doesn't mind.

and since i admittedly have philosophical and spiritual leanings toward Kashmir Shaivism, and the inclusive perspective that everything is God…Sa'rah, for me, that puppy really is God, and can at the very least give you a direct experience of God. Especially, if that puppy is the thing you love most in all the world. If that is the case, then that puppy is a pure reflection of your heart and can open you to a deep experience of your own divinity and true nature.

hope that is assistful, gurrrlfriend. and i hear you on the attention span thing…let's just say…you are not alone. thank god, for meditation and practice, eh?  :)

and nonsense with this self-effacing “i have a itty bitty perspective from the simpler mind of me.” you have a wonderful mind and keen perception.

pshaw! on being intimidating by intellectual hoosiwhats and jargon masters (no names! no names! ekg! no names! ah, hah, hah, hah!)

;) lol!


p.s. julian,
a) yes!
b) yes!
c) yes!
d) ah, yes!
e) simple, humble compassion
f) bold, steadfast devotion
g) ordinary equanimity
h) quiet everything-ness
i) mantra

:)

Very well said, Delia.  I was just about to post a comment along those same lines, but it wouldn't have been nearly as well put as yours.

I just wanted to add, about Sa'Rah's comments on “third-person … nature”, that there, too, it depends on how you relate to nature as to whether that's a third-person or a second-person spiritual relationship.  What third person means here is more an “objective” perspective than an “interpersonal” one, so if you are loving nature and relating with it from a feelings perspective, I'd say that's second person, not third person.

om namah shivaya, delia…so eloquent…i thank you…but i suppose what i imagine(d) is that that puppy is somewhere on some continuum between self and Self…and i definitaly understand your experience of it…hmmm…something is clicking…i think i am getting it a bit more…the experience of it lies a bit more in a second-person-eque way in its expression?…the humble (perhaps there is a better word to insert here) approach to reinforce further expression, maybe?…a bit like the way Grey is speaking of one way of relating to nature (as when these experiences arise, this is when the feelings (ie gratitude) also arise)…the way we relate to an outer reality?…i am extra careful in trying to maintain connection with ground, sometimes writing off these experiences…but i think i understand your not-so crude example here…

…and i am not trying to be self effacing…it is true that i have little experience with this level and depth of conversation about such matters…my persective is small (in the grand scheme of things)…and my mind is simple (when it comes to the ability to reference and communicate ideas at the scale the other participants can…but i can definitaly think!…and thats why i am here :o)…)…nonetheless, i appreciate your kind words and support!

and grey…i appreciate the distinction…but then i am somewhat lost about a third person objective experience of God…you mention it can be a love of the planet (gaia-esque)…but how is that not feeling based?…does it lie more in acknowlegement of its existance?…i dunno…i would love it if you would please elaborate…

Not sure that I can.  I'm sort of elaborating this for myself as I go. I think that my reference to Gaia was perhaps misleading because I'm realizing now that it can encompass both second and third person perspectives. I'm thinking of third-person more in the sense of objective, so I guess we could say that when we're looking at Gaia, the ecosystem, etc. as a system that we can observe externally, see how that is an expression of Spirit, and relate to it objectively in that sense, then that is a third-person perspective.

Does that make sense?

OK, my contribution for the week is online! Enjoy!

Grey

MrTeacup

I respect (but dispute) a pov that calls western culture irrelevant, and so looks elsewhere, to Buddhism, etc. My point–I'll be brief, as my comment in fact opens a new topic–is that talk of an east-west sythesis floods this movement, but the “west” brought to the table is hard science (wave-particle physics especially) and a rational analysis defined by social science and postmodern theory. Even your comment is framed by the terms “constructs” and “narratives.” This is western self-definition anchored, I'll claim, in self-disgust due to present day circumstances and recent history. It ignores the core of western culture, that ongoing wrestle with an angel… with its hard dreams about god, secularism, and justice.

Is a true contemplation of western culture not part of the shadow work that westerners, at least, might want to undertake?

L.D., excellent point.

Julian,

Grounded Contemporary Perspectives, views based in personal experience expressed in modern language?

And to be truly Integrated we would have to be able to unravel Truth throughout history and see its relevance today. Avoidance will not do. But I believe you're with me on that one Julian?

Julian, I'm going to think for a few days about how best to provide what you ask for.

Some readers may know that I've just published a literary novel, set at a holistic retreat. Anyone who follows my profile to my blog will see a post titled “The Holistic Movement As A Literary Subject.” It tries to cover the holistic (human potential, call it what you will) slash literary divide from the other angle: arguing to the literary culture that this movement, which it ignores, matters. So, Mr Teacup will find me in partial agreement with one of his claims.

I have an off-Zaadz bookblog and the novel (The Seeker Academy) an Amazon landing page, which interested readers can link to from my Zaadz blog.

L.D.,

I don't deny that western self-disgust plays some role in the rejection of our traditional cultural products, but I don't think its the main reason. I think the post-modern critique has not been fully accepted by Western artists who view themselves as part of a tradition, and for good reason: the post-modern critique was vastly over-stated. One of the goals of the integral project is to move past it while including what legitimate truths it contains. Spiral Dynamics in particular allows us to accept western ethnocentrism as tragic but in some ways unavoidable by-product of the most enlightened worldview available at the time without endorsing it and working to move past it in the present. For me growing up in post-colonial Africa, post-modernism's black-and-white picture seemed simplistic compared with the complex racial dynamics that I saw. For one thing, the oppressed people of Africa are far more eager to forgive the West than white Americans in the grip of post-modernist dogma are, and far more accepting of the gifts of the West.

Integral theory is also quite big on German Idealism and continental philosophy in general, and many of those philosophers have a lot of relevance, for example: Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Hegel. I think you'll find that of the various projects that attempt an east-west synthesis, Integral theory is much more inclusive of Western enlightenment.

MrTeacup, good point. That's perhaps the main reason Integral theory is being accepted in both camps, eastern and western, here in the West, as long as they can see their way out of their particular -isms.

yo bloggers

i'll be posting some time tomorrow afternoon usa time. i definitely overdid it yesterday!

“get it up soon so we can keep the momentum going!”

as the actress said to the bishop…

soon come

I'm late in the game, but I was tickled to write. Also, the server was having a tough time posting my comment. It's really slowed down with the traffic I assume.

Julian what a wonderful beginning to your spiritual practices and guidelines for authentic transformation.  You're a wonderful writer and you make things very explicit for those who may be confused between true transformation and ones who just want a gimmicky and fast fix.

Julian…The difficulty of course comes in two forms: first, whether we realize it or not, most of us have fairly serious unresolved issues in these earlier chakra levels and second, many if not most people interested in spirituality have come to a spiritual path out of some kind of pain, suffering, longing for something that we do not have/feel. So spirituality actually is a bit of a magnet for wounded people. Now, if the kind of spirituality that is encountered is not integrative, it will likely perpetuate the very defenses (denial, rationalization, magical thinking) that are keeping the ego and the Self from being in an integrated fluid relationship.

So spirituality actually is a bit of a magnet for wounded people.

I have two different views about this statement.
We can say we are all wounded in one way or another. And being “attracted to spirituality” is a whole new set of discussions.  I mean we can spend a whole day on spiritual materialism. And people are attracted to spirituality for various reasons. I'm not so sure that “spirituality in itself is a magnet for wounded people”.

I'm glad to know people seek spiritual answers rather than finding some fullfillment in addictions like abusive relationships, addictions to drama, etc. Because more than likely they will find that they will have to seek the answers within themselves, especially if they are required to meditate and sit.

What bothers me is that you see these “wounded people” as victims.
I might be reading between the lines too much, let me know.
I get red flags when other people start talking about “wounded people” that has vitimization written all over it. And that these “wounded people” need help. Granted, we all have our issues, but we certainly don't “need” someone who thinks they can fix things for us. Also victimization takes two, the master and slave relationship. Both are equally bad. Most of the time we blame the abuser, but the abused is also a catalyst in the dynamics as well. Certainly, “wounded people” may likely fall under the traps of abusive teacher/student relationships, but again that's another dialog I think that needs more depth. Certain behaviors and patterns of thinking are clues why they fall prey to abusive relationships, which needs to be addressed.

But I certainly don' t think that it is the case if we are regular meditators and truly spend time with our own minds. If someone is in an abusive relationship it certainly brings into light their sense of autonomy.

ON ATHEISM
I think most people already touched on your atheist stance so I'm not going to repeat it other than I see you are associating atheism as counter acting “magical thinking”. I think that's a limited argument. Your argument that some sort of existential experience can be used as a catapult to atheism is also I think misleading. One can still be a theist and experience an existential crisis. One of the most famous critics and interpreter of existentialism since Sartre was a theist. (though I forget his name, sorry)

I really enjoyed your essay especially “Distinctions”  and “Compassion and Codependence”. Great stuff and am looking forward to reading more of your practices.

Lucidity, if you don't mind me interjecting my thoughts, I think many people are realizing that meditation and spiritual practice is not a substitute for therapy. Hokai, in the following dialog, references David Deida in making a distinction therapy, yoga and spiritual practice, noting that they actually have very little in common. People who are suffering a great deal are naturally drawn to spiritual traditions that promise the end of suffering, but may be disappointed to learn that personal happiness is not the goal of meditation. It can even be harmful to them to pursue a spiritual path without dealing with the ego's dysfunctions. I think that a by-product of spiritual practice is developing some skills in dealing with the ego – nonattachment, mindfulness – but spiritual practice does not require you to use them. Some traditions actively discourage trying to fix the ego, because it can be a form of attachment. Several books have been written after many serious, long-time meditators discovered that many deep-seated issues remained lurking in their psyche even after many years of practice. One is called The Wisdom of Imperfection by Robert Preece.

If this phenomenon can be found among Buddhist practitioners, its probably even more common among the much broader population of spiritual people, many of whom do not commit themselves to daily spiritual practice to see through the ego, and for whom New Age magical beliefs are compelling.

my entry is online

pull up a chair folks - here's some more of my poetry

you might want to get a cup of tea first…

BEING understood as a way to focus the mind enough to go under the defensive omnipotent fantasies into the places of vulnerability wherein lies the true gift - our disowned aspects of self …

acceptance and the kind of mirroring that allowed a strong sense of self to be internalized …

Authentic confidence will develop over time from learning how to be present and loving with the insecure part of yourself …

Healthy anger sets boundaries, communicates violations, expresses moral outrage. Healthy anger can be channeled into hard work, creativity, passionate engagement. Healthy anger can create real intimacy - because it is honest and direct. Toxic anger is usually tied to some kind of repressive cycle such that it builds up and needs to be discharged either by out of proportion reactivity or passive agression. Healthy anger is a function of ego-strength. Toxic anger is usually part of an ego-defense …

As we engage in practices that allow development and healing to occur, INSIGHT arises. INSIGHT IS distinct from belief in one simple way: belief is an outside-in phenomenon.  INSIGHT IS as the word suggests an inside-out phenomenon.

“the arising of the altered state awakenings and psychophysical phenomena attributed in the East to Kundalini and in the West to the somato-psychic wave, somatic discharge, unwinding etc…”

Julian,

Talk of  “altered states” (I'm writing a review of the new history of Esalen, which also talks of this a lot) confuses me. Personally, I've had enough dreams and LSD and wine  and experiences becoming transfixed by art to believe human attentiveness has a wide range and can be way poetic. I also know that a very old story tells us that great suffering can lead to spiritual rebirth, but that (from Holocaust chroniclers) this great suffering is more often just itself.

I'll suggest here (after noting again that you equate “the West” with psychological theory… rather than, citing one alternative, Greek myths) that the idea of and importance paid to “altered states” builds from a degraded present day sense of what the normative human state is. Greek drama had Apollo and Dionysis slugging it out onstage. Viewers were attentive, entranced, engaged, enthralled, and maybe high. But they saw themselves in a normative rather than in an altered state.

Ouch, my centaur hurts. My contribution to the symposium is up.

I’m going for a walk. I might come back. ;o)

J-Dub,

I finally have a little spare time to get into the mix. How do you people do it! Just keeping up with all the comments is a full-time job for me.

Anyway, I wanted to ask you about your use of the term “unwinding.” I’m curious because I do a very idiosyncratic practice that’s evolved over many years that I call “unwinding.” Basically, I just lie on the floor, on my back, and do nothing. I inhibit any and all voluntary movements as I wait for anything that feels involuntary, any movement that feels as if it’s happening of it’s own accord. For the first several minutes I may only get a few twitches, but eventually, if I hone in enough, a whole series of movements will begin to emerge, and I follow them wherever they go, as long as the sense that it’s all “just happening” is driving the action. After a while, I might be bouncing all over the room, or end up on top of the refrigerator (this has actually happened!).

The sense I get from these movement meditations is that I’m literally unwinding various patterns of tension and inhibition, like the way a twisted rubberband will follow its way back to its slack form in precisely the reverse pattern with which it became twisted. At the end of this unwinding I feel incredibly clear and free, and I’m often showered with insights for hours.

It’s pretty wild, although I can’t force any of it. Also, I only do this practice every once in awhile, when the mood strikes. I’ve never tried it in a disciplined way.

Anyway, I’m wondering if you have any experience with or insight into this kind of thing.

–Bob

You gotta be kidding me! I had long presumed the unwinding process was my discovery. I was in the process of getting it trademarked (just kidding).

The Sovatsky article is great. I really had no idea anyone else was thinking about this stuff in quite this way.

Humbling and pretty awesome.

–Bob

I guess if you guys check out this video (see the full 19 min. for a full ride) you might see that is can - and has - evolve into a veritable way which I've been on for quite a while now.

I even try an explanation, though its primitive in comparison to the Sahaj Yoga link you gave - thank you so much, jULIAN!

I enjoyed the video, Mushin. Your explanation of the Dynamic Presencing process makes perfect sense to me. I especially like the way you described the shifts of foreground and background. I had not thought of it in that way before. I’m happy to know others are exploring these kinds of experiences and making them available to others.

Hi - I want to get briefly into the mix, if briefly is actually possible with so much here.

I'm surprised how much fun exchange is - the depth, breadth, intensity that doesn't feel ponderous or intimidating, and the relevance to life as surviving functioning organism and life as human mind  (and I appreciated the comments on what mind might be and might not be) are excitingly full for me, here. You folks are speeding up my learning process of how to evaluate what is being said around me and how to communicate how I think of things.

I have thus far only read a little over half way through the comments, and I need to write something, now, or my window of intention may close. I want to feel the heat of the herd.

I appreciated so many of the comments and commenters. I think I want to weigh in with the views elektroglide, jim, and julian. I apparently lean more towards their kind of logic and language than that of a 2nd person, well, personal relationship with 'spirit' . If I had had a significant 2nd person devotional experience, there is a good chance that I'd want to cheer for that reality.

Maybe somewhat like Julian in moments, I often tend to think of personal, historical psychological, explanations. I also tend to think about how we have developed through our individual histories in interaction with our surrounding world and how similar dynamics are often at play in larger social, like international, actions and how the fascinating-to-me exterior quadrants play out  - how these usually load me up plenty and I don't feel the need, inclination, or uninvited presence of Spirit or God. As I write this I fear that this could be flatland - but hey, Still, there is plenty of richness in my world.

Elektroglide - “does anyone else see the importance of conscious and precise language use - including definitions, conventions, grammar, context relatedness - in the discussion of metaphysical philosophy?”
Yes I do. We have enough difficulty with different histories and therefore necessarily different views of the world, since we usually see through the lens of our experience. Add to that a quite spotty agreement and divergence in the meaning of the words we use, and its a surprise that we do as well as we do. A word may have several denotated meanings and many connotations. Mary chooses 'C' to emphasize and Alice chooses 'F', and it may be a while before one of them goes, “Oh, what do you mean by the word 'mind', 'psyche', 'spirit', or 'intelligence'?” Yeah. But who wants to lay down the meaning of important themes at the outset? Who has the patience or who cares enough? Probably usually not me, until we are stuck on something that might actually be important to me.

To take this tangent further, briefly, it seems that some words take a tour of meanings through the years and at some point come to mean the opposite of their root derivation. I'm thinking momentarily of the convention that most of us use and that Julian used early on in his presentation of contrasting a meaning that is “symbolic” or “literal”. Like maybe, “Do you mean that you were literally 'up to your knees in ____'? - or is that metaphoric?” My understanding of literal has to do with alphabetic letters, which are symbolic. So, though we all usually know what is meant, I get a funny little distraction when I read it because it sounds as, “Do you mean that symbolically or symbolically?” So then I say what word do I use? How about “actual”? Well doesn't that mean having to do with action? How about really? Existentially? God - choosing proper words that communicate is tedious? Excuse the fetishistic tangent.

Julian, I followed how you laid out this large territory - slicing though from the angles that you did. As others mentioned, I liked the spiritual bypass described.

I like how you gave the three orienting meanings for “chakra system” that inform you. Both b and c seem common usages that I have often found confusing and annoying - “b) a way of talking about how the inward experience of the body in a particular physical area resonates emotions and energetic qualities, and c) a metaphorical/imaginal way of talking about mind-body matrix and it's developmental and healing processes.” It reminds of a couple of disciplines that I have dabbled in and haven't been able to pursue because the idealized process was presented as a formulary journey or hard wiring that one just tapped into and exercised. I'm thinking of the chakra work of Kriya, the “microcosmic orbit” of some tantric systems, and the vipassana exercises taught at a monastery in Thailand.

My guess was that in Kriya, many people didn't know quite where and how the this point was, and yet I never heard anyone really admit to the transmitting teacher that they didn't really know what the heck they were doing. My further guess is that many people overlay a virtual map over the body and energy sense, and the map is definitely not the territory, nor usually is the experience the same as the original one that was come upon. But the virtual map eventually becomes familiar and manipulable in marvelous ways as it interfaces quirkily with our real senses and functionings. And, by george, I've got it. Keep the folks busy and they will get into less mischief in the world, become more focused, and maybe they'll trip and fall into a rabbit hole.

Perhaps because I don't have a consistently coherent and agentic self-expression, I still have doubts about the dictum, “You have to have a 'self', before you can give it up.” other than that this is obviously true by definition. As someone else questioned a bit, I really don't know whether a person has to have a strong self or ego to reside much in non-duality, marvelous relative states, and if navigating everyday life without much grace and barely adequate efficacy isn't OK. Who's to say?

I was gonna watch Miss Congeniality tonight, but instead I got stuck with this stuff.
Smiles.
Still traveler - a pre-existing fake-it-til-I-make-it designation

so…i am left wondering…is this unwinding considered an altered state?…or just a deeper experience of a grounded one?…because it seems like the interpretation has a lot to to integration and i go through this at least once a day…so it would be interesting to hear some perspective on that…

Sa'rah, if what Bob describes as unwinding is similar to what I would call “dynamic presencing” than some of the states that it can and does lead to are very much different from what is a 'normal state', so much so that functioning in pretty normal situations can be impeded for hours after one has left the 'depth' of the state - don't drive a car!

Question is, of course, is a “grounded state” an “altered state” since probably people are in it not all too often; or do you see many people in the grounded state walking the ground of an ordinary street? ;)
If by grounded you mean a state in which you have the feeling that you have “come home” than the states accessed through the mentioned 'methods' are sometimes called just that by those reporting back from being there.

I have made it into a practise to let the state interpret itself… that is, when in a normal state remembering the “a.s.” I don't inquire but listen… like opening up to a dear friend, curious what he's been up to and what his stories are.

Hope this helps…

got it…guess it is not the best to be driving during these releases although sometimes it did happen…much less now that some of that energy that just HAD to go, has left…and you are right…sometimes best not to intellectualize too much…and, julian you drive the point home…thank you both… 

and j…feist doing nina simone…oh yeah.